Join Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology; Mike Potter, Chief Digital Officer for Government and Craig Suckling, Chief Data Officer for Government, launch DataConnect24. They will welcome you all to the conference, set out an overview of the week-long event, and share their perspectives on data and AI, the latest themes, and the opportunity it presents for the UK.   

Gen AI application panel

Hosted by Craig Suckling, the UK Government Chief Data Officer, the panel includes:

• Dr Amanda Svensson, from the Government Communication Service, who will discuss 'a new way to communicate: The role of data in empowering GCS's AI tooling'
• Ganesh Sethi, from Government Digital Service, who will discuss 'ask analytics: democratising data insights with Generative AI for GOV.UK'
• Steve Kingston, from Ordnance Survey, who discusses 'the AI of where: unleashing the power of grid index systems and foundation machine learning models on Geospatial Data.'

A panel discussion centred on data sharing across government. What have we solved already, and what are the remaining problems?

Hosted by Jenny Brooker, the Government's Chief Data Architect, panellists include Mat from GCHQ, Alex Smith, Head of Data Platforms and Security in CDDO, Emily Stewart, Senior Policy Adviser, Government Cyber Security Policy in Cabinet Office, and Rebecca Llewellyn, Deputy Director of Data Services Programmes at NHS England.

Samuel Clarke, Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), and Neil Jasper, Knowledge Manager also at IOPC, discuss creating data governance within a restricted budget.

This presentation outlines two IOPC initiatives, Data Quality Trust Scales and Data Design, and how they were put into practise without the need of specialist tech or outside consultancy.

Join CDDO Race Champion, Kafui Mbrou, and guest panellists - Craig Suckling (Government Chief Data Officer), Delia Lazaroiu (Senior Data Analyst at DWP) and Ajoa Akuamoah (Government Digital Capability Delivery Lead at CDDO) who will discuss, and invite the audience, to share their experiences of diversity in Civil Service data roles. 

They will talk about initiatives that have been successful and why, in aiming to attract more diverse backgrounds into the Government data profession.

Join Elliot Bridges, from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, who will discuss how he developed the world’s first fertility treatment dashboard.

Tom Smith, from the Gambling Commission, then talks through online illegal gambling in Great Britain, automating detection, and measuring the scale of activity.

A panel discussion that will cover why we need data catalogues, and how to develop them on a budget.

Hosted by Douglas Ward, from PwC, panellists include Inigo Antolin, British Council; Silviya Chakalova, Regional Evaluation Manager, British Council; Debbie Wilson, Ordnance Survey, and Maddy Lunskey, Product Manager at Department for Business & Trade.

Watch a series of engaging data catalogue demos. This session also covers the benefits of having a data catalogue.

Session host, Douglas Ward, from PwC, is joined by Agnes Coaker, Senior Data Analyst, and Maddy Lunskey, Product Manager, both in the Department for Business & Trade, demo an open source data catalogue, that builds trust in data, promotes transparency within and between departments, and unlocks access across the system of departments.

Then Kate Winfield will showcase the Ordnance Survey Enterprise Data Catalogue. This demo will show how to empower your team with the data they need, governed by the best practices that protect and enhance its value.

Join a panel and Q&A session to learn about the value of data maturity assessments in local government.

Kate Cooper, Manager of the Data and Transparency programme at the Local Government Association, will provide an overview of the LGA’s data maturity self-assessment tool. She will explain why it is beneficial for councils to undertake a data maturity assessment, and how councils can use their results to drive change.

Gemma Moreing, Business Information & Performance Lead at Publica Group, reflects on delivering data maturity assessments at the Cotswold, Forest of Dean, and West Oxfordshire District Councils.

Dr Panos Panagiotopoulos, Queen Mary University of London, will discuss the benefits of data maturity assessments for councils like focusing leadership attention on data skills and improving AI readiness (based on research funded by the Alan Turing Institute’s Skills Policy Awards project).

