Blog from Steph Wright, Head of the Scottish AI Alliance.

It’s December and Christmas is 10 days away so it’s a perfect opportunity to take a look back at 2022 and pick out some highlights. With 12 days of Christmas going through my head, my many attempts at clever and gimmicky ways to present these highlights have failed so I’m just going to go old school and tell it like it is and was! 

2022 has been quite a year. We have been super busy so hopefully the following gives you a flavour of some of the things the Scottish AI Alliance have been up to.

Scottish AI Summit

The year started off with a bang as the period from January to March was really hectic with all of Year 1 of the delivery of Scotland’s national AI Strategy culminating in the Summit at the end of March. But it all worked out fantastically. We delivered our first annual State of AI Report, and the inaugural Scottish AI Summit, in full hybrid format, was a huge success… so much so that we’re doing it again in March 2023 over 2 days and in Glasgow (early bird tickets on sale now)!

Our programme of work has grown from strength to strength, reaching more and more of the Scottish AI community as well as the general public through our extensive outward communications programme. 

Events

We launched a regular events programme which has seen us run events on human computer design and its impact on the LGBTQIA+ community for Pride month, the various uses of NLP, medical device regulation, Scotland’s AI powered right decision support service for health and social care, AI and IP and implementing AI in the workplace.  

We launched the beta of the Scottish AI Playbook, our one stop shop for anyone embarking on a journey with AI. We held our first editathon in Gathertown (think Mario + virtual event space).  

We supported the Scotland launch of Women in AI UK (join the community!) and also curated a panel about inclusion in AI at Data Summit.  

Community Engagement

We engaged the Democratic Society to co-develop (with communities) a set of design principles and subsequent engagement mechanisms for our community engagement programme that will kick off in 2023. We were keen to ask the communities we are trying to reach (the public and the under-represented) how they would like us to engage with them. We have one more workshop to go in Inverness on 14 January so please help us spread the word if you can!  

We also embarked on an incredible 2.5 year project with the Children’s Parliament and The Alan Turing Institute to engage children across Scotland with AI.  

And we’ve just launched an artists’ commission with The New Real team at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. 

And all of this is just scraping the surface of what we’ve been up to this year!

Growing Team

Over the year our team has grown on both The Data Lab side and the Scottish Government side. We’ve said goodbye to some colleagues and welcomed new ones. We finally got the whole team in a room in person at the beginning of December and we almost managed to get the Alliance team and the Leadership Group together for a workshop but the weather and rail strikes meant it was not to be. But we did end the year with a fantastic workshop setting the vision for the Scottish AI Alliance for year 3 and beyond.  

As they say, time flies when you’re having fun. Thank you for the support of everyone we have worked with this year! We wish you all a restful festive season and look forward to working with you in 2023!