US and UK Governments Launch Prize Challenges to Develop Democratic Tech Innovations

The governments of the United Kingdom and the United States are launching a set of the prize challenges that are aimed to tackle financial crime and public health emergencies amid concerns regarding technological advances in China.

The challenges are now based on using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to examine large and sensitive datasets, even though the synthetic financial and medical data is also being used for the challenges themselves.

The challenges come amid concerns that China is outspacing the western countries with its artificial intelligence research, which some people believe is at least in part, which is hindered in the western countries by strict privacy laws along with ethical and technical concerns.

The challenges were first announced in a virtual gathering hosted by the United States with the intention of renewing democracy at home and also confronting autocracies abroad. Earlier 2022, the government of the United States has confirmed, it will be jointly funding the challenges for people to come up with the mechanisms for artificial intelligence models to be trained on sensitive data without the data having to be revealed.

Due to the machine learning tools requiring enormous amounts of data to be trained, and privacy enhancing technologies have been a focus as the can possibly allow that sensitive personal and commercial data for being used without the usual risks of sharing the data.