Synthetic Data Guide

Progress

A draft of the Synthetic Data for National Statistical Organisations: A Starter Guide is now out for review by project members, until 8 November.

Next Steps

Consolidate the guide based on feedback after 8 November.

Undertake webinar on synthetic data back-to-back with the HLG meeting.

Present an overview of the guide at the UNECE-Eurostat Expert Meeting on Statistical Data Confidentiality in December.

Hackathon expected to take place in the new year.

Risks and Issues

Issue	Mitigation

Input Privacy-preserving Techniques

Progress

Agreed structure for a report to document the outputs of the IPPT project.

Drafts on the different chapters to review by the project members.

Setup a program for the webinar on 18th of November.

Draft plan for public consultation.

Two prototype use cases, has been jointly described, realized and tested. One use case is about a simulated environment to validate the concept of multi party privacy preserving Machine Learning (PPML) for both training and inference. The environment was a simulated multi organisational set-up with serveral NSO's gathering data from individuals (sensors) to predict their activities (time use and well-being surveys).

The second use case:

A national statistical office (NSO) measures the coverage of a data source from a 3rd party, when there is limited trust in an honest - but - curious setting.
a. The encrypted data is provided to the NSO and linked to the NSO data.
b. The measured coverage (point estimate, confidence interval) is provided to the 3rd party.

Next Steps

Webinar on IPPP on 18 November. Further details: Input Privacy-Preservation Project Webinar

Proposals for extension of the IPPT project for the HLG-Mos board.

Organize a public consultancy for a Secure Private Computing-as-a-service.

