Please join us for a panel discussion on Data and delusion after Covid 19, Wednesday 27 May @ 1pm South Africa, W Europe |  12 noon UK | 7am US East Coast | 7pm Beijing China. Please “arrive” (log in) 15 minutes beforehand to ensure time for you to be admitted prior to the event as we admit participants individually for security reasons. We start sharp on the hour. To join you first need to register.

Panelists:

• Dr. Shakir Mohammed is a Senior Researcher at Google DeepMind in London, United Kingdom (UK).
• Professor Charis Harley is an academic based in the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), South Africa.
• Professor Olaf Dammann is Vice-Chair of Public Health at Tufts University in Boston, United States (US), Professor of Perinatal Neuroepidemiology at Hannover Medical School, Germany, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Neuromedicine and Movement Science at the University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.

Facilitated by Professor Alex Broadbent, Director of the Institute for the Future of Knowledge at the University of Johannesburg

Please register if you wish to watch this live. A recording will also be posted afterwards.

This is the third in a series of webinars on Reimagining the World After COVID-19, organised by the Institute for the Future of Knowledge in collaboration with the UJ Library and Information Centre on the initiative of the Vice Chancellor’s Office at the University of Johannesburg.

Data and delusion after COVID-19

An epidemic has a single centre from which disease spreads: an epicenter. A pandemic is what happens when the disease no longer spreads from a single centre but circulates and spreads throughout the population. The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by a pandemic of data. Data is offered, analysed, re-packaged and criticized by mighty international organisations and by tiny local outfits. Even private individuals with no prior expertise or interest in data, disease, or statistics spend hours poring over graphs and critiquing case fatality estimates.

Yet this proliferation of data and analysis has not yielded effective predictions. Instead, it has demonstrated how ill-equipped we are to deal with this new, non-hierarchical, distributed information context. Leading scientists have proved dramatically wrong. Or perhaps not – it depends who you ask. The unfolding pattern of spread still surprises us at every turn – except those who predicted it all along. Nothing is more common than the common cold, and coronavirus variants are one of its causes: yet we seem unable make reliable predictions about COVID-19.

This webinar explores a range of issues relating to data and trust in science in the aftermath of COVID-19. What went wrong with the modelling approach to prediction – if, indeed, anything did go wrong? How should policy and scientific research interact, and how should policy makers make use of data? Can people without domain-specific knowledge use data to predict better than the experts in that domain? If not, then can data analysts themselves make predictions merely by studying patterns in data? Turning to the generation of data, how does the individual interest in privacy weight against the public interest in private information, notably location, which can be very useful in the context of a pandemic?

Our improved data processing abilities did not help us as much as we might have imagined in this situation. Machine learning, in particular, thrives on spotting complex patterns in noisy datasets, and doing it fast; yet is has been conspicuously absent from the efforts to predict the course of this pandemic.

Register here