AI Barometer

 

The CDEI has published its AI Barometer, a major analysis of the most pressing opportunities, risks, and governance challenges associated with AI and data use in the UK, initially across five sectors (including Criminal Justice, Financial Services, Health & Social Care, Digital & Social Media and Energy & Utilities).

The key findings

• The AI Barometer highlights the potential for AI and data-driven technology to address society’s greatest challenges
• Some opportunities are easier to realise than others
• Harder to achieve’ innovations, in contrast, involve the use of AI and data in high stakes domains that often require difficult trade-offs
• Several barriers stand in the way of addressing risks and maximising the benefits of AI and data
• Three types of barrier merit close attention: low data quality and availability; a lack of coordinated policy and practice; and a lack of transparency around AI and data use.

Azure Data Catalog

 What is a data catalog? Gartner define this as

“A data catalog maintains an inventory of data assets through the discovery, description, and organization of datasets. The catalog provides context to enable data analysts, data scientists, data stewards, and other data consumers to find and understand a relevant dataset for the purpose of extracting business value.”

Data Catalogs are the New Black in Data Management and Analytics (Gartner, 2018)

A data catalog is important to have to record those critical assets that bring value to data. It becomes a library full of core information about your data sources. It can contain a data dictionary and can provide basic statistics about the data. This is a really useful feature being able to explore the data.

Azure Data Catalog documentation is here and the service here

• Users can discover the data sources they need and understand the data sources they find. At the same time, Data Catalog help organizations get more value from their existing investments.
• They are inventories of data in the organization
• Data catalogs are a standard for metadata management in the age of big data and advanced analytics
• Adding tags to data sets enable a business glossary of terms to be applied to the data

    

Microsoft MVP for a third year

During such a life changing time, I am over the moon with joy to be honoured with my third Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in recognition of exceptional technical community leadership for Data Platform for 2020-2021. How amazing to receive this. Thank you @MVPAward #MVPBuzz . There are so many amazing MVP's who help the community improve and grow their data platform knowledge. I am passionate about helping share the knowledge and experience I have gained.

This has been a strange period with many events cancelled and turned into virtual events. As an organizer of  Data Relay this year we cancelled our event to make way for SQLBits to move into the only viable slot this year. As things are still ongoing I think it is unlikely any in person conferences will continue this year.  However there are some amazing free online events to attend. My thoughts have been on helping and supporting the local community as well as the data community.