raoofphysics / asg-community

AI for Science and Government (ASG) Community and White Paper project

Welcome to the AI for Science and Government (ASG) Community and White Paper project repository. 🎉

ASG is an integrated research programme at The Alan Turing Institute that aims to demonstrate – via a diverse range of activities organized and presented as an integrated whole – how AI and data science can be used to effectively address significant societal challenges and transform health, science, engineering, and government.

The ASG Community and White Paper project will engage researchers at the Turing to collaborate, exchange knowledge and showcase their work through a series of white papers and supporting communication outputs about the ASG projects. This repository will provide the resources required to support the community engagement and project management of this project.

Vision

“Demonstrate, showcase and amplify the real-world impact of ASG research.”

Mission

Our goal is to produce a series of communication outputs, including formal reports as well as impact stories, highlighting:

• the research contribution of the ASG programme,
• the unique role ASG plays in cultivating diverse endeavours and
• the influence of the Turing’s network-convening capability ASG's work.

Specifically, the outputs will address these questions:

1. What are the ASG research contributions and success stories?
2. Why ASG is uniquely placed to do such integrated research?
3. How does the Turing leverage the convening capability to enhance the quality of ASG work?
4. What is the real-world impact of the ASG research?

Background

ASG was initiated in 2018 with a £38.8M investment from the UK government's strategic priorities fund. ASG supports a range of ongoing projects in different domain areas including applications within the Criminal Justice System, Health, Data Science for Science, Engineering, and Urban Analytics. In addition to these themes, ASG researchers are also working on three large cross-theme projects that focus on:

• Shocks and Resilience: improving policy-making by linking healthcare and economic data and models, preparing for future shocks and making government more resilient
• Ecosystems of Digital Twins: combining methodology from Engineering and Urban Analytics to develop integrated systems of digital twins
• Environment and Sustainability: linking heterogeneous environmental data and models to help assess the widespread impact of climate change, from arctic sea ice loss to food security

ASG overview

Outputs and products

In this project, we are producing a series of influential communication outputs, including community reports. These address key issues for policy-makers and other stakeholders on the future of AI in science and government. The documents are being co-created by all members of the ASG community and shared openly for further development and reuse.

One of the primary outcomes will be a portfolio of three community-written white papers, which will offer an opportunity for ASG as a programme to reflect on:

• learnings using evidence from ASG research,
• key challenges that have emerged,
• recommendations for the future and
• possible calls to action for the wider research community, government, policymakers and the public.

The titles of these papers and associated communication materials will be defined by three core groups focusing on:

1. using data science to predict and protect from future societal shocks
2. Digital Twins as a revolution in engineering and beyond
3. the role of AI in creating a healthy, sustainable, environment and responding to climate change

Beyond the white papers, we will also use different models of communication such as data visualisation, illustrations, executable code, storytelling approaches, impact reports, case studies, podcasts, video recordings and follow-on technical papers. These resources will pull together the different strands of ASG research and be easily digestible and accessible to a wide audience.

Contributing to the ASG Community and White Papers

• Please read the contributing guideline to understand how you can get involved in the project
• Please read the onboarding to follow a step-by-step guide to get onboard as a contributor to the white papers and other communication outputs
• Please read the contributor roles derived from the CRediT taxonomy to understand the scope of authorship beyond writing and reviewing

Who is involved

• The ASG programme is under the leadership of:
  • Professor Ben MacArthur, Director of AI for Science and Government, Deputy Programme Director for Health and Medical Sciences, and Turing Fellow
  • Professor Jonathan Rowe, AI for Science and Government Programme Chair, Programme Director for Data Science for Science, and Turing Fellow
• The Community Manager for the ASG programme is Achintya Rao is coordinating the development, progress and editing of white papers
• The Programme Manager and Research Project Manager carry out project management and operational tasks in the project
• ASG researchers, Research Application Managers and members of the Tools, Practices and Systems programme contribute to the White Papers in different capacities
• The Turing Communications team members, notably, James Lloyd is providing editorial support for the project
• ASG Researchers also take lead in the development of other communication outputs
• The Turing Events team is involved throughout the project for ASG events-related support

Partners and projects:

• The Tools, Practices and Systems (TPS) programme at the Turing represents a cross-cutting set of initiatives that seek to build open source infrastructure that is accessible to all and to empower a global, decentralised network of people who connect data with domain experts. The ASG Community Manager is funded by the ASG and sits in the Open Research and Community Building Team hosted under the TPS programme.
• The Turing Way is an open source community-driven guide to reproducible, ethical, inclusive and collaborative data science. The project goal is to provide all the information that data scientists in academia, industry, government and the third sector need at the start of their projects to ensure that they are easy to reproduce and reuse at the end. Best practices from The Turing Way will be integrated into the development of communications outputs, as well as recommendations from this project will be shared more widely via The Turing Way as chapters.

All the Turing Institute's policies and Code of Conduct apply to the activities in this project carried out by the Turing researchers and employees. For both internal and external contributors, we recommend familiarising yourself with the following policies and guidelines from the Turing Institute that we apply to this project:

• Equality, Diversity and Inclusion framework
• Events code of conduct

Contact

This repository is maintained by the ASG Community Manager, Achintya Rao. For any organisation-related queries or concerns, you can directly reach out to him at [email protected].

Licence

This work, copyright of The Alan Turing Institute, is licensed under the MIT licence (code) and Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (documentation). You are free to share and adapt the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as you provide attribution (give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made) in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use, and with no additional restrictions.