The IDEMS Podcast

Lily and David discuss the importance of working with multi-level data. The conversation highlights the need for integrating the concept of multi-level data into data literacy education, from basic to advanced levels, to help people better analyze and interpret complex data sets. They also touch on the practical implications of ignoring multi-level data, such as in the 2020 UK examination algorithm controversy, and consider the relevance to AI.

David Stern interviews Polly Noyce about the history and impact of Manor House, a Kenyan institution focused on teaching sustainable agriculture to smallholder farmers. Polly shares her experiences starting the project in the 1980s and the transformations it has undergone over the past 40 years. They discuss the importance of agroecology and how contemporary technologies and approaches have influenced rural farming.

Can AI-generated information be trusted? In this episode, Lily and David dive into the issue of AI-generated “hallucitations”, where generative AI models like ChatGPT provide ostensible citations referring to sources that do not exist. They discuss the implications of such misinformation, including defamation cases. They emphasize the importance of responsible AI systems and the challenges of funding and prioritizing research to ensure accuracy and reliability in AI outputs.

In episode “061 – Simplicity versus Complexity”, David claimed that if a problem is solvable by throwing money at it then it is not inherently complex or “wicked”. In this episode, Santiago challenges this claim via the thought experiment from another episode, “031 – Who Wants to be a Trillionaire”. This prompts a discussion that spans topics including the sustainable development goals, the unintended consequences of market fluctuations, how progress can exacerbate inequalities, and the intricate nature of “wicked” problems.

David talks to Chris Sangwin, creator of STACK, the online assessment system designed to support the teaching of university level mathematics. They review what makes STACK so useful and how they are collaborating on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership program. STACK presents huge opportunities to improve mathematical education at scale and Chris and David discuss how a separate, human system of question authoring experts are needed to support this.

Open access software tools like ODK (Open Data Kit) have been a game changer in enabling access to digital data collection. Lucie and David discuss what makes ODK so interesting, and compare its development and use to that of R-Studio, another open access software that has made waves in data analysis. What will be the next step change in data collection? Does ODK’s impact represent an alternative model to that of “big bets” as the route to bring about large-scale change?

IDEMS works on complex, real world problems, but what does complexity mean? Lucie and David discuss the concepts of simplicity and complexity, with David suggesting that mathematics can be seen as a realm of simplicity compared to the complex real world. They touch on the dangers of oversimplifying problems and highlight how modern research tends to overvalue simplicity.

In this episode, Lily and David consider foundational data skills in data science education. They discuss Lily's recent teaching experience at the doctoral training school in Kigali, Rwanda, as part of the AIMS initiative. The conversation explores the significance of teaching basic yet essential data handling and analysis skills to data science students, emphasising how these foundational abilities are often overlooked in conventional education but are critical in the real-world application of data science and responsible AI.

How do you get a project off to a good start? In IDEMS’ Research Methods Support work for the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems (CRFS) in West Africa, we facilitate Inception Meetings to support projects make the right decisions. David and Lucie reflect on 9 CRFS projects’ joint Inception Meetings held in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso.

We’re used to participatory research with farmers, but what does scalable participatory farmer-focused research look like? Lucie and David discuss this principled approach to agroecological research, which has the potential to not only create great benefits for researchers and farmers alike, but to also shake up research systems and power dynamics between researchers and the community.

Santiago Borio and David Stern discuss STACK, an open-source online assessment tool for mathematics and STEM subjects. They explore how STACK can provide scalable and effective feedback across diverse educational settings, emphasizing its success in universities with large class sizes and limited resources, particularly in Kenya and other similar environments. They reflect on the value of community in open source educational initiatives.

Lily Clements and David Stern discuss their recent collaboration with a PhD student on complex data modelling. They highlight the challenges of accurate statistical interpretation, the importance of responsible research practices, and the need for more accessible modelling tools. Their conversation underscores the significance of improving data skills to enhance the reliability of research and AI applications.

Santiago Borio and David Stern delve into the distinctions between scalability and sustainability within IDEMS’s internship models. They debate the potential for internships to drive significant societal and economic changes, particularly in rural African settings, by fostering economic growth through digital opportunities. The conversation also examines how these scalable initiatives could profoundly influence both local and global economies across various resource environments, presenting a unique model to create opportunities for future generations.

In this episode of the IDEMS podcast, Lily Clements and David Stern explore the intersection of technology and humanity through the lens of Amazon's AI-powered shops. They discuss the concept of "phygital" initiatives, such as the mobile phone-based money transfer service M-PESA, where physical and digital realms merge to create jobs and enhance human interactions. They consider the future role of AI, the importance of community, and the ethical considerations of outsourcing labour.

