On May 24, 2022, Athena Infonomics' Senior Consultant Bilal Afroz participated in a UK Evaluation Society (UKES) Conference session with members of Itad. The session, which sought to stimulate discussion around new ways that evaluators are using digital data, explored the implications, limitations, and ethical considerations of this form of data use.

Data-use methods discussed included: the application of satellite imagery to examine socio-economic outcomes for communities arising from mine-clearance programmes; the measurement of market sentiment by using machine-learning algorithms to analyse online articles and news sources; and the use of machine-learning to determine the effects of different starting conditions on early childhood development (ECD) outcomes.