As an organization that represents companies that help their customers do great things with data, BSA has long viewed unnecessary barriers to the exchange of data as lost opportunities that impede collaboration and growth. Our advocacy across the globe has focused heavily on the need for sensible policies to ensure enterprises can transfer data to where it is needed most. Today we are launching the newest chapter in BSA’s ongoing effort to promote policies that enhance the collective benefits of data.
In Open Data: Bridging the Data Divide we outline a new plan for advancing policies that will facilitate greater sharing, collaboration, and experimentation with data across a broad swath of industries. As detailed in the agenda, BSA will support open data policies that: (1) enhance access to high value government data, (2) make it easier for organizations to voluntarily share their own data, and (3) promote the development and use of privacy-enhancing technologies that enable data sharing to occur in ways that align with the public’s expectation of privacy. In launching the agenda our aim is to “bridge the data divide” by getting data into the hands of the people and organizations that can use it to unlock new opportunities, enable innovative collaborations, and promote economic growth.
Open Data to Unlock New Opportunities
The fight to contain the impacts of COVID-19 has been a stark reminder about the importance of ensuring that citizens, policymakers, public health officials, academic researchers, and business leaders all have access to the data they need to make crucial decisions during a global health crisis. In the words of one researcher on the frontlines of mapping the mutation of the virus, COVID-19 “has been a powerful story of open data” and the opportunities that are unleashed when the divide between data and computing power is bridged.
Open data-enabled opportunities in the healthcare space are by no means limited to COVID-19. By eliminating siloes that currently separate researchers from the technologies that can transform their data into breakthroughs, open data policies can play a key role in addressing some of the world’s greatest medical challenges. However, fully leveraging data-enabled technologies in clinical settings is complicated by the sensitivity of the data that researchers are working with. For understandable reasons, a range of legal restrictions place limits on the sharing of medical records. While these restrictions safeguard important privacy interests, they can also act as barriers to researchers seeking to harness the power of AI to improve healthcare outcomes.
Fortunately, a range of emerging privacy-enhancing technologies and data governance structures can bridge these gaps, allowing researchers to leverage open data opportunities without compromising patient confidentiality. For example, Intel recently launched a new software platform that is enabling researchers from 30 leading hospitals to jointly train an AI system that radiologists can use to more accurately identify early-stage brain tumors. By leveraging “federated learning,” the platform allows the system to be trained on each institution’s data without exposing any individual patient’s medical records. In contrast to traditional machine learning approaches that rely on a centralized pool of data, federated learning enables researchers to train the system using data that remains under the protection of the patient’s health care provider. Because the accuracy of AI is often a function of how much data is available for training a system, the use of federated learning to train algorithms with data from a large number of medical institutions may be a pathway to clinical breakthroughs. Intel’s federated learning platform has already shown remarkable signs of promise. Whereas tumor detection algorithms trained on a single institution’s data were 70% accurate, early testing suggests that leveraging the open data advantages of federated learning will improve model accuracy to 85.7%. To bridge the gap between data and discovery, BSA will support policies that encourage the continued development and use of privacy-enhancing technologies.
Open Data to Enable Collaboration
Across industries, there is growing recognition of the immense collective benefits that can arise when organizations share data in ways that facilitate collaboration. Even in the intensely competitive automotive industry where companies are racing to be the first to market with a fully autonomous car, there is an acute awareness that collaboration on key safety features will drive progress for the industry as a whole. In March, Ford released a massive corpus of data from tests it conducted with a fleet of autonomous vehicles in Detroit. By sharing its data with the broader research community, Ford aims to accelerate the pace of innovation and hasten the public’s embrace of driverless cars.
Despite growing recognition of the benefits of these sorts of voluntary data sharing efforts, a recent MIT study revealed that 64% of business executives cite concerns about regulatory uncertainty as an impediment to fully embracing the benefits of open data. To bridge the gap that prevents organizations from leveraging the advantages of collaboration, BSA will support policies that eliminate open data uncertainty, such as the establishment of expedited regulatory clearance processes for collaborative data sharing arrangements.
Open Data to Promote Growth
Government-generated data is an important asset that can serve as a powerful engine for creating new jobs, promoting economic growth, and enabling innovation. When government data is made available, the economic impact can be profound. While few realize it, the global positioning system (“GPS”) is a US-government owned satellite system whose data was opened for commercial use in the 1980s. The availability of GPS data quickly transformed old industries – e.g., improving agricultural efficiency by enabling precision farming techniques – and catalyzed the growth of entirely new industries – e.g., laying the groundwork for the modern smartphone. In a recent study, the National Institute for Standards and Technology concluded that the opening of GPS data has generated more than $1.4 trillion in economic benefits.
At the state and federal level, agencies collect and generate vast quantities of data that offer unique insights into virtually every facet of the modern world, from satellite imagery that can help predict the weather to transportation data that can help reduce congestion. Open government data advocates have been buoyed by some major policy wins in recent years, including the 2019 passage of the OPEN Government Data Act. However, important work remains. The full economic potential of government data often goes unrealized, trapped in siloes that prevent it from being used to create jobs and spur economic growth. To bridge the gap that prevents entrepreneurs from fully leveraging government data, BSA will support a range of policies designed to enhance the availability of high-value government data
To read BSA’s Open Data Agenda, click here.
