Enabling data-centric AI through data quality management and data literacy

Abstract

Data is being produced at an intractable pace. At the same time, there is an insatiable interest in using such data for use cases that span all imaginable domains, including health, climate, business, and gaming. Beyond the novel socio-technical challenges that surround data-driven innovations, there are still open data processing challenges that impede the usability of data-driven techniques. It is commonly acknowledged that overcoming heterogeneity of data with regard to syntax and semantics to combine various sources for a common goal is a major bottleneck. Furthermore, the quality of such data is always under question as the data science pipelines today are highly ad-hoc and without the necessary care for provenance. Finally, quality criteria that go beyond the syntactical and semantic correctness of individual values but also incorporate population-level constraints, such as equal parity and opportunity with regard to protected groups, play a more and more important role in this process. Traditional research on data integration was focused on post-merger integration of companies, where customer or product databases had to be integrated. While this is often hard enough, today the challenges aggravate because of the fact that more stakeholders are using data analytics tools to derive domain-specific insights. I call this phenomenon the democratization of data science, a process, which is both challenging and necessary. Novel systems need to be user-friendly in a way that not only trained database admins can handle them but also less computer science savvy stakeholders. Thus, our research focuses on scalable example-driven techniques for data preparation and curation. Furthermore, we believe that it is important to educate the breadth of society on implications of a data-driven world and actively promote the concept of data literacy as a fundamental competence.