David Stern and Kate Fleming discuss how social enterprises can offer “investment as a service”. They consider how shifting priorities away from growth can lead to positive outcomes, fostering sustainable practices that prioritise social impact whilst delivering for investors.

In this episode, Santiago Borio and David Stern delve into the development and growth of the Maths Camps initiative. They discuss the unique non-curricular and game-based methods used at the camps to engage students, moving away from conventional competitive educational models. The conversation also addresses the challenges and triumphs in scaling the camps, as well as their significant impact on students and educators internationally. David wraps up by reflecting on how the project has shaped his understanding of brain circulation.

Lucie and David discuss IDEMS’ aims to create digital opportunities for young people in rural areas. By building technology differently, and supporting local development, David shares how he has seen young people not only empower themselves, but also strengthen their local community.

In this 50th episode of the IDEMS podcast, co-founders David Stern and Danny Parsons celebrate the milestone by reflecting on the crucial role of observation in their professional journeys and its impact on IDEMS' development. They discuss the transition from observers to leaders, emphasizing the importance of taking a step back to gain a deeper understanding and insight, which has enabled thoughtful action and leadership within the organization. They also recognise the importance of allowing their team members the opportunity to observe and gain experience, while acknowledging the challenges of doing so in a dynamic business environment.

This episode delves into the nuances of language discrimination, specifically focusing on the impact of language models like ChatGPT on linguistic perceptions and the inadvertent biases they might reinforce. Hosts Lily Clements and David Stern discuss a controversy that arose in Nigeria over the use of the word "delve," which some attributed to AI-generated content, highlighting broader issues of language discrimination and the unintended consequences of AI tools in communication.

In this episode, Santiago Borio and David Stern delve into the use of language and its implications in today’s sensitive cultural landscape. Motivated by a prior discussion that mentioned 'white' and 'black' economies, and recognising the potential associations of this terminology, they explore how such terms have evolved and consider potential alternatives. They highlight the importance of tolerance and resilience as well as the necessity of careful use of language to avoid misinterpretation. The episode reaffirms IDEMS’ commitment to critical assessment and openness to constructive criticism, recognises that we will not always ‘get it right’, and concludes with a call for greater tolerance and self-awareness in our daily communications.

David and Kate, two of the three IDEMS directors, explore how to productively think about IDEMS’ multiple work streams as an overarching strategy. In doing so, they reflect on IDEMS’ role, and by extension technology’s role, in promoting “human flourishing”, as an enabler of human activities and interests.

David Stern talks to Moustapha Moussa about his work with communities in West Africa on processing centres to transform local food into nutritious products. They discuss how a chance encounter led to Moustapha working with the McKnight Foundation to build upon his research, and how focus shifted from urban areas to working in deep collaboration with women's groups in rural communities.

In this episode, David Stern talks to Bruce Hamaker, Distinguished Professor of Food Science at Purdue University. They discuss his projects in West and East Africa, making nutritious foods for local markets using local ingredients, and IDEMS’ role, through the McKnight Foundation, of providing research method support. They consider the transition of focus from urban to rural areas, the move to working with women’s associations and the viral scaling that this enabled.

David Stern introduces Kate Fleming, IDEMS' incoming director, discussing her alignment with IDEMS' values and their shared focus on complex data and community problems. They touch on the challenges of merging technology with social impact, the importance of community-based tech initiatives, and the goal of scalable solutions within a social enterprise framework. The episode highlights their mutual vision for addressing global issues through collaborative efforts.

In this episode, Santiago Borio and David Stern delve into the evolution of IDEMS internships, tracing their roots from the African Maths Initiative in Kenya to their expansion across Africa. They discuss the inspiration from university attachments at Maseno University, and lay the path towards potential structured programs that bolster capacity building and foster local innovation, emphasizing the significant impact on individual interns and broader community development.

In this episode, Dr Lily Clements and David Stern discuss the evolving landscape of skills for a world shaped by AI. They delve into the transformation of different job roles and the education system, proposing a future where critique, creativity, and human connection become increasingly important. This conversation highlights the supportive role of AI – aiming to enhance rather than replace human capabilities – and the vibrant future of jobs centred around adding value to our lives and society.

IDEMS has big ambitions, including to become redundant in our Research Methods Support (RMS) work for the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems. David and Lucie discuss the ongoing RMS internship program in West Africa and how, through the program, we can expand and increase our impact in the region.

In this episode, Santiago Borio and David Stern explore the journey of transforming maths education in Africa through STACK internships. They discuss how former team members, now PhD students, and local talents leveraged STACK, an open-source tool, to innovate teaching methods. They highlight the initial challenges of training interns virtually, the pivotal role of face-to-face interaction, and the interns' substantial contributions to the STACK community, particularly at the first African STACK conference. The episode celebrates the interns' growth, and their impact on educational institutions.

