Thread by @allthecitizens

Faculty Science, the London-based AI start-up linked to Vote Leave and Dominic Cummings, has been quietly accumulating some very lucrative public sector contracts.

@allthecitizens can reveal that, since 2018, they've won some 17 gov awards worth £8.3m.

THREAD:

These contracts, issued to an AI firm controversially brought into the heart of government by Dominic Cummings, span Defra, the Cabinet Office, BEIS, the British Business Bank, DCMS, and the Home Office.

10 of the contracts were issued between 2020-2021.

Most recently, Faculty won £628,000 from two awards, both starting on the 1st of March 2021. One with the British Business bank, providing “data science enablement”, and another with DHSC to build a “National COVID Chest Imaging database”, in conjunction with NHSX’s AI Lab.

This second contract solidified the partnership between Faculty and NHSX, following the first award within the health service where they’ve been working alongside Amazon, Google, and controversial data-analytics outfit Palantir, on the Covid-19 datastore.
opendemocracy.net/en/ournhs/unde…

That first contract was only released hours before the NHS were to be taken to court for failing to publish details of it. It initially gave Faculty concerning access to NHS data, a £10bn trove of information, before such access was withdrawn tech.newstatesman.com/coronavirus/nh…

Of note: one of Faculty’s proposed data “models” around “targeted herd immunity” was still being considered on the 23rd of March 2020, a week after the UK gov officially changed their policy.

Other contracts range from “cross government AI Adoption review” to machine learning solutions for fisheries with Defra. Some are worth £Ms, others for internships, like an ASI Data Science fellowship, £32k in July ‘18 placing 2 interns in the gov backed ‘Future Cities Catapult’

Contracts also include: £2.4m to “research online harms”, as reported by @BylineTimes; £2m from the Home Office for “Data Science and Data Exploitation”; and £250k from the Cabinet Office for “Filing and Sorting Emails”.
bylinetimes.com/2021/02/12/vot…

There are 2 awards for £95k and £90k with GOV.UK. Johnson reportedly intended the website as “a platform to allow targeted and personalised information to be gathered, analysed and fed back actively to support key decision making”.

Labour raised concerns the data could be used for party political purposes.
contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/notice/4867363…

Faculty (prev ASI) were founded in 2014 by Marc Warner, Angie Ma and Andrew Brookes, and have worked for a number of Conservative-affiliated groups, including Vote Leave, Cambridge Analytica, Hanbury Strategy, and digital ops for the 2019 election campaign.

In 2018 Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Chris Wylie gave evidence that ASI was a “subcontractor” for CA to the DCMS Select Committee. ASI responded in a blog post on their site, claiming they didn't work “formally or informally” with the disgraced firm.
faculty.ai/blog/cambridge…

Whether ASI and CA had a “formal” relationship or not, for 2 years CA’s parent company (The SCL Group) recruited interns through the ASI Data Science Fellowship. As reported by Middle East Eye, “ASI fellows have worked on at least 10 projects for SCL”.

Regarding Faculty’s involvement with Vote Leave, campaign spending on ASI states they were employed for “market research” and “advertising”. Invoices for the transactions, however, relate to “data polling and analysis”

Last year, the @guardian tallied the total awards won by Faculty since 2018 at 13 (worth some £3m). It also emerged that a company owned by Dominic Cummings, Dynamic Maps, paid them £260,000 between 2018-19, and was listed as a “customer” of Faculty.
theguardian.com/politics/2020/…

Cummings, a fan of data-led political campaigning and politics, also helped hire Ben Warner, brother of Faculty CEO Marc, into No.10 as an adviser. Both Marc and Ben were present during SAGE meetings during the early stages of the pandemic.

It has also been reported that Marc Warner used to communicate matters related to their Covid work with Dominic Cummings via messaging apps, raising issues of transparency.

Faculty also boasts other connections to those close to government.
Lobby group Hanbury Strategy, who themselves won two pandemic related contracts worth £640k, have worked with them. Their director, Paul Stephenson, is former Vote Leave comms director.

https://twitter.com/allthecitizens/status/1354141438557224963?s=20

Other concerns exist. As part of a debate over monopolies on data access, the gov set up CDEI in 2019 to oversee the potential ethical issues surrounding the use of AI and profiling.

Who better to keep an eye the ethical use of confidential data than Faculty's COO Richard Sargeant? He sits on the CDEI board.

CDEI awarded Faculty a contract for £125k in March of 2020 to oversee “bias mitigation” and “mitigation in decision making algorithms”.

While there is no evidence their extensive relationships across government helped Faculty secure contracts, their involvement and close proximity to so many people in Johnson’s Vote Leave government, raises concerns of transparency and fair dealing in contract issuance.

In addition, the details of what Faculty are doing with their access to our personal data held by gov remains unknown. In the spirit of openness and due diligence, @allthecitizens calls, at the very least, for the publishing of un-redacted gov contracts with Faculty.

Faculty have been approached for comment.