Stefaan Verhulst
Report by Hannah Chafetz, Adam Zable, Sara Marcucci, Christopher Rosselot, and Stefaan Verhulst: “Most people now generate large amounts of digital data through their everyday activities and interactions – whether commuting, shopping, communicating or searching for things online. These social data sources are increasingly being used in health and wellbeing research around the world. Yet, questions remain around:
- the unique value of social data for health and wellbeing research
- how social data can be integrated into cross-disciplinary health research programs
- how to make social data more accessible to health researchers
This landscape review, commissioned by Wellcome and produced by The GovLab, aims to answer these questions by mapping how social data has been used in health and wellbeing research around the world. This review mainly focuses on the United Kingdom (UK) and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This report examines the opportunities and current challenges in this space, to identify areas where greater investment and coordination are needed.
This review was guided by an international advisory board and conducted using several methods including a literature review of over 290 studies, group discussions (referred to as “studios” in the report), interviews and a peer review with 23 experts.
The goal of this report is to raise the profile of social data for health and to inform funders, researchers and practitioners on how to connect new initiatives, reduce duplication and integrate social data more effectively into health research ecosystems worldwide…(More)”.
Article by Li Hongyi: “A common problem in innovation programs is that we do not know what we are innovating for. Are we trying to reduce costs? Improve usability? Save time? Or are we just trying to do something “new”? Without a clear goal your only reference point is what you are already doing. Then your only source of feedback is whether anyone is unhappy about change: and someone always is. So you get stuck, wanting to innovate but not able to move.
Conversely, when you have a clear goal you can be very flexible about how to get there. In the private sector, it might be profit. In F1, it is lap time. In AI, it is quality benchmark scores. Once you know what you are trying to achieve, you can stop obsessing over how you achieve it. Good metrics tell you what to care about, but also what not to care about.
Practically, even when a public sector team manages to overcome the bureaucracy, technical challenges, and operations to build something really good and present it to leadership, it often gets shot down with a simple “That’s not how we do things”. This is not really anyone’s fault. It is hard to make something new happen when your job is to make sure nothing bad ever happens…(More)”.
Article by Zoë Brammer, Ankur Vora, Anine Andresen and Shahar Avin: “The success of AI governance efforts will largely rest on foresight, or the ability of AI labs, policymakers and others to identify, assess and prepare for divergent AI scenarios. Traditional governance tools like policy papers, roundtables, or government RFIs have their place, but are often too slow or vague for a technology as fast-advancing, general-purpose, and uncertain as AI. Data-driven forecasts and predictions, such as those developed by Epoch AI and Metaculus, and vivid scenarios such as those painted by AI 2027, are one component of what is needed. Still, even these methods don’t force participants to grapple with the messiness of human decision-making in such scenarios.
Why games? Why science?
In Art of Wargaming, Peter Perla tells us that strategic wargames began in earnest in the early 19th century, when Baron von Reisswitz and his son developed a tabletop exercise to teach the Prussian General Staff about military strategy in dynamic, uncertain environments. Today, ‘serious games’ remain best known in military and security domains, but they are used everywhere from education to business strategy.
In recent years, Technology Strategy Roleplay, a charity organisation, has pioneered the application of serious games to AI governance. TSR’s Intelligence Rising game simulates the paths by which AI capabilities and risks might take shape, and invites decision-makers to role-play the incentives, tensions and trade-offs that result. To date, more than 250 participants from governments, tech firms, think tanks and beyond have taken part.
Building on this example, we at Google DeepMind wanted to co-design a game to explore how AI may affect science and society. Why? As we outlined in a past essay, we believe that the application of AI to science could be its most consequential. As a domain, science also aligns nicely with the five criteria that successful games require, as outlined in a past paper by TSR’s Shahar Avin and colleagues:
- Many actors must work together: Scientific progress rests on the interplay between policymakers, funders, academic researchers, corporate labs, and others. Their varying incentives, timelines, and ethical frameworks naturally lead to tensions that games are well-placed to explore…(More)”.
