Skip to content

Selected Topics

Data for Policy Conference was held at UW and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation campus on Dec.8 and 9, 2022, for the 7th edition of the Data for Policy Conference.

The Data for Policy conference is a premier forum for interdisciplinary and cross-sector discussion around the impact and potential of data-driven innovations in governance and the public sector. The conference was held sequentially in Hong Kong (5 Dec), the University of Washington, Seattle (9 Dec), and Brussels (13 Dec), with the Seattle conference also hosting a Thursday afternoon side event (8 Dec) on the BMGF campus.

The all-day UW Friday event featured sessions on:

research from Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, South Africa, and Italy on COVID data and policy
citizen data and governance (example from India);
a panel on inclusive data policy for AI in Africa with the Africa-Canada Artificial Intelligence and Data Innovation Consortium
a panel on Indigenous data and sources of data sovereignty
A panel on leveraging data to set objectives and make decisions: What can we learn from impact assessments? The IFAD experience.
Finally, UW Professor and co-author of “Calling Bullsh*t: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World”, Carl Bergstrom will offer the keynote lecture.

The BMGF side event features three plenary panels on: open data; the politics of data; and the ethics and efficacy of modeling and machine learning. Panelists are composed of researchers, senior public service officials and foundation officers, hosted by BMGF’s Ashley Farley and co-moderated by Stanley Wood and Managing Director and Co-founder, Open Watch Inc., Shaida Badiee. Lunch, coffee breaks and a reception follow both events.

As the host campus, students and faculty with UW net ids are eligible to register under the inclusion scholar option, though we ask those who are able to pay the normal fee, which helps to support the non-profit Data for Policy community.

+++++++++++++++++++++

At EPAR, we are dedicated to providing research for the public good. While our research has spanned a wide variety of international development topics, we have a particular focus on four major areas of inquiry:

Climate Change and the Environment,
Data Curation,
Digital Financial Services and
Gender.
All EPAR research reports can be found on our research page.