King's College London

Deputy Head of the Department of Informatics, Professor Elena Simperl has been nominated to join OpenUK’s AI Advisory Board, to help develop and guide the UK’s leadership in Open Technology.

Covering open-source software, open hardware and open data, the organisation is the UK’s industry body for Open Technology. It promotes the strength of the UK’s technology community to help shape and guide policy on the subject, as well as promoting world-leading research, learning and best practice.

Following a specialism in open data, Professor Simperl joins figures such as Google DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning, Professor Neil Lawrence, and Responsible AI Manager at Digital Catapult, Chanell Daniels, to shape the Open Technology agenda in the UK and its global partnerships.

Of the appointment, Professor Simperl said: “I'm very pleased to have joined OpenUK's AI Advisory Board, along with contemporaries across academia, industry and the third sector to help spearhead the UK's open technology agenda. AI is and will continue to be an enormous influence on our lives and there are many important questions about its design and use which cannot and should not be solved by technologists alone.

“As shown time and time again with open-source software, open science, or open data, taking an open approach will be crucial not just to address big social and technical challenges around the safety of AI models, but also to gain public trust and fight misinformation. While in 2024 we’re seeing more and more AI models being released with an open license, we’re still far from having a genuinely open public infrastructure for AI that is built on principles and standards that encourage wide participation and foster innovation.

“For me, this board is a big step towards advancing our thinking around and advocating for greater investment in this infrastructure in the UK and beyond. The web, in its original, open, participatory form rather than the siloed corporate platforms we have today has had massive societal and economic benefits around the world. It’s time to do the same for AI.”

To date, her work has largely been at intersection between AI and collective intelligence, helping developers understand how to build smart systems that combine data and algorithms with human and social capabilities.

She is currently working with Siemens to verify the training methods of AI and make sure they are in line with regulation. She also led on the development of standardised vocabularies for machine learning datasets documentation with international partner MLCommons.

Elena is also the Director of Research for the Open Data Institute, President of the Semantic Web Science Association and features in the top 100 most influential scholars in knowledge engineering of the last decade ranking.