"The Open Data Delusion" at 10 years
It’s been 10 years since I published an article called “The Open Data Delusion” on a now defunct news outlet called “Broken Toilets”. You can still read it on my own blog.
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15 things I have learned launching AI projects - Part 4
Looking forward to better AI adoption I’ll close this blog series with 2 reflections on what to do next; because AI adoption, regardless of bubbles and hype, won’t end today. This is how you get and stay ready: adapt, adapt, adapt.
15 things I have learned launching AI projects - Part 3
Systemic issues in AI adoption In the previous issues of this multi-part blog post I shared some lessons in AI adoption that pertain to definition and framing of the opportunity. We’re now looking at the systemic, structural issues that can impede proper adoption. To note, I don’t go into technical details in this blog series (maybe one for later?). But if you want to learn more about…
15 things I have learned launching AI projects - Part 2
What does AI adoption means in practice Part 1 was a preamble based on framing AI in the context of building solutions. Here, we get a bit more practical detail.
15 things I have learned launching AI projects - Part 1
The context in which we build AI This is a little preamble because it’s mostly about how to frame AI in a way that makes you… forget about AI.
15 things I have learned launching AI projects - Index
In 2020, I joined the NHS AI Lab. Part of the now defunct NHSX (a joint digital unit between NHS England and the Department for Health and Social Care), the AI Lab was a £250M initiative to develop and deploy safe, ethical AI across the UK healthcare system.
All I Want For Christmas Is Davos
I bumped into this nice visualization of Google Trends. It’s about web searches for “Davos”, which clearly exhibit a seasonal pattern consisten with the dates of the World Economic Forum.
Using a M5AtomS3R to display live bus arrival info
I’ve been meaning to play with microcontrollers for a long time. When I was at university, I was really jealous of my friends who had studied electronics in high school and were able to use these mysterious devices. The learning curve was really hard before ESP32 and Arduino made things much more standard and easy. The latter, especially, came with an IDE that, over time, has become the de…
The Bus Station That Didn’t Exist, and Other Data Epiphanies
This article was first published in Nightingale “Data is multidisciplinary” is my mantra—it’s 2025, and I’ve now worked 20 years in every possible flavour of data—data visualization, open data advocacy, data pipelines in healthcare, data-driven national-scale services, AI innovation, and more. Whatever the application or project, my take on data literacy is the fundamental ability to challenge…
Notes from csv,conf,v9
I’ve just come back from a splendid week in Bologna, where I helped run csv,conf,v9 for the first time.
Commutes within urban areas are the shortest
A couple of weeks ago I saw this interesting map of commute times in Germany made by Datawrapper’s co-CEO David Kokkelink, noting how commutes into major cities are the longest in Germany.
The Open Data Delusion
Photograph: The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design Open Data is about the “Data” as much as it is about the “Open.” Some stories from my experience as an Open Data activist and adviser illustrate it.
QGIS – An ATLAS of buildings by council
Another little QGIS step-by-step note to my future self. Prerequisites : This time I was looking to create a visualization of London councils showing the buildings that come from Open Street Map, using the handy downloads from Geofabrik to get the buildings shapefile into QGIS. In order to add the “by council” element, I also downloaded an official shapefile of the boundaries of London…
Playing With Gpx Data from Strava
I’ve been wanting to try using gpx data for a while. You can record your runs with a variety of apps, and even edit those with a text editor, as gpx is a format that is relatively human-readable. What I realised, though, is that I’d been using Strava quite a lot when we were in lockdown in 2020, my hour of daily air being, often, a jog. Personal best after personal best (which…
Three things about data...
First published on LinkedIn Quite a few interesting discussions at Think Data yesterday, both on and off stage.
Calculating the average face from a set of photos using OpenCV on Colab
TL;DR Here is the Colab notebook . A few years back, the the UK Parliament released photo portraits of each Member of Parliament. So, I thought, it would be cool to do something data-driven with that image set. I had worked before with algorithms that allowed to find reference points on a face, using Terence Eden’s code that found the most similar painting to a face.
Making a map of the closest capital using QGIS
I saw this map on Facebook. It asks what capitals are closest to each Italian town, creating what looks like a continuous map to display the result. I like this kind of thing, so I set out to replicate it using QGIS, and making the process as replicable as possible.