Government Analysis Function > News > Announcing the winner of the first Analysis in Government People’s Choice Award
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Announcing the winner of the first Analysis in Government People’s Choice Award

The winner of the first Analysis in Government (AiG) People’s Choice Award has been announced this morning during a very special Celebration Day event.

All winners and runners-up from the main AiG Awards were eligible for the People’s Choice Award. Voting opened on Thursday 19 January 2023 and closed on Friday 24 February. In that time, 1500 votes were cast to decide the winner of the People’s Choice Award for this year.

Runners-up

In third place is the Aviation, Maritime and Borders Analysis team at the Department for Transport (DfT) for their project “Developing new short-term international demand estimates”.

In second place is the Demographic Statistics and Vital Events team at the National Records of Scotland (NRS) for their work on the recent “Who lives in Scotland?” documentary, which was broadcast on the BBC.

Congratulations to both teams! You can find out more about our runners-up on the People’s Choice Award webpage.

The winning entry

The winner with 34% of the votes is the Data Linking Team at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) for their work on “Splink”!

Two years ago, the MoJ introduced “Splink”. This is a Python library for data deduplication and linkage, or entity resolution, at scale. Since then, Splink has been used in government, the private sector, and academia to link and deduplicate huge datasets. Some of these datasets contain more than 100 million records.

Splink has been downloaded over 5 million times. It is also capable of running small linkages of up to almost 1 million records 100 times faster than earlier versions. This opens up the possibility of real-time linking in operational services. It is now being used widely in the courts and probation space, helping to:

  • develop a better understanding of offenders under electronic monitoring orders
  • create more accurate criminal histories to drive risk and predictive models

After working with academics and private sector big data consultancies, MoJ have now had 18 contributors to the Splink repository, with interest in using Splink to develop a Public Sector Solution Accelerator. This is a real sign of the value of this innovation to a global user community.

Watch our video to find out more about the beginning of the Splink project.

Congratulations to the winning team!

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