Patterns in Practice explores how practitioners’ beliefs, values, feelings and emotions interact to shape how they engage with and in data mining and machine learning – forms of ‘narrow AI’. The project ran from August 2021 to September 2024 and was led by Jo Bates based at the University of Sheffield Information School, with DCRC’s Erinma Ochu, Helen Kennedy, Itzelle Medina Perea, Monika Fratczak, Hadley Beresford, Samborne Bush and Lucy Sabin.

Data and algorithms are becoming increasingly important resources for decision makers in organisations across sectors. Data mining and machine learning techniques allow analysts to find hidden patterns in the vast troves of data that organisations hold, producing predictive insights that can be actioned by others within the organisation or further afield. As applications of such techniques have become more common place, they have also become more controversial with concerns raised about, for example, discrimination and social manipulation. Across sectors practitioners are asking what good data practices look like and how they can be fostered. In 2017 the UK government launched the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation to examine such issues.