Smart Data Sandbox

Whether you’re a developer, entrepreneur, researcher, or simply have a passion for driving positive change, the sandbox can provide the resources and environment to transform your idea into a working prototype of a Smart Data solution – though you will need someone on your team with technical skills to achieve this. Explore the technical details to learn more.

It is difficult for innovators to access and develop solutions using real data about people and businesses, in particular data from the same individuals linked across different sectors. The sandbox synthetic data is generated from Agent Based Simulation, providing a safe, ethical and legal way to provide such data to support development of innovative Smart Data solutions.

The sandbox provides access to a curated collection of datasets relevant to a range of real world problems, informed by the Smart Data Discovery Challenge that concluded in March 2024 and developed in consultation with the Smart Data Challenge Advisory Group.

The synthetic data in the sandbox is provided by Smart Data Foundry, an industry leader in synthetic data whose products have been successfully deployed in complex use cases, such as training machine learning models to detect fraud in finance systems.

Here’s what you can expect:

• Onboarding and familiarisation: You’ll be given an introduction to the platform, shown how to log on, how to access the data and tools, and where to find guidance and resources.
• Ongoing technical support: You’ll be part of a dedicated slack channel giving you access to data and technical support from Smart Data Foundry and Nayaone. You’ll also have the opportunity to attend drop-in support clinics where you can pick the brains of the data and sandbox builders.
• Exploration and data preparation: Dive into the data, understand its structure, clean and prepare it for processing, bring in your own data, models or code, combine datasets, explore and analyse, unlock new insights, test hypotheses.
• Hands-on innovation: Develop your smart data idea, either directly in the sandbox with the provided tools, or on your own platform using the APIs to integrate the synthetic consumer and business data with new services or applications. 
• Prototyping: The focus is on building practical solutions, not just theoretical concepts. Iterate and refine your approach, to build a functional prototype of your solution, web app, tool or service – it might not be glossy or polished, but it will show how consumers and small businesses can benefit from sharing their data in smart ways. 
• Showcase your innovations: The prototypes are the core of your Challenge Prize submission, making your idea more accessible to a non-technical audience. Present your work, explaining your approach, and the potential impacts to demonstrate the transformative potential of your ideas to the judging panel.