In March 2020, when the full scale of COVID-19 impact was starting to become clear, my R2 Data Labs team – including Dr Klaus Paul and Dr Nigel Hart - and I started thinking about how data analytics could help support our communities in the recovery from the pandemic.
The high-profile ventilator manufacturing challenge, of which Rolls-Royce was a part, was really inspiring, but when you lead a group of data scientists, a lot of what we do feels a lot more abstracted than manufacturing solid pieces of kit. So, my team and I asked: “What is it that a group of data scientists could do, that might make a real difference here?” We could see how the response to the crisis was being addressed, so we decided to use predictive data analytics to identify the emerging economic recovery cycles that would eventually come out of the pandemic.
We knew we couldn’t do it by ourselves, so we invited seven other companies to be founding members and build capacity, bring ideas and resources. Within a few weeks, Whitespace, Google Cloud, Microsoft, IBM, Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, The Data City, ODI Leeds, Fieldfisher, SATAVIA, IOTICS and Truata signed up – and so the Emergent Alliance was born, with a mandate to share data, analytics and data science with a real positive world benefit attached to that work and to sharing that work in the open source domain.
Together, we strongly believed that if we could find evidence from data about where the risks were reducing, and therefore, where economic activity could be promoted, we could help lessen the recessionary impact of COVID-19. We wanted to do this by creating and publishing free data products to model recovery in the areas of transport, community, supply chain and economies.
We worked for 18 months in a non-competitive, virtual, collaborative space that spanned more than 60 organisations, 250 volunteer data scientists and contributors. Providing insights to decision makers and planners that they wouldn't otherwise have had – and doing so completely free of charge, with commercial interests and competitive instincts set aside. These are all captured in our closing report, so others can benefit.
I’m proud that Rolls-Royce led the charge on this, but most of all I’m proud of the positive way that data science stood up in the face of such a massive crisis.