Upcoming events

Bristol Data Week 2026
Save the date for Bristol Data Week 2026, 1-5 June! More details to follow shortly.

Turing Seminar Series

  • Wednesday, 18th March 2026. 13:00 - 14:00 followed by refreshments (1400 - 1500)
    • Title: Open data infrastructure in the age of generative AI
    • Speaker: Elena Simperl
    • Location: Chemistry Building LT4
    • Abstract:

      • Open data infrastructure refers to the systems, frameworks, and processes put in place to collect, store, manage, and share data generated or held by governments and other public institutions. It is meant to ensure that public data is accessible, high-quality, secure, and usable by a wide range of stakeholders, including the general public. For more than a decade, we have witnessed millions of datasets made available via such infrastructure, advancing research, policymaking, and innovation. However, open data infrastructure is still far from realising its potential; non-technical users, in particular, face significant barriers in navigating complex datasets and extracting meaningful information to support their decisions. There are also ongoing challenges around sustainability and stewardship.

        In this talk I will walk through some of my recent research into how generative AI could address some of these barriers. I will start with user studies in "data prompting", which explore how professionals in various data-related roles engage with chatbots to find, make sense, and use open data. Diving deeper to the accuracy issues suggested by these studies, I will then describe two projects focusing on open government data. In the first one, my team used machine unlearning and information leakage methods to understand if existing open datasets are used by widely accessible generative AI tools. In the second one, we developed a benchmark to assess the factuality of foundational models in answering citizen queries.

        Informed by the findings, we developed PortalGPT, a proof of concept leveraging knowledge graphs, large language models, and retrieval-augmented generation to make open data more accessible and actionable for people with varying levels of data literacy.

    • Bio:

      • Elena Simperl is a Professor of Computer at King’s College London and the Director of Research for the Open Data Institute (ODI). She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and the Royal Society of Arts, and a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow. Elena’s work is at the intersection between AI and social computing. She features in the top 100 most influential scholars in knowledge engineering of the last decade and in the Women in AI 2000 ranking. She is the president of the Semantic Web Sciences Association.