Emerging Topics Sketch

In June, Benjamin Marchant (British Geological Survey, benmarch@bgs.ac.uk) led a great discussion on Emerging Topics in Statistics, Data Science and Technology. Topics of discussion included: questionable assumptions underlying plant and animal health diagnostics; emerging sources of data and their biases; quantum computing, and most thoroughly, AI technologies.

The potential of hybrid AI-process models, specialist-trained statistical expert systems, AI agents and technical AI assistants were highlighted. There was also a deep discussion on barriers to the uptake of these technologies within the environmental sciences, including a lack of output explainability, uncertain data security, slow adaption of policies, poor knowledge sharing and lack of resources.

Resources were suggested to help people keep up to date with AI developments, such as AI-centric networks (e.g. AIBIO, Prob_AI), newsletters (e.g. RSS Data Science and AI) and the UK Government AI Insights.