Book by Soroush Saghafian: “Improving public policies, creating the next generation of AI systems, reducing crime, making hospitals more efficient, addressing climate change, controlling pandemics, and reducing disruption in supply chains are all problems where big picture ideas from analytics science have had large-scale impact. What are those ideas? Who came up with them? Will insights from analytics science help solve even more daunting societal challenges? This book takes readers on an engaging tour of the evolution of analytics science and how it brought together ideas and tools from many different fields – AI, machine learning, data science, OR, optimization, statistics, economics, and more – to make the world a better place. Using these ideas and tools, big picture insights emerge from simplified settings that get at the essence of a problem, leading to superior approaches to complex societal issues. A fascinating read for anyone interested in how problems can be solved by leveraging analytics…(More)”.
OECD Report: “Countries count AI compute infrastructure as a strategic asset without systematically tracking its distribution, availability and access. A new OECD Working Paper presents a methodology to help fill this gap by tracking and estimating the availability and global physical distribution of public cloud compute for AI.
Compute infrastructure is a foundational input for AI development and deployment, alongside data and algorithms. “AI compute” refers to the specialised hardware and software stacks required to train and run AI models. But as AI systems become more complex, their need for AI compute grows exponentially.
The OECD collaborated with researchers from Oxford University Innovation on this new Working Paper to help operationalise a data collection framework outlined in an earlier OECD paper, A blueprint for building national compute capacity for artificial intelligence…
Housed in data centres, AI compute comprises clusters of specialised semiconductors, or chips, known as AI accelerators. For the most part, three types of providers operate these clusters: government-funded computing facilities, private compute clusters, and public cloud providers (Figure 1).
Public cloud AI compute refers to on-demand services from commercial providers, available to the general public.
Figure 1. Different types of AI compute and focus of this analysis
This paper focuses on public cloud AI compute, which is particularly relevant for policymakers because:
- It is accessible to a wide range of actors, including SMEs, academic institutions, and public agencies.
- It plays a central role in the development and deployment of the generative AI systems quickly diffusing into economies and societies.
- It is more transparent and measurable than private compute clusters or government-funded facilities, which often lack publicly available data…(More)”.
Report and Framework by UNDP: “…to help ensure data exchange systems reflect core governance principles and universal safeguards. The framework enables countries to assess how effectively their data exchange systems support inclusive public service delivery, identify practical steps to enable efficient and representative data sharing, mitigate risks of misuse, and function as digital public goods. Through the framework, UNDP aims to put integrity and public trust at the core of unlocking the full potential of data as a driver of equitable, efficient, secure and rights-based data exchange systems…(More)”
Explore the Governance Assessment Framework for Data Exchange Systems here.
About: “CityMetrics is an online data platform to explore indicators and geospatial datasets related to the urban environment of many cities with which WRI works, including Cities4Forests ,UrbanShift and WRI Ross Center’s Deep Dive Cities Initiative. A previous iteration of CityMetrics was known as Cities Indicators. CityMetrics is in open beta phase and we welcome all feedback and request for improvements and bug fixes….
Indicators are organized into seven themes. The menus on the left side of the screen allow users to select a city of interest, indicator themes and a specific indicator.
Indicator results can be viewed at the city scale—either for the political jurisdiction or the urban area—as summary value in comparison to the other cities in the selected city groups. Results can also be reviewed at the sub-city scale as a table, chart and, for many indicators, a map. All metrics for a particular city can also be reviewed in the City Overview. These views can be navigated between using the menu on the right side of the main window. Geospatial and tabular versions of the data in each view can be downloaded for offline use. Details about each indicator and the methods behind it are available by clicking on the “Information” icon next to the indicator description. Additional information on this project, the general methods used, and the methods and limitations of specific indicators is available in the associated WRI Technical Note…(More)”.
Blog by Mayara Soares Faria, Ricardo Poppi and Carla de Paiva Bezerra: “We have heard it before and will likely hear it again: democracy is facing serious challenges. Around the world, levels of trust in governments and institutions are low. To overcome this, one of the most telling findings, highlighted in the latest OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust, is that people trust governments more when they feel their voices are genuinely heard.
Participation, therefore, has become a key ingredient for strengthening democracy and rebuilding trust. However, participation on its own does not guarantee trust. On the contrary, poorly designed processes can backfire, creating frustration and enhancing mistrust. Meaningful participation requires careful design, transparency, and a real link between what citizens ask for and what governments do.
