Data and AI for social purpose
This research explores how data and AI can support social wellbeing, inclusion, and public value, while addressing risks and building governance models that align innovation with societal needs.
The challenge
Data and AI can be powerful tools for advancing public value, social inclusion, and improved quality of life when designed and used ethically. Rather than replacing the workforce, AI should support sustainable prosperity and open new ways to understand research questions and address social challenges. This includes unlocking community wellbeing with administrative data, ensuring that technological innovation aligns with citizens’ aspirations, and navigating risks such as the militarisation of AI. Building the right mechanisms, capacities, and governance models is essential to ensuring that science and technology genuinely advance social wellbeing.
What we do
Under this theme, we seek to re-design models, tools and practices to unlock fresh knowledge that can drive prosperity for the 21st century, through collaboration with citizens, policymakers, service providers and technology innovators.
Our projects
Prosperity in east London 2021-2031 Longitudinal Study
UK’s first longitudinal study of household prosperity using citizen-led metrics will produce robust, actionable, and local evidence about prosperity, as defined by local communities.
Citizen Prosperity Index for east London
The Citizen Prosperity Index is a new way of measuring prosperity that reports on what matters to local communities in east London.
Good Life Euston
This is a project in collaboration with Camden Council, Lendlease, Camden Giving to understand the experiences of local communities most affected by major regeneration projects in the Euston area.
Using Administrative Data and AI to understand community wellbeing
This project explores how government agencies can use behavioural data, including administrative records of community activity, to better understand place-based wellbeing.
Building Economic, Needs-Based and Environmental Evaluation Frameworks for Inclusive Transformation…
BENEFITS explores how urban regeneration affects prosperity and inequality in east London using citizen-led methods and lived experience data.
Maisha Bora Citizen Prosperity Index
An innovative, community-led research project exploring what prosperity means to people living in three unplanned settlements in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Hamra Prosperity Index
The Hamra Prosperity Index project empowered teams of citizen scientists to develop targeted interventions based on the needs identified through their research in Beirut's Hamra neighbourhood.
Mina Prosperity Index
This report is a rare and necessary study offering detailed quantitative data for a site in Lebanon outside Beirut, addressing the research landscape's disproportionate focus on the capital.
Featured publications
Report: A Citizen Prosperity Index for east London
This report outlines a new way of conceptualising and measuring prosperity based on long-term research about the determinants of prosperity local communities.
Working paper: Redefining prosperity with and for communities in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
This working paper summarises headline findings from the Maisha Bora Index, Africa’s first citizen-led prosperity measure.
Report: Prosperity in east London 2021–2031 Longitudinal Study: Outputs and Impacts from Wave 1
This report summarises the outputs and impacts from the first wave of research, undertaken in 2021–2022, and plans for the second wave, which will be undertaken in 2025–2026.
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