Data quality challenges in the age of AI – workshop with danah boyd (invite-only)

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CAISA is hosting a workshop on data quality and legitimacy in the age of AI, featuring a keynote by Professor danah boyd (Cornell University).

Please note that this is an invite-only event. Relevant participants may express their interest by contacting Irina Shklovski at ias@di.ku.dk.

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The EU AI Act requires that high risk AI systems are trained on high quality data. But what constitutes high quality data? Research with state statistics and medical organisations shows the wide array of “repair work” necessary to create and maintain datasets, deploying techniques such as imputation alongside a range of data quality assessments to determine if the data are “good.” Yet the legitimacy of data practices is often questioned and it is a challenge to know what aspects of data quality are in fact important. In this workshop, we invite practitioners to a discussion of data quality and legitimacy, focusing on current problems and approaches to managing these. The workshop will include a keynote presentation by Professor danah boyd from Cornell University based on her new book Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the US Census. This is an ethnographic account of how the US Census Bureau made census data during a pandemic, while contending with both natural disasters and intense political pressures.

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Bio:
danah boyd is Geri Gay Professor of Communication at Cornell University and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Georgetown University. She is also the founder of Data & Society, an independent non-profit research institute. Her research examines the intersection between technology and society.

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Time and Place

Date: August 13

Time: 1.00 p.m. - 3.00 p.m.

Location: Statistics Denmark

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Please note: This workshop is in English.

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Digital sovereignty is multidimensional and requires priority

In a time of geopolitical instability and rapid AI development, control over digital infrastructure and data has become critical. While there is broad agreement on the need for action at the national, Nordic, and EU levels, a shared language around digital sovereignty is still lacking. This lack of alignment leads either to inaction or to narrow technical solutions without strategic direction. The core argument of the brief is that digital sovereignty is a multidimensional concept, involving both principled positions and pragmatic choices. Reducing it to technical solutions risks overlooking the values and trade-offs that determine who controls and benefits from these systems. Conversely, focusing solely on values leads to abstract principles without practical implementation or real impact. Digital sovereignty is rarely about choosing between full self-sufficiency and total dependence. Rather, it is about balancing often competing demands for openness, security, competitiveness, growth, values, and rights in a world where capabilities are unevenly distributed. This means that it is necessary to define who or what is to be protected or promoted, within the domains of security, economic growth, or citizens’ rights, and to recognize that choices in one domain may strengthen or undermine another. The brief focuses on AI as the area where digital sovereignty is most acutely at stake, but the concepts apply more broadly to digital infrastructure and data. It provides decision-makers with tools to navigate these dilemmas by presenting:

- A conceptual framework for identifying who or what should be digitally sovereign.

- An overview of how digital sovereignty is prioritized around the world.

- An understanding that sovereignty can be exercised through three control regimes: ownership, expertise, or regulation – but that none of these are sufficient on their own.

The central implication of the brief is that digital sovereignty requires an integrated strategy that combines ownership, expertise, and regulation, while managing the interdependencies and trade-offs between security, economic growth, and citizens’ rights through clear objectives. Without this holistic approach, there is a risk of ineffective regulation, unusable infrastructure, or a lack of capacity to develop, maintain, and apply solutions in practice, potentially undermining security, growth, or rights.