To explore, promote and support a high integrity national digital future
About
Est. July 2021
Vision
Our vision is to create a high veracity digital nation that reflects and amplifies a desired quality of life here in Aotearoa New Zealand
Purpose
Veracity Lab facilitates deep and inclusive conversations across all areas of society about our digital future, and provides capabilities to incubate and undertake research and development work at the cutting edge of values-based and human-centered technology.
Partnership model
Veracity Lab will provide the objective and safe environment to facilitate partnerships with the following:
Indigenous
Industry
Research
Education
Developer
Government
People
Leadership
Matthias Galster: Co-director Veracity Lab and Science Lead, Associate Professor, University of Canterbury
Māui Hudson: Co-director Veracity Lab, Associate Professor, University of Waikato
Brendan Hoare: Associate Director Veracity Lab, Director Buy Pure New Zealand
Research Team
Kelly Blincoe: Dr, University of Auckland
Tim Miller: Dr, Victoria University of Wellington
Steve Reeves: Professor, University of Waikato
Jens Dietrich: Associate Professor, Victoria University of Wellington
David Eyers: Associate Professor, University of Otago
Kevin Shedlock: Victoria University of Wellington
Stephen Cranefield: Professor, University of Otago
Operational and Management
Maree Kibblewhite: Senior Administrator, Victoria University of Wellington
Advisory Board
Karyne Rogers: Senior Scientist at GNS Science
James Noble: Director, Creative Research and Programming
Ben Tairea: Managing Director and Kaiwhakahaere, CEO of Āhau
Richman Wee: Academic Research Manager for the New Zealand Law Foundation (NZLF), University of Waikato
Supported by
Case Studies
Indigenous data
Local Contexts (www.localcontexts.org) supports the application of Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels and Biocultural (BC) Labels to datasets to ensure information relating to provenance and cultural authority is maintained in the digital records associated with mātauranga and taonga. Maintaining the integrity and trustworthiness of this metadata in Te Ao Matihiko (Digital World) is a key challenge which the Veracity Lab is helping to address.
Natural products
We will be exploring, with the organic community in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally, how we can take a 40-year old internationally recognised environmental standard process from analogue to digital using veracity. This is of particular interest to Aotearoa New Zealand as the Government considers legislation around regulating organic standards through the Organic Products and Production Bill currently before the House.
Contestable AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will undoubtedly enter and influence many more areas of people’s daily lives. From loan and insurance claim decisions to autonomous machines in farming, AI is already in use in many areas today. An important question is, how do humans intervene when they disagree with or doubt the actions that are triggered by AI? How do we make sure actions of AI are reliably documented and understandable? Who is accountable? Veracity Lab is looking at these questions from the perspective of the national digital infrastructure needed to ensure humans can live well alongside an ever increasing amount of AI in their environment.
Resources
Research Briefs
Our 1-page research briefs provide an overview of current research relating to the Veracity Spearhead Research Project.
Watch this space for the publication of our first research brief coming soon ….
13 April 2023 Veracity Spearhead: Organic Case Study (slides) Exploring Trust, Truthfulness and Authenticity within New Zealand’s Organics Supply Chain. Judith Perera (University of Auckland) (Veracity Research Aim 3).
12 April 2023 Organics Case Study: Use Case Briefs Judith Perera (University of Auckland) and Camila Costa Silva (University of Canterbury) (Veracity Research Aim 3).
4 April 2023 Kaitiakitanga with Ahau (poster) Fintan Mountfort, University of Waikato Summer Student (Veracity Research Aim 1).
4 April 2023 Poster resulting from work with Āhau. Mahaki Leach, University of Waikato Summer Student (Veracity Research Aim 1).
13 February 2023 Towards Understanding Provenance in Industry Matthias Galster, University of Canterbury and Jens Dietrich, Victoria University of Wellington (Veracity Research Aim 2).
24 January 2023 A Logic for Veracity Steve Reeves, University of Waikato (Veracity Research Aim 1).
21 June 2022 Veracity Logicseminar at CSIRO by Steve Reeves, University of Waikato (Veracity Research Aim 1).
Media
21 March 2023 Kevin Shedlock, (Victoria University of Wellington) was interviewed on national television about the world’s first integrated Māori keyboard. View the interview here.
8 February 2023 Kevin Shedlock, Victoria University of Wellington, gives an interview to Waatea News about trusted infrastructure, platforms and software when working with Māori and Māori data. Listen or download the audio here.
2 December 2022 Follow-up interview on Radio New Zealand with Markus Luczak-Roesch, Victoria University of Wellington, on Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and its effect on the Christchurch Call. The Panel (listen at 2.27 – 10.50).
28 November 2022 Interview on Radio New Zealand with Markus Luczak-Roesch, Victoria University of Wellington, on Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and its effect on the Christchurch Call. The Panel (listen at 4:10 – 11:26).
