EMPOWER
Data Governance Driving International Standards and Practices
What is EMPOWER?
EMPOWER is a multi-million research programme dedicated to the multidisciplinary field of data governance. It is funded by industry partners and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), the Irish national agency for scientific research, which brings together leading expertise from academia and private enterprise to address the current challenges in data governance.
Data Governance: A National and Global Challenge
Businesses must ensure they have the right tools, processes, and infrastructure to collect, analyse, store and delete data securely and appropriately to prevent data breaches and misuse of personal information. Organisations must also understand the ethical and legal implications of data collection and use, ensuring transparency, respectful usage, and societal benefit. Data is one of the most valuable assets in the business world today. Organisations rely on it to make decisions, understand customers’ needs, develop predictive models to anticipate market changes, create better products and services, and create a competitive advantage for their businesses. However, businesses have growing demands and requirements to protect, manage and maintain their company and customer data.
The EMPOWER Vision
Effective and efficient data governance is the core pillar of EMPOWER’s vision for a thriving global data ecosystem to ensure that the vast amount of data that moves between actors within complex information supply chains is governed effectively, efficiently, and securely. This includes how consent is managed, optimising data lineage processes, and supporting transparency throughout the process whilst allowing users, applications, and machines to leverage these data flows to optimise physical and digital systems in the areas of industry, health, environment, energy, water, waste, people (intellectual endowment and engagement), lifestyle-built environment, mobility, transportation and logistics, and public services and public spaces. We believe data platforms and appropriate data governance models will be crucial to enabling all users to harness the potential of the data within the global data ecosystem.
Who is Involved in EMPOWER?
The EMPOWER consortium comprises a group of academics from a number of SFI Research Centres across multi-disciplinary fields of computer science, information systems, business studies, sociology, and law, working on collaborative projects with the public and private enterprise. A sample of partners are shown here, and innovative collaborative projects continue to be explored with new and existing industry partners under this research programme.
Multidisciplinary expertise is vital to tackle data governance challenges that span technological, policy, and legal areas. EMPOWER is establishing leading practices in data governance internationally. EMPOWER recognises that Ireland, as a hub for data processing in Europe, requires innovative and advanced tools and techniques for governing data ecosystems. It is of critical economic and public policy interest and aligns with Europe’s digital agenda.
“We know that for health research data is of immeasurable value, but we also know about the abuses of data. The opportunity to have a national discussion about how we use data responsibly in Ireland but at the same time be an example in privacy orientation and privacy driven, is very important. When I heard about the EMPOWER vision, I could only encourage it because it is exactly what we needed.”
EMPOWER’S Research Successes:
Transparency and Explainability in AI
This academic-industry collaboration between researchers from the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics and Genesys aims to create trustworthy AI systems for data-driven models. [SG1] A team of machine learning experts is conducting a survey to identify bias detection frameworks and methods in machine learning models. They will also investigate how to explain any biases present in the models. This collaboration aims to contribute to a more transparent and trustworthy AI ecosystem.
Ethical AI Data Governance
Within EMPOWER, Meta and academics from the four SFI Research Centres are focussing on translating new EU policy requirements into tools and techniques that impact data-sharing regulation in the EU more broadly. One example is establishing terms and concepts for Ethical AI Data Governance that will form a strong basis for future analysis of the implication and implementation challenges introduced by the EU Data Governance Act and Data Act. The Ethical AI, Data Governance framework is complemented by developing a scalable approach and tool for differential privacy.
Benefits of Partnering with EMPOWER
EMPOWER provides industry partners with unique opportunities by connecting academic research and industry experts to form partnerships to develop research solutions that have the potential to unlock the power of science, research and innovation to future-proof industry competitiveness, realise goals and inform future strategy.
Community of Practice
EMPOWER sponsors an active Community of Practice to enable and support data governance in the real-world application of data-driven solutions. This Community of Practice is an open and collaborative platform for knowledge sharing, best practices, and expertise. This will create a powerful global network of data professionals working collaboratively to drive data-driven innovation to develop a roadmap for Ireland with concrete recommendations and actions that will contribute directly to its status as a world-leading data economy.