The European Commission has just published its draft Regulation on Artificial Intelligence (AI). While there’s no obligation for UK law to follow suit, the Regulation provides a helpful guide to risk from different applications of AI, and the sort of controls that might be required. What “AI” is covered? According to Article 3(1) [with sub-clauses […]
Category: Articles
Thoughts on regulatory and ethical issues relating to the use of technology in education and research
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Information Sharing: Failing Smarter
Over the past twenty years, I’ve seen a lot of attempts to start information sharing schemes. And a lot of those have failed, some very slowly, despite huge amounts of effort. I wondered if there pointers that could be used, early on, to try to spot those. Story First, what is the story? If you […]
One striking aspect of the new Ethical Framework for AI in Education is how little of it is actually about AI technology. The Framework has nine objectives and 33 criteria: 18 of these apply to the ‘pre-procurement’ stage, and another five to ‘monitoring and evaluation’. That’s a refreshing change from the usual technology-led discussions in […]
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Audience Measurement
To improve websites and other online services, measuring how they are used is a key tool. However the law on measuring visitors to websites is a mess. Nine years ago, when reviewing the types of cookies that do not need consent, the Article 29 Working Party of data protection regulators concluded that requiring consent when […]
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Where is “AI ethics”?
One of the trickiest questions I’m being asked at the moment is about “the ethics of Artificial Intelligence”. Not, I think, because it is necessarily a hard question, but because it’s so ill-defined. Indeed a couple of discussions at Digifest yesterday made me wonder whether it’s the simply the wrong question to start with. First, […]
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Learning in (and from) the pandemic
Priya Lakhani’s Digifest keynote was titled “How COVID-19 has catalysed edtech adoption” but actually ranged much more widely. What has the pandemic shown us about the role of technology in education and, indeed, how does that relate to education’s role in future society. One obvious result of the pandemic is that we have (nearly) all […]
Anyone who works with flows, logs and other sources of information to protect network and information security should already be familiar with Recital 49 of the GDPR, where European legislators explained why that was (subject to a risk-based design) a good thing. Now the European Commission has published its draft of the replacement Network and […]
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Data Breach Shanty
To celebrate my 500th blog post, here’s another sea shanty: What shall we do with the stolen data? What shall we do with the stolen data? What shall we do with the stolen data? Early in the morning. Way-hey the fines are rising Way-hey the fines are rising Way-hey the fines are rising Early in […]
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Beyond the Future of Assessment?
A fascinating discussion session with colleagues who worked on Jisc’s “Future of Assessment” report. When that was written, in the first months of 2020, its intention was to look at how things might change over the next five years. Little did we know… When the pandemic hit, suddenly many of things we had expected to […]
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Adequacy Shanty
Inspired by Gavin Freeguard’s National Data Strategy Sea-Shanty, and in homage to the shanty-makers (I’ve worked the North Atlantic on small ships), here’s my “Adequacy Shanty”… Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish data, Farewell and adieu to you data of Spain, For our UK law may be judg-ed inadequate, And we may never see […]