Who should own your data?

The Committee will be looking to establish how personal data should be owned, managed, valued and used for the benefit of society in the modern world. The Committee will also be asking its witnesses whether existing legislation, including the Data Protection Bill currently going through Parliament, and the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) more widely, are fit for purpose in relation to the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

These are among the key issues the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence will be asking two panels of witnesses on Tuesday 31 October 2017 from 3.30pm.

Data is the fuel of the current boom in AI development. With a growing tension, on the one hand between the tech giants seeking greater access to personal and public datasets, and activists and experts with ethical and privacy concerns on the other, the sessions promise to be a timely debate about an increasingly significant part of people's daily lives.

The first panel will be at 3.30pm and the Committee will hear from:

• Elizabeth Denham, UK Information Commissioner
  The Information Commissioner seeks to uphold information rights in the public interest, promote openness in public bodies and data privacy for individuals. In 2017, the Commissioner was recognised as being one of the three most influential people in data-driven business in the annual DataIQ 100 list. The Information Commissioner's Office's written evidence to the inquiry is here.
• Dr Mercedes Bunz, Senior Lecturer, The Communication and Media Research Institute, University of Westminster
  Dr Bunz was a Guardian technology reporter and has authored ‘The Silent Revolution: How Algorithms Changed Knowledge, Work, Journalism, and Politics Without Making Too Much Noise' (2014). Dr Bunz submitted evidence to the inquiry here.
• Dr Sandra Wachter, Postdoctoral Researcher in Data Ethics and Algorithms, Oxford Internet Institute. Dr Wachter is a member of the Ethics and Philosophy of Information Research Cluster and the Digital Ethics Lab, and a Turing Research Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Her research focuses on the legal and ethical implications of Big Data, AI, and robotics as well as governmental surveillance, predictive policing, and human rights online.

The second panel will be at 4.30pm and the Committee will hear from:

• Frederike Kaltheuner, Policy Officer, Privacy International (PI)
  Privacy International is a London-based charity which aims to build a global movement for the protection of privacy, to challenge data exploitation and to contest surveillance. Privacy International's evidence to the Committee can be found here.
• Olivier Thereaux, Head of Technology, The Open Data Institute (ODI)
  The ODI was co-founded in 2012 by the inventor of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee and AI expert Sir Nigel Shadbolt to address today's global challenges using the web of data.
• Javier Ruiz Diaz, Policy Director, The Open Rights Group
  The Open Rights Group is a non-profit organisation working to protect the rights to privacy and free speech online.

Other questions the Committee is likely to ask include:

• How can access to data for researchers and SMEs be improved? How can monopoly ownership of data by large corporations be prevented?
• Is there a technical solution to preserving privacy while also ensuring the benefits of AI are realised?
• Should the use of black-box algorithms like deep learning be restricted in domains of high-stakes decision making, such as finance, health, law, and military applications?
• How can unintended prejudices in the data that is used for training AI models be mitigated?

These evidence sessions will take place at 3.30pm on Tuesday 31 October 2017 in Committee Room 3 of the House of Lords.

The Committee recently published the written evidence it accepted into the inquiry. Click the link below to read this evidence.
http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/lords-select/ai-committee/publications/