Meeting the Smart Data Research UK cohort in Westminster
Life is not always on LinkedIn, and this website has been quieter than my actual year.
So, belatedly: in February I spent a day in Westminster with my fellow Smart Data Research UK cohort, and it was one of the best days of the fellowship so far.
There is a particular pleasure in being in a room where nobody needs the premise explained. Everyone there was already convinced that data about how people live can be used to improve how people live, and had spent their own funding period elbow-deep in the practical difficulty of proving it. What varied was the subject. Smart meters and fuel poverty. Shopping data and diet. Local news and quality of life. Mobility patterns among older people. The breadth was genuinely striking, and so was the sense of shared purpose underneath it.
I presented Synthetic Realities, my human-in-the-loop project on how AI-generated visual vaccine misinformation spreads across social media, and how we might track it before it spreads rather than after the damage is done. Presenting to a room of people who work with digital footprints for a living is a useful discipline. They do not need convincing that the data exists. They want to know what you are going to do with it, and whether you have thought carefully about the people on the other end of it. Those are the right questions.
Caption: Around twenty Smart Data Research UK fellows and staff standing together for a group photograph in front of UKRI and Smart Data Research UK banners.
Thanks to the Smart Data Research UK team for putting the day together, and to the rest of the cohort for the conversation. And there’s a photograph, which means it definitely happened!
You can read more about Synthetic Realities in my write-up of the Digital Footprints Conference 2026 poster, or find the project details in the Research section.