Information Day on a new era of STI policy making with AI

Background

Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) underpin a knowledge-based European economy and society. It is a key driver of productivity increases, long-term economic growth, and environmental sustainability. Over the past decade, STI policy has shifted from catch-up growth to sustainable development by integrating social, economic, and environmental factors. 

The new era of policy in STI: The complex web of models and many actors and pathways in STI creates a sense of "interconnectedness" that requires a participatory policy style, with government officials, scientists, consultants, and the public working together to determine the best sustainable development policy. «Digitalization» of science has brought data-driven processes that accelerate design-to-product-to-user feedback innovation cycles, while sharing data and infrastructure and cheaper communication encourage collaboration.

About policy intelligence: The IntelComp platform streamlines big data, AI-assisted policy modelling to improve human judgment for evidence-based policymaking to address ‘Policy Intelligence’. High Performance Computing advances and the unprecedented volume and variety of STI data from open science, public sector information, and web data have created ideal conditions for developing and applying AI techniques and modelling approaches to improve STI policy formulation and implementation.

The event

The event's primary goal is to facilitate interaction among those responsible for formulating policies and those who can help improve that process by providing access to cutting-edge data and technology, as well as those who will be directly impacted by those policies. 

We will first present results from IntelComp, i.e., the dataspace,  methodologies and AI tools we applied on several stages of STI policy (agenda setting, implementation, monitoring and evaluation) in the areas of Cancer Research, R&D in AI and Climate Change,  how we facilitated participatory design, the challenges we met and the lessons we learnt. We will also hear from policy makers, data scientists, and consultants about their perspectives on the challenges associated with the implementation of AI in STI policy making and its gradual introduction from the beginning. 

Our expectation is that the discussions will assist us in reaching a consensus on the opportunities brought about by the new technologies, that they will provide feedback on the risks associated with them, and that they will help us avoid making mistakes so that we can formulate a collective action plan for all parties involved.