Explainer by Sean Long and Tom Romanoff: “Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) have the potential to create applications that tackle societal challenges from human health to climate change. These applications, however, require data to power AI model development and implementation. Government’s vast amount of open data can fill this gap: McKinsey estimates that open data can help unlock $3 trillion to $5 trillion in economic value annually across seven sectors. But for open data to fuel innovations in academia and the private sector, the data must be both easy to find and use. While Data.gov makes it simpler to find the federal government’s open data, researchers still spend up to 80% of their time preparing data into a usable, AI-ready format. As Intel warns, “You’re not AI-ready until your data is.”
In this explainer, the Bipartisan Policy Center provides an overview of existing efforts across the federal government to improve the AI readiness of its open data. We answer the following questions:
- What is AI-ready data?
- Why is AI-ready data important to the federal government’s AI agenda?
- Where is AI-ready data being applied across federal agencies?
- How could AI-ready data become the federal standard?…(More)”.