Using artificial intelligence and archival news articles, a teenager in Northern Virginia created a program to measure media biases – and in researching older news articles, she found that Black homicide victims were less likely to be humanized in news coverage. Emily Ocasio, an 18-year-old from Falls Church, Virginia, created an AI program that analyzed FBI homicide records between 1976 and 1984 and their corresponding coverage published in The Boston Globe to determine whether victims were presented in a humanizing or impersonal way. After analyzing 5,042 entries, the results showed that Black men under the age of 18 were 30% less likely to receive humanizing coverage than their White counterparts, Ocasio told CNN. Black women were 23% less likely to be humanized in news stories, Ocasio added. A news article was considered humanizing when it mentioned additional information about the victim and presented them "as a person, not just a statistic," Ocasio said in her project presentation.

The pandemic has not only highlighted the importance of speed for medical discoveries, but also how data science and artificial intelligence (AI) can aid this acceleration. For example, machine learning in medicine has taken significant strides in recent years, with drug molecules discovered through AI used in human trials. Despite this, a recent report from the Alan Turing Institute revealed that difficulties with data collection, use, storage, processing and integration with different systems, namely the lack of a robust data architecture, hindered efforts to build helpful AI tools in response to the pandemic. To tap into the full potential of AI, organisations, especially in healthcare and pharmaceuticals, need to get their data in order. While great efforts have been placed into the likes of drug and medical discovery, particularly in light of recent events, it can be a lengthy, complex and costly process. Not to mention, its low success rates – only a couple of years ago, the overall failure rate of drug development was reported to sit at 96%.

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