Tools, practices and systems at the Turing

Slides from Kirstie's talk for the Turing's TPS Seminar Series on 27 May 2020

Abstract: All members of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence, are guided by the Turing's "Rules of the Game". There are six dimensions of these recommendations for supportive interactions: trust, transparency, inclusivity, integrity, respect, and leadership. In this talk, I describe my vision for the Turing's Tools, Practices and Systems (TPS) Research Programme. My goal is to empower the people working on data science and artificial intelligence to embed our values into our ways of working, and the open source software and infrastructure we build and maintain. Trustworthy systems allow researchers to implement innovative analytic methods safely. Many members of the data science ecosystem require training and better support for transparent reporting and inclusive interoperable standards. As a sector, we must go beyond legal compliance to deep and continuous engagement in ethical research integrity. We need safe people designing and building our AI infrastructure, and we must respect the expertise of users, policy makers, and HIC designers in that process. And finally, there is an opportunity for our national institute to incentivise leadership in open ways of working, joining a movement to incentivise a collaborative vision for transformative uses of data science to improve the world. I will reserve time at the end of the talk to understand members Turing TPS community's priorities. They - in fact all members of the Turing community - are invited to co-create the programme through the Programme's GitHub repository at https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/tps-project-management.

Bio: Kirstie Whitaker leads the Tools, Practices and Systems Research Programme at The Alan Turing Institute (London, UK). Her work covers a broad range of interests and methods, but the driving principle is to improve the lives of neurodivergent people and people with mental health conditions. Dr Whitaker uses magnetic resonance imaging to study child and adolescent brain development and participatory citizen science to educate non-autistic people about how they can better support autistic friends and colleagues. She is the lead developer of The Turing Way, an openly developed educational resource to enable more reproducible data science. Kirstie is a passionate advocate for making science "open for all" by promoting equity and inclusion for people from diverse backgrounds, and by changing the academic incentive structure to reward collaborative working. She is the chair of the Turing Institute's Ethics Advisory Group, a Fulbright scholarship alumna and was a 2016/17 Mozilla Fellow for Science. Kirstie was named, with her collaborator Petra Vertes, as a 2016 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine. You can find more information at her lab website: whitakerlab.github.io.