Three talks from Olivia Newport, DEFRA and the Data Analytics and Science Hub (DASH), Michael Gordon, Ordnance Survey and Simon McLellan, Head of Data, at Met Office

Neil Brammall, Geospatial Commission, DSIT, The NUAR Harmonised Data Model - standardisation of utility subsurface information

Gerald Wong, Cabinet Office, Interoperability - One Data, will discuss how CO links data across systems with the CEI, and examining the role of data governance, and data ethics

Hollie Young, ONS, unlocking the data value of your organisation through data modelling, an ONS use case

Kyle Knight, ONS, will talk about the operationalising and embedding of ONS's linked business glossary, and its governance framework across the organisation. Touching on how it is driving improvements in data governance, and data literacy.

Teslim Abass profiles Data Marketplace, a front door to discover, access and share government data in a legal, ethical and trusted way, also offering supporting guidance and tools to help data sharing across government.

Hosted by Octavia Field Reid, Associate Director, Impact and Research Practice, Ada Lovelace Institute.

The panel includes:

Reema Patel, Research Director and Head of Deliberative Engagement, Ipsos UK

Tim Davies – Research Director, Connected by Data

Vinay Narayan, a Senior Manager at Aapti Institute and a co-lead of the Participatory Data programme with the Open Data Institute

A panel discussion hosted by David McKeever, Senior Data Analyst at the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), and Chair of the UK Regulators (UKRN) Data Strategy Network.

Panelists are:

• Lisa Allen from The Pensions Regulator
• Charley Clark from Ofgem
• Sam Buckley from Ofwat

A panel discussion covering data governance in the Met Office, the British Council and GOV.UK -

• Helen Bartlett, Met Office
• Inigo Antolin, British Council
• Chris Marshall, GOV.UK, GDS

Dr Louise Maynard-Atem, Deputy Director, Data & Insight, GDS discusses the future potential of GOV.UK One Login and the cross government co-operation that is making the user experience better, and working together to stop fraud.

Georgina Langley and Fay Skevington from the AI Alignment Team for Education, discuss the education content store and optimising data for educational AI.

Mavis Machirori​​​, Senior Researcher at the Ada Lovelace Institute, discusses beyond trust and transparency, and the mechanisms for public legitimacy.

Marisa Hayes, Local Authority Liaison Manager, GeoPlace, discusses data governance for data you can trust.

James Herbert, CEO of Pivotl, a Cloud, Data and IA consultancy, hosts a panel discussion with Professor Alan Brown, University of Exeter, and author of Survive and Thrive in the Age of AI, and Tetyana Mykhaylyk, Director of Information, Data and Analysis at Valuation Office Agency.

This panel session will discuss what it means for leaders and decision-makers looking to accelerate data and digital transformation strategies, and redefine their organisations to be ready for the age of AI.

The discussion will centre on five areas that are at the core of how to reframe how services that are delivered in the age of AI, and will answer:

• Why data transformation matters
• How to put data at the heart of providing public services
• Why security and compliance, data management, tooling and technology, and skills & capabilities should be the focus
• Assessing data and AI’s impact on service provision
• Moving from Proof of Concepts to AI-at-Scale

The latest AI research and real life use cases across government will be shared, to help data and digital professionals alike understand the true potential of data transformation, leveraging it to enhance digital transformation efforts, and scaling AI solutions effective.

Alex Atudosie, Programme Manager, and Alex Luck, Programme Director at Department for Business and Trade, discuss the National Digital Twin Programme, with a focus on integration architecture. This is an open source high TRL project focused on developing a data sharing infrastructure.

Sean McConnell, Customer Success GovTech Lead and Office Analytics and Insights team, and Mark Bangs at Home Office Analytics and Insights team, will explore the challenges and solutions in establishing a National Data Quality Service for crime classification, emphasising trust and transparency in data governance.

This session will comprise of a case study detailing the journey of transitioning from a successful team of one, to effectively managing a team of many, in the implementation of a successful National Data Quality Service. Sean and Mark will talk about developing innovative semantic analysis methods to classify and automate the counting of crime records for government reporting.

The session will also explore the challenges of leveraging a new and growing team, with the demands of government bodies, and end users. Lessons in effective management, stewardship and governance will be discussed.