It was to address this challenge that Brazil placed social participation at the heart of the government’s agenda. Within the General Secretariat of the Presidency, the National Secretariat of Social Participation was entrusted with a bold mission: to make policymaking more inclusive, reflective of the country’s regional and social diversity, and more effective by grounding it in the reality of each territory. To achieve this, a federal strategy of social participation was designed to foster dialogue between civil society and government, reduce barriers to participation and empower citizens. This required a concerted effort to rebuild the participatory structures that had been dismantled in previous years..(More)”.
Article by Jacob Mchangama: “…The Trump administration has moved with startling speed from trumpeting free speech to seeking to criminalize it. At first glance, that might seem to vindicate the arguments in the historian Fara Dabhoiwala’s new book, What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea. Dabhoiwala believes that the modern obsession with free speech—particularly the American belief that almost any restriction on it threatens democracy—has blinded its defenders to how often that right is invoked cynically in pursuit of antidemocratic ends. In his view, the right to free speech has most often been wielded as “a weaponized mantra” by people motivated by “greed, technological change and political expediency” rather than as a principle invoked sincerely to restrain tyranny.
Although Dabhoiwala acknowledges that pre-Enlightenment peoples such as the Athenians valued forms of freedom of expression, his main story begins in the eighteenth century. In that era, he writes, the idea that freedom of speech was necessary for human flourishing went viral across Europe and the United States, despite the fact that the theorists who made the argument often did so “for personal gain, to silence others, to sow dissension or to subvert the truth.” A robust and civil-libertarian interpretation of it became entrenched in twentieth-century American culture and legal doctrine, but Dabhoiwala contends that modern First Amendment jurisprudence undermined the very democratic values it was supposed to safeguard. Rather than fulfilling its promise as an “antidote to misinformation and falsehood,” he writes, the American approach to free speech “often amplifies it.”…
Today’s crisis of free speech in America is not the legacy of John Stuart Mill or First Amendment fetishism. It has arisen because too many Americans have lost their faith in free-speech exceptionalism—at the very moment when the First Amendment remains the strongest constitutional barrier to Trump’s censorious agenda. Yet the First Amendment’s text alone cannot guarantee robust debate. Time and again, unpopular and persecuted groups—political, racial, and religious—have fought to strengthen its practical force. Americans must work again to secure that inheritance…(More)”.
Blog by EuroCities: “Digitalisation has made it easier than ever to share information. And just as easy, to spread falsehoods. Cities are now facing the consequences as disinformation undermines public trust.
Local governments are often the first to feel the impact of misinformation, from confusion over public health advice to growing scepticism toward official information online. But as the level of government closest to citizens, and the one they trust the most according to the 2024 OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions, cities are also in a strong position to respond. Across Europe, they are finding practical ways to strengthen transparency, improve communication, and help citizens navigate the digital world with confidence.
The trust crisis
False information spreads quickly through social media and online platforms. It fuels polarisation and confusion, and makes people question not only what is true, but who to trust. For local governments, this has a direct impact: if citizens lose confidence in their city’s information, services or institutions, democracy itself becomes weaker.
“Trust is fragile and being tested every day by the spread of misinformation,” said Sophie Woodville, Digital Programme Manager at Bordeaux Métropole. “We need to protect and strengthen that trust by rethinking how we deliver services, engage with citizens and build ecosystems that are transparent, inclusive and resilient.”
Cities’ proximity to citizens allows them to respond faster than national governments and to adapt messages to local realities and communities…
City representatives shared how misinformation takes shape at the local level.
In Ghent, false rumours during the Covid pandemic, from vaccine myths to confusion about lockdown rules , spread through neighbourhood networks and community groups. The city responded with clear, multilingual messages and direct outreach through schools, community influencers, and even printed flyers in eight languages.
“We chose not to attack the disinformation,” explained Mieke Hullebroeck, General Manager of the City of Ghent. “Instead, we built a communication strategy that was fair, transparent and clear, both internally to our staff and externally to our citizens. We made our messages as accessible as possible, using images and icons so that everyone could understand them.”
In Helsinki, misinformation has also taken new forms. “The amount of misinformation online multiplied during Covid, and we are still struggling with its effects,” said Jasmin Repo, Senior Advisor for Data Policy at the City of Helsinki. “Just recently, a deep fake video featuring a government official went viral. The quality of these fakes is improving so fast that it’s getting harder to know what is real. Combatting this requires not only digital skills, but critical thinking and understanding.”..(More)”.