Data Governance
As required by Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (Evidence Act), EPA assigned a Chief Data Officer. The EPA CDO implements Title 2 of the Evidence Act, formally titled - The OPEN Government Data Act. The main provisions of Title 2 include creating a data governance body, improving data governance and data management practices, and making data that EPA manages publicly available in open electronic formats wherever necessary and feasible.
Advisory Councils
EPA’s CDO established and leads a Data Governance Advisory Council, or DGAC, to support data governance projects within EPA. The Federal Data Strategy Action Plan and the Evidence Act define data governance goals for the DGAC.
EPA’s Chief Information Officer has a Strategic Advisory Council. The council provides advice on EPA’s IT/IM strategic direction to optimize support for the Agency’s mission and business needs. Read the Chief Information Officer Strategic Advisory Council Charter (pdf) to discover the background, purpose, scope and more related to the CIO SAC.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments. AI tools can collect and process large amounts of data that may contain sensitive information, such as financial, confidential business and personally Identifiable Information.
AI also enables computers to perform a variety of functions, including:
- the ability to see, understand, and translate spoken and written language,
- analyze data, and
- make recommendations.
Given the breadth of potential inputs into AI systems strong governance is required to maintain security and ethical use. In support of this, EPA established a subcommittee of the DGAC, dedicated to building necessary means to meet the agency requirements for the use of AI. The subcommittee is made up of key subject matter experts from across the agency. It is co-chaired by the EPA Responsible AI Official.
One of the outputs of the AI subcommittee includes:
- Collecting and updating EPA's Artificial Intelligence Use Case Inventory for the public. This inventory is also shared with other federal agency AI use cases on AI.gov.