Alice Tandon, Head of Data Strategy and Megan Clokey, Data Product Manager discuss how DCMS is leading a data improvement programme, working with its public bodies to improve the complex landscape of data sharing across the diverse DCMS sectors.

During this cross departmental collaboration and data interoperability project, the team enabled secure access to quality data that will facilitate impactful departmental and sectoral decisions going forward.

Dr Steve Harris and Nicholas Oughtibridge from Technology Strategy, Architecture and Standards, NHS England, and James Welsh from the Big Data Institute, University of Oxford , discuss data driven NHS forms.

The session will explore internationally standard low/ no code frameworks for the design of healthcare forms as data, animating the forms as web interfaces, and handling the record output for storage and processing.

The session will then explore the benefits of this project, including saving public money, improving interoperability, and making services more responsive to the needs of government and citizens.

Alessia Tosi and Richard Eveson, from GDS discuss how they used data science to make generative AI experiments work for users.

This session will cover how GDS learnt from a scaled experiment, and how the team identified and prioritised ideas for improvements and iterations. The talk will also cover evaluation methods, and how and why the team experimented in one language, and implemented for production in another, using Python and Ruby.

Join Dan Budden, Dom Stevenson, Sarah Garner, and Aashna Sethi from GDS, who discuss their work on GOV.UK One Login, enabling people to create a digital identity.

They will talk through the data architecture - bringing digital identity concepts to life and enabling event data governance, using open-source catalogues.

The session then delves into how they transformed performance analytics, building a cloud-native platform that consumes millions of events per day and visualises insights through Reproducible Analytical Pipelines.

Mat from GCHQ will discuss permission to share in national security.

In this session, Jamie Mann, Head of Data Science & Analytics, at the British Council, will explore RAG chatbots, knowledge graphs, and retrieval methods. He will compare 'Neo4j hybrid' vs. Microsoft GraphRAG patterns. He will present a production demo of a knowledge graph-based RAG chatbot, and the results of a 'human evaluation' test of rival bot technologies.

Join this session to learn about the concept of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbots and the limitations of 'naive' RAG approaches. Learn about knowledge graphs and their role in graph-based retrieval methods. Compare Neo4j hybrid patterns with GraphRAG techniques to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Review human evaluation test results and statistics to gauge performance. There will be a live demonstration of the deployed model and a Q&A.

A session focussed on two experiences of building communities in public sector organisations to measure and improve how data is used to achieve strategic objectives and better serve the public. 

Delegates will hear about the Scottish Government's Data Maturity Programme, hosted by Sally Kerr, Data Transformation Lead at the Scottish Government. In this session Sally offers an overview of the programme, now in its fourth year, and discusses how it aims to help organisations open up discussions about data improvement and becoming data driven organisations. 

Attendees will also hear from Courtney Wenner, Data Governance Manager at the Department for Work and Pensions, on how building multidisciplinary teams has helped make data make sense to operational colleagues across the organisation, and halved the time taken to deliver data maturity assessments in the programme's first year. Delegates from all data backgrounds are encouraged, and we're keen to hear about your experiences tackling the big challenges seen across the public sector.

Mark Hafford, Change Manager, at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLC), discusses a pioneering data transformation programme, that aimed to improve data maturity across the department and enable DLUHC to effectively and efficiently adopt AI.

The session will cover the department’s journey from data strategy conception, to the formation of a multidisciplinary team in the delivery of the programme, to ensure the department is AI ready.

Luke Hounsome, Advanced Analytics Team Lead, UK Health Security Agency presents a session about multiple foundational Large Language Models (LLMs) that are both available open-source / open-weight, and commercially available. LLM providers usually quote performance results on tasks such as chat, reasoning, maths, and code benchmarks.

This session will present UKHSA’s approach to evaluating a combination of external and internal validation datasets, alongside use-cases of LLMs in Public Health. We set out the results of our automated evaluations of LLMs for public health tasks involving the classification and extraction of free text.

We will demonstrate the wide variation in performance depending on the required task and LLM used. We will describe some of the unique challenges in Public Health data and the variation in performance noted across a range of tasks. Importantly, we will discuss our view on best practice in developing validation datasets for real use-cases and the value of validation to build trust in the use of LLMs (and AI in general) for supporting Public Health decision making. 

