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New research paper by academics from the Department of Computer Science examines the modelling assumptions that have informed COVID-19 policy-making processes

Posted on 11 September 2020

Researchers based in the Department of Computer Science have had a new paper published in BMJ Health and Care Informatics this week.

The paper, authored by Ibrahim Habli, Rob Alexander, Richard Hawkins, John McDermid, and Chiara Picardi from the Assuring Autonomy International Programme, alongside colleagues Mark Sujan (University of Warwick) and Tom Lawton (Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust), considers what can be learnt from other industries to help improve the transparency and accountability of COVID-19 policy-making processes.

It is common practice in safety-critical industries such as aviation to produce an assurance case which assesses how confident we should be in any decisions we make based on the results of a model used. This new paper suggests that any model that is used to guide critical policy decisions would benefit from being supported with such an assurance case to explain how, and to what extent, the evidence from the simulation can be relied on to substantiate policy conclusions.