WIREDGOV

Update on the latest AI skills and talent initiatives being joint-funded by industry & government.

Combined government & industry investment of £370m will deliver 2,700 new AI PhD places in the UK - 1,700 of these PhD places have been allocated to advance discoveries in bioscience and tackle challenges like feeding the world’s growing population while helping people stay healthier, for longer.

This investment is part of a suite of recent AI skills announcements helping to solve the UK’s Grand Challenges and meet some of the commitments made in the AI Sector Deal.

At the Autumn AI Skills and Talent Initiatives event there was a strong emphasis on the importance of diversity. Minister for Digital & Broadband, Matt Warman highlighted the need for diverse ideas and representation to ensure tech works for everyone.

It is important that these new courses are “student-centric” and support individuals that may have had a negative experience of education so far.  Currently in the UK there’s a 13% gap between the chances of white and BAME students getting a first or upper second degree, even when other factors are controlled for.  We need to better understand why this is the case and what can be done to mitigate this difference.

Technology and online learning can be part of the solution but we also need to ensure that these jobs are made available in regions outside of London.  As Jacqueline de Rojas, techUK President highlighted, by 2022, there will be 1.2m unfilled jobs in the tech sector.  Regional engagement will have an important role to play in filling these jobs.   In industry alone 93% of UK tech companies say that the lack of digital skills available is affecting their commercial operations. 

techUK is calling for a skills brokerage platform, a single, centralised platform where individuals can find information on skills pathways, current schemes/courses available to them at the national & local level and relevant job opportunities.  Stakeholders, such as the Institute of Coding and Data Skills Taskforce, are currently conducting some pilots in this area. It’s important that, alongside government, we join together to make this concept a reality.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has defended the UK against more than 600 cyber attacks in the past year – bringing the total number to almost 1,800, new figures show.

The figures are contained in the NCSC’s third Annual Review, which also sets out the various ways the organisation has been protecting the public. This includes a pioneering operation to stop hundreds of thousands of people losing money to credit card fraud.

Over the period of the review the NCSC has dealt with 658 incidents, which brings the total number to almost 1,800 since the Centre’s formation in 2016.  A significant number of incidents continue to come from hostile nation states.

In the most wide-ranging review yet produced by the NCSC, which is a part of GCHQ, significant disclosures include:

• The pioneering Operation Haulster, which automatically flagged fraudulent intention against more than one million stolen credit cards, as a result protecting hundreds of thousands of people from financial loss
• A machine to improve the efficiency of information sharing around threats to the UK – speeding up the process from a matter of hours to just seconds - new Indicator of Compromise (IoC) machine.
• A breakdown for the first time of the sectors which are given the most support from the NCSC’s Incident Management team, with government heading the list, followed by academia, IT, managed service providers and – in joint fifth – health and transport

Elsewhere in the review, the key role the NCSC plays in protecting the democratic process is highlighted as well as the success of the Active Cyber Defence (ACD) Programme.  ACD is the NCSC’s world-leading, bold, interventionist approach that stops millions of cyber attacks from ever happening. 

(See also: Active Cyber Defence (ACD) – NCSC )

ACD features a number of pioneering programmes, such as the Takedown Service, which finds malicious sites and sends notifications to the host to get them removed. Thanks to this service, 98% of phishing URLs discovered to be malicious were taken down, a total of 177,335 phishing URLs.  Of those, 62.4% were removed in the first hour.

There are also examples in the review of how the NCSC is helping defend individuals and families from the cyber threat, including via Operation Haulster.

DHSC Secretary Matt Hancock has set out his ambition for every patient in the country to have access to social prescribing schemes on the NHS as readily as they do medical care.

Social prescribing involves helping patients to improve their health, wellbeing & social welfare by connecting them to community services.  This can include activities such as art and singing classes.

The National Academy for Social Prescribing will work to:

• standardise the quality and range of social prescribing available to patients across the country
• increase awareness of the benefits of social prescribing by building and promoting the evidence base
• develop and share best practice, as well as looking at new models and sources for funding
• bring together all partners from health, housing and local government with arts, culture & sporting organisations to maximise the role of social prescribing
• focus on developing training and accreditation across sectors

The indepedent academy will receive £5m of government funding and will be led by Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, the outgoing Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners.  It has been developed in partnership across government, with Sport England, Arts Council England and a range of voluntary sector partners.  Alongside the benefits for patients, the National Academy for Social Prescribing could reduce the burden on the NHS.

Only 60% of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) use social prescribing for patients with anxiety, mental health problems and dementia.  In some parts of the country, patients with long-term conditions who have had access to social prescribing link workers have said they are less isolated, attended 47% fewer hospital appointments and made 38% fewer visits to A&E.

The NHS Long Term Plan includes plans to recruit over 1,000 trained social prescribing link workers by 2020 to 2021, with the aim of 900,000 people being referred to social prescribing schemes by then.  The government’s Loneliness Strategy committed to every eligible patient in the country having access to a social prescribing connector scheme by 2023.