Introduction
DataWell.me is a research and development project jointly run by ORBIT-RRI, a not-for-profit company spun out from Oxford and De Montfort Universities.
Background
Academic opinion indicates that a lack of access to data undermines the potential of medical AI to significantly enhance human health. As highlighted by Marieke Bak et al, “Artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare holds the promise of making healthcare safer, more accurate, and more cost-effective. Both public and private entities have invested considerable resources into the domain. Nonetheless, the fundamental requirement to leverage data-intensive medicine, especially AI technologies, is access to data.
Gaining access to representative datasets for training medical machine learning models is encumbered by privacy issues (Mittelstadt 2019). Nonetheless, the concept of individuals sharing their private healthcare data in exchange for personal health insights has gained momentum, notably through commercial genetic sequencing enterprises like 23andme, which boasts over 12 million customers. A majority of these customers share their data for research to receive personalised health insights.
We propose a novel data-sharing model where individuals are compensated for the data they contribute directly. This model, initially targeting healthcare data, has broader applicability. If successful, this could significantly accelerate the development and influence of AI systems worldwide, while equitably distributing the value generated to all participants.
The Concept
Prof. Martin De Heaver
Professor de Heaver is a leading figure in the responsible development of Artificial Intelligence systems, and collaborates with many top UK universities. Cofounder of Ipsotek (computer vision), GEOMii (smart cities), Merger Antitrust Review (financial information) and currently CEO of Oxford University spin out company ORBIT. Formerly a professional systems engineer with 30 years’ experience of designing and building major IT systems. Professor de Heaver has been a crypto miner, user and advocate since 2014.
Dr Roman Bauer
Dr Bauer is associate professor in Computational Neuroscience at the University of Surrey. Dr Bauer’s research focuses on the computational modelling and analysis of biological dynamics, in particular those of the brain. His research involves modern computing approaches, innovative machine learning and AI methods, and IT-related collaboration. Dr Bauer is spokesperson of the international Computational Biology collaboration BioDynaMo (www.biodynamo.org). He is also co-founder of biotech company Oxford Cryotechnology (www.oxfordcryotech.com/).
Advisors
Professor Joao Pedro Magalhaes
Prof de Magalhaes graduated in Microbiology in 1999 from the Escola Superior de Biotecnologia in his home town of Porto, Portugal, and then obtained his PhD in 2004 from the University of Namur in Belgium. Following a postdoc with genomics pioneer Prof George Church at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, in 2008 Prof de Magalhaes was recruited to the University of Liverpool in the UK to establish his own group on genomic approaches to ageing. In 2022, Prof de Magalhaes was recruited to the University of Birmingham as Chair of Molecular Biogerontology where he currently leads the Genomics of Ageing and Rejuvenation Lab [http://rejuvenomicslab.com/].
His lab studies the ageing process and how we can manipulate it to fend off age-related diseases and improve human health. The lab’s research integrates different strategies, but its focal point is developing and applying experimental and computational methods that help bridge the gap between genotype and phenotype, a major challenge of the post-genome era, and help decipher the human genome and how it regulates complex processes like ageing.
Notably, his lab is a world-leader in employing genomics and bioinformatics to study ageing, with pioneering work in studying gene networks of ageing and in sequencing and analysing genomes from long-lived species. Prof de Magalhaes has authored over 100 publications and given over 100 invited talks, including three TEDx talks. His research has also been widely featured in the popular press (BBC, CNN, the Washington Post, the Financial Times and many others).
Prof de Magalhaes is an advisor/consultant for various organisations, including nonprofit foundations, universities, investment funds and biotech companies. In the long-term. Prof de Magalhaes would like his work to contribute to the development of interventions that preserve health and combat disease by manipulating the ageing process
Dr Ehsan Toreini
My field of research is focused on physical security (electric hardware and non-electric components), trustworthy machine learning and web security. My research is strongly engineering-focused in nature, be it through designing real-world attacks or cost-effective and efficient mitigations. I have over 35 peer-reviewed publications in cyber security (including top journals and venues such as Usenix Security Symposium, PoPETS, ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security) and I own two US patents on authentication of physical objects using internal structure (#US10680825,#US10841098). In particular, I am proud of my work(s) on instinct-based anti-counterfeiting technologies in different documents (paper sheets and polymer-based banknotes), smartphone sensor attacks and defences and trustworthy machine learning. Finally, leading international media outlets such as The Economist, Wall Street Journal, BBC, Guardian, E&T and ACM Communications have featured my research. I won national and international grants and prizes for my research including “the Economist and Kaspersky cybersecurity award” on using Blockchain for e-voting.
I also have a significant industrial impact during my research career, including my impact on (1) Mozilla Firefox deployed a fix on Firefox 46 (CVE-2016-2813), (2) Apple included a fix in iOS 9.3 (CVE-2016-1780), (3) W3C (the main international web standards organisation) has released a revised version of the motion and orientation specification with a security section citing our research (4) Safari patched the vulnerabilities discovered based on our research (bug report #14685058). I am also an invited expert on Device and Sensor Group in W3C.