UCL’s first year of the Data Empowered Societies Grand Challenge

UCL’s Grand Challenge of Data Empowered Societies launched in October 2024. As we approach the end of our first year, Prof Allison Littlejohn and Prof James Hetherington, (UCL Pro-Vice-Provosts for Data Empowered Societies) share how this Grand Challenge fits with UCL’s wider mission, and what they look forward to achieving over the next four years.

Developing Our Vision

Data, and new technologies to work with it, are changing almost every aspect of our lives. Information technology is transforming medicine and healthcare, improving climate resilience, and altering how we live and learn through new ways of analysing, measuring, sharing and making decisions. However, the ways these changes are taking place does not always empower humans. 

Our vision prioritises innovation that is both ‘human-driven’ and ‘data-driven’. Technical advances should advance with our understanding of their social impacts. Reductionist approaches risk leaving people behind through exclusion or machine. With these issues in mind, we have developed our ambitious mission:

• To accelerate UCL’s positive impact on the world through information technologies that empower humans.
• To apply UCL's expertise and insight to move towards a world in which technology is human-driven and has a positive impact, empowering people and communities to address their most pressing challenges. 
• To ensure UCL is recognised as a global leader in inclusive, data empowered research, education, and innovation, bringing transformative technologies into harmony with the values, vulnerabilities and needs of people and society. 

We aim to achieve this Mission by working to shared values, developing:

• A human-centred approach: Serving human needs and benefiting all.
• An interdisciplinary culture: Bridging deep and complex divergences of perspective, approach and epistemology in productive ways that build mutual trust.
• With optimism for transformation: Leveraging information technology to transform society in ways that engender hope.
• Engendering resilience and adaptability: Using data to respond to global challenges such as healthcare, sustainability, and climate change.
• Being responsible and inclusive: Promoting ethical data practices and ensuring data empowers all communities.

By the end of the five years of the Grand Challenge, we want our legacy to be sustainable collaboration across research, enterprise and education in data empowered societies. We aim for collaboration to be embedded culturally, structurally and materially – creating lasting impact. For example, culturally joint research grant submissions between technologies, social science, and humanities researchers should become the norm. Structurally, we envisage a ‘space’ such as an interdisciplinary center, supported by a strategic research grant, an anchor commercial partner, local community engagement, or taught courses. In terms of impact, we aspire for our research, education and innovation to begin shaping a better world.

None of this is possible without collaboration from colleagues across UCL. Through conversations with colleagues across all Faculties, it became clear that while a challenge-led, interdisciplinary approach to Data Empowered Societies is vital, a number of barriers remain: limited connections and silos across disciplines, lack of tools, time constraints, limited support for staff and recognition, and difficulties in bridging diverse epistemologies.  

To address these structural barriers, we have set the following objectives: 

• To prepare leaders for a data empowered future by creating an environment in which diverse perspectives and different epistemological approaches from across UCL can connect.
• To increase social impact through strategic partnerships by establishing partnerships with organisations at the forefront of digital transformation to ensure our insights have a positive impact and change the world for the better. 
• To catalyse responsible innovation by sharing ways UCL academics address local and world challenges combining technical insight with social and cultural knowledge.

Our Focus Areas
In our first months as Pro-Vice Provosts, we spoke with colleagues from across UCL. With the support of a researcher, we mapped people and disciplinary areas related to Data Empowered Societies. Drawing on this mapping and our discussions, we drafted a preliminary set of Focus Areas for the Grand Challenge. These focus areas were presented at the Data Empowered Societies Kick-off event in London on 23rd January 2025, where more than 60 colleagues from across UCL provided feedback. Their insights helped shape UCL’s Vision for Data Empowered Societies that formed the basis of UCL's future work around this Grand Challenge.  

We have established three research focus areas:

• Working and learning with data.
• Knowing and deciding with data.
• Data and social change.

In addition, a fourth focus area on Data Empowered Organisations, positions UCL as a ‘Living Lab’ to explore what UCL would look like as a data empowered organisation.

In January 2025 we put out a call for small grants (up to £10,000) across each of these four areas. In March 2025 we received 75 proposals. Our review panel was opened up to representatives from all faculties and the board selected 17 Small Grant projects, distributing £160,000 funding across 10 faculties and three UCL central offices.

Our partnerships
We have been developing external partnerships with companies and public and civil society bodies that enable positive digital transformation in order to build insight and catalyse impact for UCL research.  

UCL has been pleased to renew this year our association with Amazon Web Services through the Centre for Digital Innovation, a collaboration on creating enterprises with a clear public good mission in digital health and digital education. 

We were also delighted to announce this year a new partnership with Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company. Nvidia builds the hardware that enables the current data transformation, as well as supporting a lot of open source assets to empower researchers and innovators. UCL was announced recently as the selected UK partner for Nvidia’s sovereign large language models project, focused around BritLLM. 

What we look forward to in the 25/26 Academic Year
There is much to anticipate in the new academic year. As we approach the second year of the Grand Challenge, we are focussing on a set of larger-scale projects across the four focus areas. In July 2025 we launched our Challenge Awards with a deadline of 30th September 2025. These projects will run until the end of 2026.

For UCL to have a future legacy around Data Empowered Societies, we have to involve our students. Last year we contributed to a number of student-led events, including the Student Innovation Lab. This year our efforts will focus on finding sustainable ways to ensure Data Empowered Societies is an enduring part of UCL’s work.

We would like to thank the Data Empowered Societies Grand Challenge team: Sam Balch (Director), Katherine Welch (Assistant Director), Max Gillingham (Co-ordinator), Francisco Duran del Fierro (Senior Research Fellow), Susan Hermann (Admin), Martin Scott (Senior Partnerships Manager), Daisy Harvey (Communications Manager), James Paskins (Assistant Director) and especially all colleagues across UCL who have been working with us.