CAIO Weeknote #16

Connecting education, health, climate and capability

Monday

Team Meeting: Always kick start Mondays with our 9 am Team Meeting - delighted to welcome Henry Poultney to our Team as Project Manager leading on AI in Education.

AI and Data Academy: Weekly one-to-one with our brilliant Head of Digital Services, Ste Sharples. This week, plotting our AI and Data Academy - aligning and making our services across our 6 local authorities together with their heads of IT, which Ste is leading.

Festival of Data: Stakeholder meeting and light briefing for those of us speaking. I have an opening keynote on 6th February. Links to all places coming up that I’m speaking at the end.

Century Tech Demo: Henry and I had a demo of Century Tech, the platform that the LCRCA has paid for to have in 45 Primary Schools this year, to enable personalised learning journeys in English, Maths and Science to help raise attainment levels. So good to see the lessons and the teacher dashboard of where exactly all the children they manage need specific help at a glance.

AI Taskforce Comms:

Our call of industry luminaries to help steer our AI agenda was launched on Monday and is open until 31st January. For more details and apply, go to:
Liverpool City Region AI Taskforce | Liverpool City Region Combined Authority

Tuesday

AI Taskforce Comms: Headed up to Liverpool and spent time sharing our Taskforce comms with key peers and stakeholders to spread the word.

MHCLG presentation AI Programme: Presented to colleagues from MHCLG who visited us to get a better understanding of all aspects of our work. I shared the AI Programme on a page overview.

Internal sharing: Prepping for an internal team career talk and sharing the AI Programme with our Comms Team so we can work more closely together.

International Civic Health Innovation Board Initiation Meeting: Thrilled to be appointed to this new board convened at the University of Liverpool by Professor Iain Buchan. We held the first meeting at 19:30 to allow colleagues from California and Australia to join us.

The mission of CHIL is to “advance health, social and economic well-being through data science and AI research embedded in civic innovation”

The strategic priorities were defined as:

• 1. Mental health

• 2. Multimorbidity

• 3. Infection resilience

• 4. Medicines optimisation

• 5. Health & care systems

Great conversations at dinner with Board colleagues afterwards on the value of data and the funding market, commissioning challenges across Local Authorities and how AI can help.

Wednesday

Industry Meeting: Brilliant meeting with the multi-skilled Jon Corner, ex CDO of Salford Media City and Co-founder of NOVEL Innovation for Leaders, among many other brilliant roles.

Digital Inclusion and AI: Great to catch up with Rob Benson, who leads our Digital Inclusion to understand what the programme already provides for guidance for residents in AI. Thrilled to learn about our forthcoming roadshows and AI advice for residents. Check that and more out at: Digital Inclusion | Liverpool City Region Combined Authority.

LCR Innovation Cabinet Board: presented our progress in the AI Programme to our Innovation Cabinet Board and internal colleagues.

AI and Comms: Gave a talk to our comms team on my career, the AI Programme, addressed questions and looked at how we can work closer together.

Budget for 2026: 121 with our accountant to look at our budget allocation for 2026.

Quick fire catch ups with the team in separate 121s to progress our agenda.

Thursday

ACRES Workshop

With other LCRCA colleagues, academics from the University of Liverpool and key colleagues running Biodiversity and Water organisations, I took part in our ACRES workshop - AI for Climate Resilience & Environmental Sustainability (ACRES) partnership with LCR, IBM and University of Liverpool.

We heard great work showcased across three themes to inspire our discussion, connections and give fuel to understanding the challenges, AI and academic resources available to us to spot our next opportunities to work together.

• Themed Workshop 1 – Protecting Biodiversity

• Themed Workshop 2 – Water Quality

• Themed Workshop 3 – Flood Risk

Key Takeaways from a variety of speakers
We heard from Katie Atkinson, Director of interdisciplinary research centre at University of Liverpool, on how ACRES was formed and what it sets out to do.

Great to hear from Rachel Waggatt, our Lead Officer for the Environment, with a quick tour of our Five-Year Climate Action Plan 2023-2028.

It was useful to understand the models that are trained and the open-source tools for foundation model fine-tuning. https://github.com/terrastackai

• TerratKit – Python library for geospatial dataset curation

• TerraTorch – Only python library to easily tune geospatial data

• Geospatial Studio – Tools for fine-tuning and inference with geospatial models

Examples of saltmarsh mapping at Southport, looking at habitat, biodiversity, flood risk and water quality.

Understanding the work of the Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation (HNCDI).

Getting into the Beginners Guide to Geospatial Data.

Dr Yi Dong took us through how to provide measurable safety guarantees for AI systems.

• Application Domains

• Energy and Power Systems

• Autonomous and Intelligent Transport

• Cyber and AI Security Systems

Dan Aribas Bell from Imago shared the data imagery service.

Freddie Draper blew us away with integrating drone and lidar for forests.

Dr Ming Li shared Coastal Defence to Large Urban Area.

United Utilities shared their work in daylighting water courses.

Claire, the CEO of Mersey Rivers Trust, led us through their programme.

John Bridgeman, Dept of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Liverpool, laid a key quote that stayed with us. Beddington’s Perfect Storm. In 2010, Sir John Beddington warned us that we need need 50% more energy and food by 2030 and 30% more water.

• Today we need 60% more food and energy by 2050, and 30% more water.

Prof Nicolette Leonardi shared Coastal Erosion and Flood Risk projects.

We heard from Flow on the Go - Liverpool air quality research centre.

And a few more!

Train back to London and getting through the inbox that has been building up.

Friday

Team Meetings: looking at our procurement, legal and evaluation processes.

Understanding Digital Social Care: Delighted to be connected by Richard Harding of STFC Hartree Centre to Peter Skinner, Programme Director, Digitising Social Care, NHS England, to understand Peter’s work, share our work and look at future collaboration opportunities.

AI and Data Academy: jumped in late to our AI and Data Academy with Local Authorities to listen to how they are defining the approach to data modelling across our local authorities.

Centre for Innovation and Education, University of Liverpool: great working meeting with the team here to understand how they are helping academics to understand AI.
Check out their brilliant open and free resources here:
AI - KnowHow - Library Guides at University of Liverpool

Internal Skills: meeting with our team leading on corporate development and internal skills, so we can augment our capacity in AI.

3-month probation check-in: great to be aligned on what I think I need to focus on aligns with what my manager shared too.

Future of work speaker briefing: great to share and agree on how I can provoke debate on the Future of Work that I’m sharing at Newham Council next week.

Key learning this week:

I need to allow more time in my diary to process meetings, respond to the 200 emails I’ve not had a chance to review and do the AI Programme strategic work that underpins our programme.

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Events that I’m speaking at - coming up

20 Jan, Role of the CAIO, North West Employers, online (members only)

22 Jan: AI and Data Future of Work, Newham Council, Bloomberg and UCL, London (invite only)

5-7th Feb: Role of the CAIO, ACC Liverpool Festival of Data, University of Liverpool

25 Feb: The CAIO Blueprint, CAIO Summit London

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Tiffany St James
Chief AI Officer, Liverpool City Region Combined Authority