Covid-19: Artificial Intelligence

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Wednesday 9th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right to focus on the importance of trust: it is a vital underpinning in the development of AI. I imagine he is aware that we have just published our National Data Strategy, which sets out very clearly the importance of public understanding of both government and non-government data within an ethical framework.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab) (V)]

My Lords, back in April my noble friend Lord Darzi told the BBC in respect of Covid-19 that

“AI remains one of our strongest paths to achieve a perceptible solution but there is a fundamental need for high quality, large and clean data sets.”


Much of this data gets siloed in individual companies and universities, so what are the Government doing to unify these data sources to allow researchers to apply machine learning to new solutions for vaccines, monitoring and personalising care within an ethical context?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord is absolutely right, although I am sure he would acknowledge that the quality, size and integration of those datasets vary considerably, as the recent report highlights, between different sectors of the economy. Again, the National Data Strategy and the consultation on it will be important mechanisms for addressing the issues that the noble Lord raised, as well as the open data initiatives and pilots that we are already running.