The Future of AI and Governance

Helen Margetts is Professor of Society and the Internet and Professorial Fellow at Mansfield College. She is a political scientist specialising in the relationship between digital technology and government, politics, and public policy. She is an advocate for the potential of multi-disciplinarity and computational social science for our understanding of political behaviour and development of public policy in a digital world. She has published over a hundred books, articles, and policy reports in this area, including Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (with Peter John, Scott Hale, and Taha Yasseri, 2015); Paradoxes of Modernization (with Perri 6 and Christopher Hood, 2010); Digital Era Governance (with Patrick Dunleavy, 2006, 2008); and The Tools of Government in the Digital Age (with Christopher Hood, 2007). Since 2018, Helen has been Director of the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Insitute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. The programme works with policy-makers to research and develop ways of using data science and AI to improve policy-making and service provision, foster government innovation, and establish an ethical framework for the use of data science in government. The programme comprises over 90 research projects involving 55 researchers across 20 universities, working with over 100 public sector agencies at national, regional, local, and international levels of governance.