This episode features a conversation between Dr Lily Clements and David Stern on the influence of misinformation, initially focussing on the tobacco industry's attempts to distort statistics related to smoking and health. They discuss the historical context of smoking promotion, the transition to recognising its health risks, and the broader implications for responsible AI and the fight against pseudoscience.

A simple question, but not such an easy answer. Starting from their observations of street vendors and students in Burkina Faso and Niger, David and Lucie discuss what development could look like in this context. How does development in Niger, for example, compare to the developments needed in the UK?

In this follow-up to episode 035, Lily and David consider a recent development in the realm of AI image generation: Google’s Gemini model recently came under criticism for generating historically inaccurate images, seemingly as a result of overcorrecting for racial biases. They discuss topics including: how making mistakes can show that Google might be ahead of the competition; new AI regulations from the EU; Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI; and the infamous Glasgow Willy Wonka experience. Read about the Google Gemini incident here: https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/21/24079371/google-ai-gemini-generative-inaccurate-historical

This episode is a follow-up to episodes 033 and 034, which were a conversation between Santiago and David on IDEMS’ vision and mission. Here, Danny and David respond to that discussion, further explicating how they view the vision and mission and taking a critical look at their current formulations.

Lily and David discuss the challenges of using AI to generate images, highlighting biases observed in the results – in particular, regarding race and gender. They discuss the importance of recognising and addressing these biases, proposing solutions such as creating specific guidelines for using AI tools ethically and advocating for diversity in AI development.

Following a more theoretical assessment of IDEMS’ vision and mission in the previous episode, Santiago challenges David to explicitly analyse how these apply to three IDEMS projects. These are explained and contextualised before exposing how the vision relates to them. The mission is revealed to be explicitly relevant to each project once the vision analysis is carried out.

Description David and Santiago delve deeply into IDEMS’ vision and mission. David explains how these guide most of what IDEMS does and engages in, while going into detail about their meaning and implications. Transcript [00:00:00] Santiago: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I am Santiago Borio, an Impact Activation Fellow, and I’m here with David Stern, founding director of IDEMS. Hi, David. [00:00:20] David: Hi, Santiago. We’re discussing mission and vision today. Exciting. [00:00:25] Santiago: Yes! It is something that most companies have and advertise in their websites, but I don’t think they live by it necessarily as much as we do. And getting into our mission and vision it’s important because it informs so much of what we do. [00:00:50] David: Well, and also our mission and vision is not actually that well received within IDEMS, which is interesting. Danny and myself have actually had discussions about this recently that we really like it. But others within the organisation don’t, and so I’m really happy to have this discussion. I’m not going to go into at this point the criticisms why some people don’t resonate. I want to sort of have this episode to be able to say this is why I like our mission and vision, even if other people don’t like it, and even if we’re going to have to change it soon. I at least want to talk about this mission and vision while it’s ours because it means a lot to Danny and myself. [00:01:35] Santiago: Great. And just for reference, Danny is the other founding director of IDEMS. [00:01:40] David: Thank you, yes. [00:01:42] Santiago: So shall we start with the vision? [00:01:47] David: I think we should. That’s, that’s the big thing. [00:01:50] Santiago: So, the strapline of the vision is Impacting Grand Challenges. [00:01:56] David: That’s the vision. Arguably, reflecting on it, we could add a word, it could be positively impacting grand challenges. We’re not wanting to negatively make the world worse, we’re wanting to make the world a better place. And so, our hope is, as a vision, we will be happy if IDEMS is positively impacting Grand Challenges. [00:02:19] Santiago: I think anyone that listens to this podcast or knows IDEMS would get that positive implicitly. So, positively impacting grand challenges. [00:02:31] David: The main thing of course, which is one of the criticisms is a lot of people don’t actually resonate with the word ‘grand challenges’. They don’t understand what that means. It’s something which has become part of development landscape vocabulary. The Gates Foundation has adopted this as a big part of what it does and how it thinks. So it isn’t our wording, but it is not universally understood or universal wording. [00:02:59] Santiago: Maybe that’s why it’s described or defined somewhat in the website. [00:03:05] David: And particularly the relationship of grand challenges being ‘wicked problems’, which is again a term which is understood in certain circles, but it’s not widely used. That’s an interesting discussion, which I’m sure we’ll dig into, what does it mean? [00:03:24] Santiago: I was hoping we would do very soon another episode specifically on wicked problems. But maybe a very brief description. [00:03:37] David: I like the idea of recognizing that grand challenges are essentially developmental wicked problems. If you want wicked problems in development, international development, whatever that may mean. And so wicked problems are problems where you cannot have a solution. My favourite example of a wicked problem is education. Secondary school education is being able to educate your population as a whole within a country. That is a wicked problem. Because it doesn’t matter how well you do, there’s always elements that could be improved, there’s elements which should be studied, there is no solution to that problem. You can work on it as a developmental challenge. How can you improve secondary school education in a country is a fantastic example, for me, of a wicked problem. There’s no solution, but there are things which can be done, and it’s complex, and if you improve one aspect, you then might find that there’s another aspect which needs addressing. And so, there’s just complexity behind it. [00:04:52] Santiago: And it’s an almost unbounded process. [00:04:58] David: Yes, it’s unbounded, in this particular case. Healthcare is another example. You could make healthcare as good as you want, but there’s no end to what you could do, where you could say healthcare is solved. [00:05:13] Santiago: Yes, there’s loads of underlying issues in specific contexts about how healthcare is provided and so on. Those can be tackled, but healthcare as a whole will never be solved, there’s always going to be improvements to be made in system

