The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee put out a public call for suggestions on subjects it should investigate and one of the three winning pitches came from Stephanie Mathisen, campaigns and policy officer at Sense about Science, who suggested an inquiry into transparency in algorithmic decision-making. In an explanatory editorial, Mathisen explains that algorithmic decision-making is poorly understood and yet widely acclaimed, which sets the stage for a lot of bad outcomes: governments and corporations are under real pressure to adopt these systems, but to yield to vendor insistence that the decisions the systems deliver are “objective” and also not comprehensible by humans .