What I'm going to do is speak for five minutes just to introduce the centre and what we do. Hopefully there'll be some things that you'll be interested and you'll ask more about it later. Perhaps then we can have a chat afterwards. But the primary reason for me to be here is to introduce that and then introduce Claire and Angelita, who speak in more detail about two pieces of work that we're doing.
So the Welcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities is one of nearly 20 centres that Wellcome Trust funded about three years ago. Most of the marine science and we wear the with the Ethics and Humanities Centre, and the Centre is essentially an umbrella that brings together for existing groups in Oxford.
You will have already heard in previous sessions from people that you heroes centre the other two, the other three groups, the Ethos Centre, which is the centre that that I direct in population health neuroscience in psychiatry department and then the Smart Harrisons Group in the History Faculty and the World Centre for Ethics. The humanities brings all of us together under one under one umbrella, a name.
We're located at this building and heading toward the Big Data Institute. And as you'll hear from Claire in a moment, we work closely together with scientists up there who are doing a whole range of things using AI, machine learning and so on. The aim of the welcome centre humanities is in the name. Really. One of the aims is to try to encourage working across the medical sciences division and the humanities divisions in Oxford to try and promote that kind of work.
So it works really well with with with with what you're aiming to achieve in terms of its content. So the intellectual aim of the centre is to look at how ethics and the humanities, the wider humanities need to respond if they can be adequate to the task of making sense of some important developments in technology and in society. So before we picked out to begin with what developments in data science, genomics, neuroscience and global connectedness, global health?
Clearly, those are all overlapping and they're not easily separable from each other. Well, one thing that is important to note is that in all of those areas, A.I. is playing an important role in a number of different ways. I won't say much about that now, but. So these are our priority areas. But the technologies and the the methods an artificial intelligence machine learning data science is cross-cutting across these. Why link with the with the with the humanities?
Well, in addition to these, these these developments presenting problems and challenges for the way in which we do our work as humanities scholars, they also say humanities scholars concerned with ethics. They also present a number of really interesting questions for the wider humanities. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live a valuable and flourishing life as a human? What does it mean to live well together with others? All of these need.
All of these developments raise new and interesting ways of thinking about those problems. So will we once friends got a philosophy? But together with other disciplines, history, for example, literature and so on, what I want to do in the next few is now essentially just mark out some areas of work. I won't say much about them. Just to give you a sense of the areas we're working on, we very much welcome any, you know, if you'd like to have conversations about these and there's a lot going on.
So I've just picked some high level ones. So one of the areas where very interesting is issues relating to the uses of data science and in relation to images, particularly images and health care. But although you identify this as a session, it's about health care. Actually, one of the things that's important, increasingly important in data science course is that you don't say you can't separate out these domains as easily as you perhaps used to be able to say education.
A whole range of other forms of data are going to be relevant to health and vice versa. So ethics and imaging data, and Claire will tell you more about that area in a big area of interest for us, the uses of data in global health surveillance and so on. And we've got a number of people who are in this room who are working on those topics, and we love to talk to you later. A new area that we're interested in is the impact of data science, big data on climate.
So how we how we think about the potential ethical and societal tensions between an interest in the uses of big data and their impact on the climate? And then in then more specifically in the context of health care issues related to data genomics and privacy in the healthcare setting.
And I think people say something about those. And then finally, a group which link with more with the psychiatry department, the uses of data, big data in mental health and the neuroscience as a nice overlap between the work of that group in in health care, but also with our global health workforce. And there's a lot of international work that's in that group. So literally just a quick set of headings for you to know roughly what we're interested in.
What I really want to focus on is getting you to hear some detail about these two talks. You get in touch, we're really interested in collaborating with all of you.