Lily and David discuss the "Impact Activation Postdoctoral Fellow" role at IDEMS. They discuss the objectives and experiences of the fellowship program, and its impact on both individuals and the broader organisation. They explore the flexibility and opportunities provided by the fellowship to engage in diverse projects, the transition to more permanent roles within IDEMS, and the overall aim of making meaningful social impacts through their work.

WARNING: This episode was recorded outside on a mobile phone, and the audio quality reflects this. If that kind of thing bothers you, you may want to skip this one! Reports based on current trends predict that the world could have its first trillionaire within the next few years. What does this say about our global society? What could, or should, a trillionaire do with that kind of money? In this speculative episode, recorded whilst traveling, Lucie and David consider the thought experiment of implementing a global Universal Basic Income.

Lucie and David discuss various forms of study, including opportunistic studies, surveys, questionnaires and experiments. They consider some best practices for good research, using anthropology and agroecology as examples. How might modern data science be able to employ existing data for new opportunistic studies? And who might typically be excluded from data as it is often collected?

How can students be assessed effectively if large language models can be used to generate good answers to examination questions? Lily and David look at the effects of AI on education, in both the present and the future. How must pedagogy change in order to embrace the latest technological advances, and do we need to change which skills we value as a society?

David and Lily discuss the possible effects that advances in AI might have on the world of work. It seems that AI has the potential to affect almost all work, but should we be worried? What skills do we value as a society, and can AI ever replicate human creativity?

While many organisations seem to focus on a small area of expertise, IDEMS is involved in a wide range of projects and activities, in a wide variety of roles. In this episode, David talks to Santiago about the thinking behind, and advantages of, embracing diversity in how IDEMS can have impact and add value.

SMART goals and principles are common monitoring and evaluation tools, but what’s the difference between them? Lucie and David compare the two approaches and their respective acronyms, considering when being SMART is useful, and when a GUIDE might be more helpful.

Lily and David discuss consciousness in relation to AI. Whilst there is a lot of popular debate in this area, can we really have a meaningful discussion without a clear definition of consciousness? They consider advancements in AI, ethical dilemmas surrounding sentient machines, and the potential future of human-AI relationships.

In this nuanced discussion, David and Santiago discuss wealth as a privilege, examining their own privileges in various contexts. Should we view aspiration differently in low resource environments compared to high resource ones? Is it always wrong to use the privilege of wealth to gain advantages for oneself and one’s family?

David and Lucie explore the role of academic publications for researchers and inequalities in the international research publication systems. Are there alternative models and possibilities for institutions which don’t have the resources to compete on the international academic playing field?

David and Lucie discuss the role of evidence in research and in our wider society. What is good evidence? How should evidence be used? The last decade has seen the erosion of public trust in facts – so what can and should we be doing differently?

David Stern and Dr Lily Clements dig deeper into the Dutch Childcare AI scandal, its causes and consequences. They analyse how this could have been avoided or mitigated and highlight the need for more work on the responsible use of AI, and particularly the importance of the human element in integrating AI to help in societal issues.

IDEMS supports researchers at a number of research institutions in low resource environments, and in this episode David and Lucie discuss some challenges that these researchers are up against. In challenging contexts such as these, unique opportunities can arise.

In this second part of the discussion of nepotism, Santiago questions David further on whether the win-win scenarios presented in the first part do not mean a loss for someone else and consider this in a local and global context. They delve deeper into other types of opportunities, how they arise, and consider how organisations need to balance the creation of opportunities with the seizing of opportunities.

Santiago Borio interviews David Stern on the issue of nepotism. They analyse a common definition of the term, look into examples where it’s harmful and examples where it may even be necessary. They consider how IDEMS is a nepotic organisation and what that means in a wider context. This is the first part of a two part episode on a complex issue that can sometimes have deep social consequences.