Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to LSE for today's event,
which is part of the LSE Festival Visions for the Future.
My name is Cosmina Darubantu, and I'm a senior advisor at the LSE Data Science Institute.
I'm very pleased to be here to welcome Sarah Geneletti, Laura Gilbert,
and Helen Margit to both our online audience and our audience in the room with us today.
Sarah is associate professor in the Department of Statistics at LSE and the program director for the Health Data Science MSc. Laura is a senior director of AI at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and an expert advisor in AI to the UK government.
And Helen is professor of society and the internet at the University of Oxford and a visiting professor here at the LSE Data Science Institute.
Look, some brief housekeeping notes for everyone here before we get started.
For the social media users in the audience, the hashtag for today's event is hashtag LSE Festival.
Please, please put your phones on silent so as not to disturb the event.
We will be exploring three key areas today, the opportunities that government data presents,
the very real challenges of working with it,
and what the future holds for its use in policymaking and academic research.
Given the focus of today's discussion,
I'm particularly pleased to have these three panelists
because they represent the full spectrum of experience with government data,
from the systems that collect it to the teams that use it within government and to the researchers who unlock insights for the public benefit.
Helen brings decades of experience in digital government and understands better than most the legacy systems that underpin the data collection efforts across Whitehall.