The Committee will be looking to establish how
personal data should be owned, managed, valued and used for the
benefit of society in the modern world. The Committee will also
be asking its witnesses whether existing legislation, including
the Data Protection Bill currently going through Parliament, and
the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) more widely,
are fit for purpose in relation to the development and use of
artificial intelligence (AI) systems.
These are among the key issues the House
of Lords Select Committee on Artificial
Intelligence will be asking two panels of witnesses
on Tuesday 31 October
2017 from 3.30pm.
Data is the fuel of the current boom in AI
development. With a growing tension, on the one hand between the
tech giants seeking greater access to personal and public
datasets, and activists and experts with ethical and privacy
concerns on the other, the sessions promise to be a timely debate
about an increasingly significant part of people’s daily
lives.
The first panel will be at 3.30pm and the Committee
will hear from:
-
Elizabeth Denham, UK Information
Commissioner
The Information Commissioner seeks to uphold information
rights in the public interest, promote openness in public
bodies and data privacy for individuals. In 2017, the
Commissioner was recognised as being one of the three most
influential people in data-driven business in the annual DataIQ
100 list. The Information Commissioner’s Office’s written
evidence to the inquiry is here.
-
Dr Mercedes Bunz, Senior Lecturer,
The Communication and Media Research Institute, University of
Westminster
Dr Bunz was a Guardian technology reporter and has authored
‘The Silent Revolution: How Algorithms Changed Knowledge, Work,
Journalism, and Politics Without Making Too Much Noise’ (2014).
Dr Bunz submitted evidence to the inquiry here.
-
Dr Sandra Wachter, Postdoctoral
Researcher in Data Ethics and Algorithms, Oxford Internet
Institute
Dr Wachter is a member of the Ethics and Philosophy of
Information Research Cluster and the Digital Ethics Lab, and a
Turing Research Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Her
research focuses on the legal and ethical implications of Big
Data, AI, and robotics as well as governmental surveillance,
predictive policing, and human rights
online.
The second panel will be at 4.30pm and the Committee
will hear from:
-
Frederike Kaltheuner, Policy
Officer, Privacy International (PI)
Privacy International is a London-based charity which aims
to build a global movement for the protection of privacy, to
challenge data exploitation and to contest surveillance.
Privacy International’s evidence to the Committee can be
found here.
-
Olivier Thereaux, Head of
Technology, The Open Data Institute (ODI)
The ODI was co-founded in 2012 by the inventor of the web
Sir Tim Berners-Lee and AI expert Sir Nigel Shadbolt to address
today’s global challenges using the web of
data.
-
Javier Ruiz Diaz, Policy Director,
The Open Rights Group
The Open Rights Group is a non-profit organisation working
to protect the rights to privacy and free speech
online.
Other questions the Committee is likely to ask
include:
-
How can access to data for researchers and SMEs be
improved? How can monopoly ownership of data by large
corporations be prevented?
-
Is there a technical solution to preserving privacy
while also ensuring the benefits of AI are
realised?
-
Should the use of black-box algorithms like deep
learning be restricted in domains of high-stakes decision
making, such as finance, health, law, and military
applications?
-
How can unintended prejudices in the data that is
used for training AI models be mitigated?
These evidence sessions will take place at
3.30pm on Tuesday 31 October 2017 in Committee Room 3 of the
House of Lords.
