Review of Regional Skills Assessments: Final Report

No abstract available

Artificial intelligence: opportunities and implications for the future of decision making

Artificial intelligence has arrived. In the online world it is already a part of everyday life, sitting invisibly behind a wide range of search engines and online commerce sites. It offers huge potential to enable more efficient and effective business and government but the use of artificial intelligence brings with it important questions about governance, accountability and ethics. Realising the full potential of artificial intelligence and avoiding possible adverse consequences requires societies to find satisfactory answers to these questions. This report sets out some possible approaches, and describes some of the ways government is already engaging with these issues

New Labour: A Witness History

This article is the edited transcript of a witness history seminar which brought together high profile ‘insiders’ and ‘outside’ academic commentators to reflect critically on New Labour’s governance of Britain, 1997-2010. The contributions cover major areas of government activity, notably the economy, industrial policy, social justice, energy policy, ‘Europe’, military intervention, the use of intelligence and government decision-making. In their respective area of expertise, the contributors investigate the Conservative legacy seen through the eyes of New Labour people, the policies New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown tried to put in place, what changes these policies were intended to bring about and, finally, what the overall balance sheet of achievements was. The concluding section draws out the key domestic and foreign policy lessons learned during the New Labour years. The article presents a fascinating collection of findings that will be hugely relevant to Ed Miliband’s Labour Party as it gears up for the 2015 general election and after

Work-based learning and lifelong guidance policies

This Concept Note discusses the relationship between lifelong guidance and work-based learning. While these are distinct activities, they are often advanced as approaches to answering similar broad policy challenges, such as developing a skilled and socially inclusive population, ensuring engagement with education and work, and helping people to progress and live happy and useful lives. This paper argues that lifelong guidance can be particularly useful in relation to work-based learning in three main ways: • Engagement. Increasing citizens’ understanding of work-based learning, the routes into it and the rewards of participation. • Achievement. Helping participants (learners, employers and learning providers) in workbased learning to remain engaged and consider how best to enhance their skills and employability. • Transition. Assisting the effective utilisation of the skills developed within work-based learning by supporting individuals in transitions from work-based learning programmes to sustainable employment

Fife Workforce Modelling Study: Final Report

No abstract available

Towards a Theory of Analytical Behaviour: A Model of Decision-Making in Visual Analytics

This paper introduces a descriptive model of the human-computer processes that lead to decision-making in visual analytics. A survey of nine models from the visual analytics and HCI literature are presented to account for different perspectives such as sense-making, reasoning, and low-level human-computer interactions. The survey examines the people and computers (entities) presented in the models, the divisions of labour between entities (both physical and role-based), the behaviour of both people and machines as constrained by their roles and agency, and finally the elements and processes which define the flow of data both within and between entities. The survey informs the identification of four observations that characterise analytical behaviour - defined as decision-making facilitated by visual analytics: bilateral discourse, divisions of labour, mixed-synchronicity information flows, and bounded behaviour. Based on these principles, a descriptive model is presented as a contribution towards a theory of analytical behaviour. The future intention is to apply prospect theory, a economic model of decision-making under uncertainty, to the study of analytical behaviour. It is our assertion that to apply prospect theory first requires a descriptive model of the processes that facilitate decision-making in visual analytics. We conclude it necessary to measure the perception of risk in future work in order to apply prospect theory to the study of analytical behaviour using our proposed model