Akademiforelesningen i humaniora og samfunnsvitenskap

Akademiforelesningen 2024 ble holdt i Akademiet 11. mars.
Professor Helen Margetts vedOxford Internet Institute holdt foredraget The Digital, Data-intensive State: Bringing Data Science and Artificial Intelligence to the heart of government?

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About the lecture
This talk examines the changing nature of government in the light of widespread use of data science and artificial intelligence (AI), developing the Digital Era Governance model (Dunleavy and Margetts, 2006, 2013, 2023). Data science and AI offer great potential to improve government, policymaking and public services. These technologies can bring transformative capabilities to government’s information regime, allow the reallocation of state functions, automate tranches of activity and change administrative logics both vertically and horizontally. Government could be more effective, prescient, productive and citizen-centred than ever before. However, as these technologies become embedded across every market and area of society, they also pose new challenges to public safety and democracy itself, particularly in relation to the power of Silicon Valley firms to shape the information landscape. The talk will look at some of the key administrative choices to be made, for example about information regimes, state capacity and organisation, regulation and public-private relationships.

Helen Margetts OBE FBA is Professor of Society and the Internet at the University of Oxford. She is based in the multi-disciplinary department the Oxford Internet Institute, of which she was Director, 2011-8. From 2018, she has also been Director of the Alan Turing Institute’s Public Policy Programme, which develops data science and AI to improve government and policymaking.  Before Oxford, she was UCL's first Professor of Political Science & Director of the School of Public Policy (2000-4). She has degrees in Mathematics (BSc), Politics and Public Policy (MSc, LSE) and Government (PhD, LSE).

Her research and writing focuses on the relationship between technology, government, and public policy, including books Political Turbulence (Princeton, which won the Political Studies Association prize for the best politics book, 2017); Digital Era Governance (OUP, 2008); Paradoxes of Modernization (OUP, 2010) and The Tools of Government in the Digital Age (Palgrave, 2007).  Prizes and awards include the Technical University of Munich’s Friedrich Schiedel prize (2018) for research and research leadership in social and political science; the OBE for services to Social and Political Science (2019); the Kluge Senior Chair in Technology & Society in the Library of Congress (2019); a Fellow of the British Academy (2019); and the Meyer-Struckmann Prize for Digitization and Democracy research from Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf (2020).  She is currently working on two books: How Democracy can Work in a Digital World? and the Third Wave of Digital Era Governance: the Data-intensive Digital State.

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