A proof-of-concept codebase that demonstrates interlinking hash codes created from digital artefacts. In this case the hash codes are computed over Prolog code and data cells that sit within a Jupyter notebook. The Hyperledger Iroha permissioned blockchain is used to provide replicated storage of the hash codes. This codebase has been containerised to facilitate ease of reproducibility. (Veracity Research Aim 4). https://github.com/veracitylab/SWIPL-Notebook-Blockchain-Filehashing
A provenance ontology based on the PROV-DM standard, and a schema to describe the mapping to program language specific execution events, including a reference implementation for Java. (Veracity Research Aim 2). https://github.com/veracitylab/approv
We follow an agile process of ideation, requirements analysis and specification between the Veracity Research Team and stakeholders who can join with the Veracity Lab in partnership at any time to bring in new high priority research and development challenges for a high veracity digital nation.
Wednesday 23 November 2022, 5 pm: Webinar – “Reverse engineering New Zealand’s organic supply chain – implications for digital”
In this webinar Veracity will be sharing our learning and insights to date on the opportunity of ensuring veracity in the worlds’ fastest growing multi-food sector.
Speakers: Matthias Galster (Science Lead and Associate Professor, University of Canterbury), Judith Perera (Research assistant on the Veracity project, PhD candidate University of Auckland), Richman Wee (Veracity Advisory Board member and Academic Research Manager, University of Waikato).
Wednesday 28 September 2022, 5 pm: Webinar – “Veracity Digital Identity – what is in the service of what?”
In this webinar thought leaders, researchers and practitioners share their insights into the veracity of digital identity.
Speakers: Stuart Hill (Emeritus Professor Social Ecology, University of Western Sydney, Australia) speaking on identity and sense of place, Ben Tairea (CEO Ahau, Advisor Veracity Lab, EC Digital Identity NZ) speaking on identity, trust and authority, Andrew Ecclestone (Victoria University of Wellington) speaking on provenance, freedom of information and open government process.
In this webinar the postdoc scholars working on the Veracity Research Project talk about their research and findings to date.
Speakers: Judith Perera (PhD candidate University of Auckland); Bailey Jewell (PhD candidate, Victoria University of Wellington); Hazel Darney (PhD candidate, Victoria University of Wellington).
Tuesday 28 June 2022, 1 pm: Webinar – “Non-fungible Tokens or NFTs: Practical, Legal and Regulatory Issues” A Veracity Lab + TeLENZ ‘Leading Minds’ webinar.
This webinar explores a number of introductory, practical, legal and regulatory issues related to NFTs.
Speakers: A/Prof Wayne Rumbles (TeLENZ Project Lead); James Cochrane (Partner, Stace Hammond); Binu Paul (Specialist Lead, Fintech @ Financial Markets Authority NZ); A/Prof David Eyers (University of Otago and Veracity Research Project member); A/Prof Alex Sims (Dept of Commercial Law, University of Auckland).
Tuesday 10 May 2022, 5 pm: Webinar – “Rules as Code” A Veracity Lab + TeLENZ ‘Leading Minds’ webinar.
In this webinar, researchers, policy makers and technologists will be discussing (1) the role of rules of code and related work undertaken in New Zealand and overseas; Potential for initiatives to be trialled in New Zealand, and (2) multi-disciplinary and cross-sectoral collaborations to explore specific use cases.
Speakers: Nadia Webster (Manager, Data & Insights, Wellington City Council & (2020—2021) Innovation Lead, Smart Council), Hamish Fraser ( Co-investigator, New Zealand Law Foundation-funded research on ‘Legislation as Code for NZ’ & Product Architect, Developer, Wellington City Council).
Wednesday 30 March 2022, 5 pm: Webinar – “Demystifying Blockchain”
In this webinar practitioners and researchers working in blockchain will discuss what (1) they may be useful for; (2) may be achieved equally or better using other technologies; and (3) what the principles embedded in blockchain technology actually are. Facilitated discussion will explore when and how blockchains may be of use, and when and why they may not.
Speakers: Robert O’Brien (Distributed Systems Software Architect, yümi), David Eyers (Associate Professor, University of Otago), Walter Langelaar (artist/academic in Media Design, Victoria University of Wellington), Chris Claridge (Chair, Trust Alliance New Zealand).
Tuesday 30 November 2021, 1 pm: Webinar – Discussion of our working paper “Digital Whenua, Sovereignty and Rights for Aotearoa”. Part of the Whāki Webinar Series.
This webinar outlined how Te Tiriti o Waitangi might inform the development of public digital infrastructure.
November 2-4, 2021: Webinar – Veracity Lab led a series of open discussions exploring how the Government’s ‘Digital Strategy for Aotearoa’ can trigger a positive repositioning of our digital future. Below are recordings from the webinars.
Contact
Contact us for information and potential collaboration
