Working with and accessing sensitive data has always been associated with bureaucratic burdens, but both the barriers and opportunities of data-driven research are changing rapidly, the Digital Universities UK conference revealed.
Speaking of Times Higher Education Richard Gunn, Program Director for Digital Research Infrastructure at UK Research and Innovation, described the funding body’s efforts to reimagine the nation’s digital research infrastructure for a new era.
This provided an opportunity to address issues with the current environment, such as the inequality that exists between different disciplines.
“In the past you had siled provision, with state-of-the-art digital research infrastructure linked to particular research communities,” he said at the event, held in partnership with the University of Exeter.
“This inequality has led to real barriers, for example to interdisciplinary research, and also creates all sorts of practical difficulties. For us, it’s about breaking out of the silos of what is undoubtedly excellent work and empowering researchers to get access to the right technology and skills to solve a particular problem.
To improve the status quo, he said, it’s important to recognize why the current patchy approach has arisen – not least that digital infrastructure is a “complex adaptive system driven by bottom-up factors,” meaning that “command and control approach’ to replace it will not work.
What is required, he argues, is “a program of change in three dimensions: technology, politics and culture, and as we know, culture often takes the most time.”
But the payoff for improving the current landscape, he said, is significant: “We want to move away from this idea that your access to digital infrastructure depends on your funding council or research topic…[That] the way we do things is unsustainable, we have to move forward and we know that if we can get it right, it can be transformative.”
Speaking alongside him was Emma Gordon, director of the Economic and Social Research Council’s UK Strategic Center for Administrative Data Research, who also acknowledged the problems with the current approach to data access.
She described a frustrating process where researchers can get stuck in a cycle of applying for access to owners of often highly sensitive datasets, getting feedback on the request, resubmitting, and so on. – often resulting in months of delay.
This may be compounded by a lack of upfront clarity about the data researchers will ultimately have access to — a problem, she suggested, that could be resolved if they had access to “low-fidelity synthetic data.”
This would be in a form that “describes the real data, but does not maintain the statistical relationship between them, so it could never be abused, but would allow you to understand what variables are there, how they are structured, and for development and testing of code before accessing the data. This will also allow you to develop a much better research application to access the data because you will understand it properly.
Such an approach, she argues, would save significant time and cost on all sides by reducing the demand for expensive computing time to analyze data in live environments, allowing researchers to develop code outside the system and improving outcomes.
The third speaker at the session, which was titled ‘Optimizing the UK’s digital research infrastructure to support a low-bureaucracy, impactful research culture’, was Michael Ball, Head of Data Science at the Medical Research Council.
He highlighted the transformation of the medical sciences in recent years, with increasing use of data to the extent that some disciplines are now almost entirely computational.
As a result, he said, the data used by researchers now is not only collected by the teams in question, but is increasingly collected externally, and “accessing someone else’s data requires additional management and bureaucracy.”
The NHS, he said, is pioneering a new approach to access through its “secure data environment network”, which it “explicitly says is a model shift from downloading data to accessing it where it is”.
“It requires a new way of thinking – now you bring your tools and calculations to the data, instead of taking it away and using it in your own environment,” he explained.
“But if that sounds more difficult, there’s a flip side to that, which is that the NHS is trying to make its data more accessible for research, so there’s a great prize here that could open up whole new worlds of research.” “
