A Brighter Future: How Tech is Changing the World for the Better

An algorithm deployed across the US is known to underestimate the health needs of black patients. Their needs have been lower because systemic racism has impeded their access to treatment not because they are healthier. This example shows how machine learning and artificial intelligence can maintain and amplify inequity. To identify and mitigate discriminatory relationships in data, we need models that account for the pathways that give rise to them. In this talk, I outline what is required to build models that would allow us to explore ethical issues underlying seemingly objective analyses.

I research something considered to be quite boring: data. However, I don't do data analysis or mining, instead, I research "the social life" of data, specifically of environmental data. I critically research the production of scientific knowledge about the environment, and try to understand how something apparently neutral and objective like scientific data actually has social and political power. The earth is increasingly being turned into data to be crunched in models, analysed and calculated. What does it mean for environmental justice that the earth is being transformed in this way?

You can take a great picture easily these days with a smartphone camera but can you use it for scientific measurements? In this talk, I will share with you our attempts to do serious science using smartphones with a noble aim of improving human health! Armed with our smartphones, we screened for neonatal jaundice in newborn babies and anaemia in pre-school aged children and pregnant women, all the while journeying through busy hospitals in London, Accra and New Delhi.

Simon Watt is the Public Engagement Manager at the Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Science at UCL.
You may also know him from his TV (The BAFTA winning Inside Natures Giants, The IFTA winning Wild Cities) and radio (BBC Radio 4’s Hybrid) work or for making the blobfish famous/infamous through his comedy with a conservation twist vehicle, The Ugly Animal Preservation Society.