Saving the UK national memory with Bayesian Networks

Martine Barons, Director of the Applied Statistics & Risk Unit at the University of Warwick
Wednesday 7th December 2022 12:30pm-1:00pm AEDT

Archives are socially, politically and legally important to every functioning democracy. As more and more objects that need to be preserved are created and exist digitally (born digital) or are physical objects that have been digitised, understanding the risks to digital archives in order to put in place suitable mitigating strategies becomes more and more important. In this talk I will describe the Bayesian-network-based tool we developed in collaboration with The National Archive, UK, and its partner archives. The tool, DiAGRAM, (https://nationalarchives.shinyapps.io/DiAGRAM/) has been used by The National Archives to make a successful business case for substantial uplifts in funding in the UK Government spending review, was a finalist in the 2020 Digital Preservation Awards, and 2022 winner of The Decision Analysis Practice Award, sponsored jointly by the Decision Analysis Society and the Society of Decision Professionals, given annually to the best decision analysis application, as judged by a panel of members of both Societies.

Martine Barons is the Director of the Applied Statistics & Risk Unit at the University of Warwick, UK, a Chartered Mathematician, Vice President (Learned Society) of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the UK representative of EU-MATHS-IN (which aims to leverage the impact of mathematics on innovations among stakeholders on a European level) a member of the advisory board to the Newton Gateway to Mathematics and the advisory board to the National Academy for Mathematical Sciences in the UK.