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About DIGIT Lab
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DIGIT Lab is one of the six UKRI-funded national centres in the digital economy, dedicated to impacting the processes of digital innovation. We have a team of 20 academic staff led by the University of Exeter plus the University of East Anglia, Oxford Brookes University and Royal Holloway, University of London.
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Speaker
Dr Hugh Williamson
Abstract
Responsible Innovation is an approach to research and development that aims to shape these processes towards the public good through the inclusion of diverse stakeholders, the anticipation of potential outcomes for society, and reflexivity about the direction and purposes of technology development. Digital transformations hold significant potential to change the workings of organizations, economic sectors, and knowledge production systems, with implications for both people and the environment. This talk presents a responsible innovation approach to digital transformation, illustrated by ongoing work in the animal agriculture sector in the UK. This research has explored methods for fostering inclusion and anticipation in two areas: The development of Digital Livestock Technologies as solutions to grand challenges in animal farming (such as achieving Net Zero, improving animal welfare, and increasing productivity and efficiency), and the integration of supply chain data via livestock traceability systems in the sheep farming sector. The talk describes these projects and draws broader lessons from them for practicing responsible digital transformations.
Speaker Bio
Hugh F. Williamson is a Research Fellow in the DIGIT Lab, at the University of Exeter. Trained as a Social Anthropologist and Science and Technology Studies researcher, his research investigates governance, responsible practice and social organisation in digital agriculture and plant biology. Hugh joined Exeter in 2019 and worked for over three years as Research Fellow in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy and Anthropology and the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (IDSAI), on the Alan Turing Institute-funded project ‘From Field Data to Global Indicators’. He is the co-editor, with Sabina Leonelli, of Towards Responsible Plant Data Linkage: Data Challenges for Agricultural Research and Development (Springer, 2022). He has also conducted impact tracing work for IDSAI. Prior to joining Exeter, Hugh was based at the University of Cambridge, where he conducted long-term ethnographic research on rural transformation in Eastern Europe.