Finalize the project report

Risks and Issues

Issue	Mitigation

Image result for input privacy-preserving techniques

News from the Groups
Blue-skies Thinking	Identifying Topics/Opportunities	IN PROGRESS	Project proposals: Meta-Academy for the Modernization of Official Statistics Data Governance Framework Extension of IPP project (will be proposed by project team) StatsBot. Despite the fact that the HLG-MOS workshop in November 2020 expressed quite some support for continuing this project, it has been decided not to submit a new proposal at this stage. Activity proposals: - Digital Twins. Proposal available (BSTN) - Future of Work. Proposal upcoming (CapComm) - Interacting with Generation Y. Proposal available (CapComm) - Mobile Survey Data Collection for Climate Change. Not yet articulated - Nowcasting. Not yet articulated Community proposal: - Data Virtualisation. New community idea modelled loosely after ML community.
	Network Data	IN PROGRESS
	Covid-19 Hotspot Joint Biosecurity Centre Platform	IN PROGRESS
	User Research for Official Statistics	IN PROGRESS
	Rapid survey systems	IN PROGRESS
	From experimentation to implementation in official statistics	IN PROGRESS	A Project Proposal 'Meta-Academy for the Modernization of Official Statistics' has been prepared as a practical implementation. The purpose of the meta-academy is to raise the standards of virtual learning on topics necessary for the modernization of statistics but are missing or inconsistent from academic, commercial or in-house offerings. The meta-academy project sets out to create a benchmark to better map existing initiatives and offerings in order to better coordinate efforts, reduce duplication and fill in training gaps. This project will facilitate sharing of skills strategies, as well as catalogues of contents and pedagogical artefacts, and more generally good practices and standards in that space, so that scopes for reuse or co-creation in learning capabilities can be more easily and more systematically spotted and leveraged by all National Statistical Offices (NSOs).
	Microdata for understanding declining response rates	IN PROGRESS
	Facebook survey covid19 related symptoms and behaviour	IN PROGRESS
Capabilities and Communication	Future of work, future workplace and future skills	IN PROGRESS	Last meeting of the Task Team was on 20 October. Three toolkits for operating in a new blended environment in the NSO's are almost ready: Employer toolkit, Employee toolkit and Manager toolkit Toolkits raise questions for the organization to consider, to identify requirements for the resources to be available for employees, managers or for the employer, to ensure that all necessary structures are in place to promote blended working. Toolkits raise a lot of questions, but not necessarily provide all the answers. One of the gap areas is resources, training materials, organisational policies that will be collected and posted on the dedicated wiki page that will be set up by the UNECE. Design and look of the toolkits will be improved by communication team in CSO Ireland.
	Ethical leadership as part of culture evolution	IN PROGRESS	Last meeting of the Task Team was on 19 October. Preliminary analysis of the management ethics part of the questionnaire results were circulated. After the discussion it was proposed to add common vocabulary at the end of the report and a few tables on data ethics to the current draft of the report. Preliminary report of the analysis will be submitted to the Modernisation Workshop in November. Part on data ethics will be added to the activity proposal on Ethical Leadership for next year.
	Role of market research, digital marketing & communication strategies and tools in managing a crisis communication situation and in promoting public engagement in surveys	IN PROGRESS	During the last meeting on 29 September, team discussed what the final content of the document should be. The new version of the document before the meeting was shared: Branding V4 Team members will provide contributions to the different parts of the documents, and afterwards it will be circulated revised version of the document. Countries will also be asked to provide more examples for the Appendix of the document. Next meeting of the Task Team will be on 3 November.
	Strategic Communication Framework Publication	COMPLETED
	HRMT Workshop 2022	NOT STARTED
	Topic 6		placeholder
	Other	Three activity proposals for 2022 were submitted so far: The job of the future How NSO can reach young people Ethical Leadership One more proposal from the Future of Work team on populating wiki platform with resources for the toolkits will be also submitted.
Supporting Standards	Linking GSBPM and GSIM	IN PROGRESS	Work is progressing as scheduled. The remaining tasks will be completed by the end of the year as originally planned so the Task Team will finish everything: mapping and supporting documentation. The Task Team has provided a lot of highly valuable input to the community, especially the GSIM Task Team. As the mapping activity is very useful for our users to implement/use our ModernStats models faster/easier and also for the "integrated view", the group is on the opinion that moving forward with similar activites in the future could be very beneficial.
	Core Ontology for Official Statistics	IN PROGRESS	Work is progressing as scheduled. The expert review with proposed experts is currently ongoing with the deadline of the end of October. The COOS Task Team has delivered key outputs this year, most prominently an ontology specification, a governance document, a URI policy and OWL ontology. You can find the COOS main document at https://linked-statistics.github.io/COOS/coos.html. It includes links to the formal vocabulary, the governance document and the URI policy. Next phase of the work is already planned, with special focus on: more links to external models and vocabularies (DDI-CDI, SSN, DQV, etc.) integration of feedback from the expert reviews operationalization: the ontology will be loaded into an RDF database and toy client applications will be developed development of use cases
	Updating GSIM	IN PROGRESS	Work is progressing as scheduled. The Task Team has recently closed the issues associated with the Business Group (huge milestone!). Business Group is the most difficult part of GSIM and the discussions have opened the way ahead for a more consistent and harmonised GSIM v2 in the future. For next year, a full-scale GSIM revision is planned, in line with the user needs (more and more countries are using GSIM) and our new ModernStats Governace Guidance. In order to support our users better, the big issues with GSIM need to be solved quicky thus the current "soft update" will te transformed into a full-scale revision activity. This potential activity for 2022 will be very resource-intensive but it will have a huge impact on usabilty of GSIM and the interoperability of GSIM and the other ModernStats models.
	GSBPM Task	IN PROGRESS	Work is progressing as scheduled. The Task Team is active and has divided its work into 8 smaller groups for the 8 Phases of the GSBPM. The small groups are expected to have their first draft deliverables by the November meeting of the Task Team. The Task Team is expected to conclude its work in the first half of 2022.
	Application of GSBPM for Geospatial Information	COMPLETED
	CSPA	NOT STARTED	Discussion with potential chair ongoing. The CSPA work is expected to launch at the beginning of 2022, given that a chair is found.
	ModernStats World Workshop 2022	NOT STARTED	Not yet started.
	Other	The Supporting Standards Group prepared a generic revision policy (ModernStats Governance Guide) for the ModernStats models. Please find it here: https://bit.ly/2XOrdhe (the document is not publicly visible yet, but we plan to make it public by the end of this year). This new policy will guide - at least in part - the activity proposals for 2022 (especially the GSIM revision). For the UNECE Modernisation Workshop 2021, the activity proposals are currently being drafted and the presentation for the 20-minute time slot for the SSG is being prepared. Current potential activity proposals for 2022 from the Supporting Standards Group are: GSIM revision COOS Phase 2 GSBPM Tasks (finish in 2022) CSPA Linking activity to continue with different focus Data interoperability and data governance: there is an interest within the Supporting Standards Group (synergies with a potential project). The Supporting Standards Group will have its next meeting on 11th November, during the week before the workshop; to finalize everything for the main event.
Machine Learning 2021	WS1 – Pilot studies: from Idea to Valid solutions	IN PROGRESS	Please click here for a detailed update on the 2021 ML Community
	WS2 – From Valid Solution to Production	IN PROGRESS	.
	WS3 – Data Ethics and Governance	IN PROGRESS
	WS4 – On The Quality of Training Dat a	IN PROGRESS
	WS5 – On The Quality Framework for Statistical Algorithms	IN PROGRESS
	Other	.Please click here for a detailed update on the 2021 ML Community