Join Adam Milward, for an engaging discussion on how metadata federation empowers small teams to achieve 'more with less.'

This session will highlight a compelling case study featuring Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK) and its collaboration with prominent organisations, such as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in England, the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency (NISRA), the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research (SCADR) in Scotland, and the SAIL Databank in Wales.

Together, they created a groundbreaking national metadata solution that consolidates metadata and revolutionises data discovery across secure data environments.

Adam will discuss the transformative power of metadata federation and collaboration, uncovering new possibilities for research, analytics, and informed decision-making without revealing details of sensitive datasets.

The role of data in digitising our road network to create safer, more reliable journeys with Professor Andy Neely, Anmut Cofounder, and Thomas Coleman, Head of Geospatial at National Highways

Patrick Healy, Department for Education, discusses realising the art of the possible, and offers practical examples of how to modernise your data analytics.

Join this data as a catalyst for transformation discussion with the following panellists:

• Nic Granger, North Sea Transition Authority
• Phillip Hickinson, Cambridgeshire County Council
• Dr Jonathan Bright - Head of AI for Public Services and Head of Online Safety, The Alan Turing Institute

Join Martine Wauben, Head of Data for London, who will discuss the Data for London programme, which centres on pan-London data sharing.

Background:

The Mayor of London's Data for London programme wants to make it simpler for people to share and use data held across London to improve the city and benefit Londoners.

The Greater London Authority is building a new platform for data sharing and a user-friendly service to facilitate easy data discovery.

The team will also develop a new set of standards to foster collaboration between councils, universities, government agencies and others across the city.

In this talk, Martine will discuss how she has split this service into conceptually separate parts. This allows her team to solve specific problems for specific groups, without entangling the responsibilities and accountabilities in such a way that a risk-averse system is unable to make pragmatic change.

The session explores discuss:

• Data library
• Data for London
• Collaboration with data

It will particularly focus on the importance of data discovery to enable effective data sharing, and why the team chose to release the Data Library as a standalone product.

Join the Generative AI Security Group Community Session, for a whistle stop tour of the various security issues surrounding AI solutions including a live demo showcasing some major vulnerabilities affecting large language models and Q&A session.

Jonathan Simmons, Head of Data Science & Data Management, Tom Peterken, Data Scientist, and Matthew Grubb, Graduate Data Scientist, all from Ordnance Survey host a session about the Functional Economic Market Areas project, funded by the HM Treasury Economic Data Innovation Fund. 

This presentation will outline the new geographies that are now available, and consider the wider challenge of linking economic data with geography for greater understanding of what is happening where.

The team has developed a defined set of retail geographies, including high streets, along with night-time economy areas, coastal communities, office areas, cultural quarters and more. 

Being able to link data to well-defined places to measure economic activity over time to inform policy development is crucial – and is now easier to do thanks to this work. 

Craig Suckling hosts a global CDO discussion with, Dr Ott Velsberg, CDO for Estonia.

Debbie Archer and Gareth Corris from Kirklees Council, discuss the journey towards digital transformation and data science.

Sumitra Varma, Head of Engineering at Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency, and a member of Project Heyrick, the winning team from Civil Service Data Challenge 2023, discusses how data from across multiple government departments helped build a modern slavery data dashboard.

Project Heyrick aims to change how the UK detects invisible crime like modern slavery using a data-driven approach.

In many cases, victims of modern slavery often do not even realise that they are slaves, so thousands of slaves go undetected every year.

Data was collected from across government and from open-source data sets. By combining these data sets with advanced analytics, it can shed a light on undetected victims and provide proactive intervention targets.

Enforcement departments, such as policing, the Home Office, or the National Crime Agency, can then use this information to more effectively identify potential cases of modern slavery and intervene without the victim needing to present themselves.

The dashboard has huge potential for machine learning and AI to be used to detect patterns in data and thereby, by collating data across government departments and the third sector, will allow enforcements agencies to proactively tackle the problem of modern slavery in the UK.