Source: Chatham House –
Young people generate ideas for AI adoption in ‘policy hackathon’
News release
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Members of Chatham House’s Common Futures Conversations community used a fictional scenario to come up with innovative ways in which governments can adopt AI.
Chatham House has completed a ‘policy hackathon’ in which young people produced transferable policy proposals for how governments could benefit from adopting AI.
Twenty-two members of Chatham House’s Common Futures Conversations (CFC) community took part in the online event ‘Intelligent Government: Reimagining Civic Infrastructure’ from 10-19 March.
They were asked to come up with creative proposals for realizing the benefits of AI adoption in government for the fictional country of Valdoria. The winning team presented their idea for an AI-assisted system, ‘Guardian Angel’, which analyses ministry employee access patterns to detect potential security risks.
The team was comprised of CFC members Daria Bogolyubova, Yunus El-Asri, Sufyan Hatia and Eugenia Obeng-Akrofi.
Other ideas included an AI-enabled care intelligence platform that connects fragmented health and social care systems into a unified structure; an AI platform that detects tariff and trade-risk shocks early; and a predictive analytical model that eliminates the inefficiencies of manual resource allocation within a healthcare system.
‘Valdoria was fictional, but the challenges participants dealt with are very real,’ said Rowan Wilkinson, Research Associate, Digital Society Programme.
‘This policy hackathon demonstrated the complexity of emerging tech adoption in government, and participants really had to wrestle with how to scale these technologies in a transparent, democratic and open way, whilst maintaining secure, sovereign and cost-effective solutions – a difficult and ongoing problem for governments globally,’ she added.
The competition judges were Alex Krasodomski, the director of Chatham House’s Digital Society Programme, Felix Reilly, Senior AI Product Manager at the UK government’s Incubator for Artificial Intelligence, and Dr Stephanie Diepeveen, Senior Lecturer in Global Digital Politics at King’s College London.
Supported by the Ford Foundation, the policy hackathon was hosted by Chatham House’s QEII Academy, Digital Society Programme, and Global Economy and Finance Programme.