Stefaan Verhulst
Article by Christoph Koettl: “For two decades, satellite imagery has been my window into the unreachable.
I’ve used it to expose North Korean oil smuggling and to uncover a mass grave in Burundi. In 2022, the Visual Investigations team at The New York Times used images to rebut Russian claims that the killing of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, occurred after their soldiers had left. And in the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, these eyes in the sky have been similarly revealing.
I surveyed the damage in Tehran from space shortly after Israeli strikes hit the compound of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killing him. Our team tracked the damage that Iranian attacks wrought on regional U.S. bases. An image we captured through a satellite company even helped to determine U.S. responsibility for the strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran, that killed at least 150 people, many of them children. And just last month, we showed how the United States bombed what appeared to be a drinking-water facility, a strike that if done deliberately could constitute a war crime under international law.
We reported some of these stories despite five U.S. satellite providers cutting off access to high-resolution images of Iran and surrounding countries shortly after the war began. The main reason for these restrictions is that Iran might use the imagery to target U.S. troops. This blackout applies to customers who regularly publish satellite imagery, such as news outlets and think tanks…(More)”.
Report by DemNext: “Democracy is under strain, and one of the most promising responses to that strain is the growing global movement around deliberative assemblies: citizens’ assemblies, citizens’ juries, and related forums that bring randomly selected, broadly representative groups of people together to weigh evidence, listen to one another, and make shared decisions on complex public issues. Over 1,000 such processes have now been run worldwide, and a growing body of evidence suggests they depolarise opinion, generate well-reasoned recommendations, build trust, and reconnect people to political life.
However, these processes are also resource-intensive, slow, and hard to scale, and have thus become a site of intense interest for AI integration. The pitch from many technologists, practitioners, and funders is consistent: AI can make deliberation cheaper, faster, more accessible, and more scalable.
In this paper, we argue that AI, when designed with care, can indeed play a powerful role in strengthening deliberation. But the very efficiencies that make AI attractive also risk undermining what deliberation is for in the first place. Whether AI strengthens or weakens deliberation or strengthens is not predetermined, however; it is a matter of design.
Our starting point is that deliberative assemblies are not decision-making machines whose sole value lies in the recommendation they produce. They are also spaces in which participants exercise and develop the civic capacities that democratic life depends upon. If we automate too much, we may end up with smoother processes that hollow out the productive friction that makes them valuable, while simultaneously reducing people’s ability to participate in democratic life.
These considerations are relevant to all places where deliberation takes place – workplaces, schools and universities, museums, financial institutions, corporations and cooperatives, membership-based associations, and other organisations.
We make three contributions.
First, we argue that one of the most important and most overlooked virtues of deliberative assemblies is that they build deliberative muscles: the cognitive, dispositional, and relational capacities that citizens need to do the work of democracy together. We use the language of muscle deliberately. A muscle is not an idea one holds; it is a capacity one maintains through practice, weakens when unused, and improves when trained.
Second, we offer a typology of seven deliberative muscles: self-reflection (examining one’s own values and beliefs), reasoning (engaging critically with evidence and expertise), dialogue (listening attentively, responding, and giving reasons), vulnerability (sharing feelings and reflections, tolerating conflict, feeling the weight of others’ experiences), collaboration (moving from individual reasoning to shared judgement), imagination (envisioning futures and alternatives concretely enough to deliberate about them), and facilitation (guiding small-group deliberation productively and inclusively)…(More)”.
Essay by Rose Horowitch: “Twenty-three hundred years ago, the legend goes, King Ptolemy I of Egypt asked his court adviser to assemble a comprehensive collection of the world’s written works. Ptolemy, who had served under Alexander the Great, envisioned a library that would safeguard the sum total of humanity’s knowledge. His successors inherited this mandate. Royal forces ransacked every ship that arrived at Alexandria, searching for scrolls. These were stored at the Mouseion, a shrine to the Muses modeled after Aristotle’s Lyceum. Aristotle’s own book collection was said to be among the holdings.
Much of the history of the Library of Alexandria has been lost. But we know that it was the site of many of the premodern world’s greatest intellectual achievements. The king paid scholars to live and work in the library, and the collection was available to anyone “eager to study, an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom,” a visiting Greek rhetorician wrote. It was at the library that Eratosthenes calculated Earth’s circumference and Zenodotus edited the earliest manuscripts of Homer’s epics. Euclid, who wrote the Elements of geometry, may have studied there as well.
This run of scholarship would not last. By 400 C.E., the library had disappeared. Many scholars regard its destruction as the greatest loss of knowledge in history and the beginning of the Dark Ages. Historians have spent centuries parsing fragments of papyrus in an effort to understand what went wrong.
Traditionally, the answer was believed to be war. During the Siege of Alexandria, in 48 B.C.E., Julius Caesar started a fire that incinerated at least 40,000 scrolls. The library survived in diminished form until the fourth century C.E., when followers of the archbishop of Alexandria sacked the pagan temple that housed the remaining manuscripts. But contemporary historians tend to dismiss the importance of these dramatic incidents in favor of a more mundane cause of death: negligence.
Maintaining the collection was an enormous expense. Humidity, mice, and insects slowly ate away at the papyrus scrolls. Scribes had to continually copy old texts before they deteriorated and became illegible. Eventually, the challenges of maintaining the library became greater than the will to preserve it. “It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages,” the classics scholar Roger Bagnall has written. The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived.
Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet…(More)”.
Book edited by Sheila L. Macrine, Jennifer M. B. Fugate, Arsen Abdulali and Josie Hughes: “Intelligence research is undergoing a radical transformation, moving beyond the traditional focus on brains and code to increasingly recognize the role of embodiment, as well as our understanding of goal-directed behavior across different scales and substrates. In this edited collection, experts across fields including philosophy, phenomenology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, robotics, AI, bio-inspired design, biology, and bioengineering initiate transdisciplinary dialogues and facilitate the sharing of insights on embodiment, enabling a new understanding of embodied intelligence and how intelligence manifests across diverse substrates.
By embracing a broad definition of embodied intelligence, the contributors transcend the traditional divide between the biological and the artificial, recognizing the potential for intelligence to emerge in unexpected forms. This perspective challenges us to reconsider our assumptions about the nature of intelligence and to appreciate the remarkable diversity of intelligent behavior in the world around us. This broadened concept holds immense promise to profoundly reshape our understanding of ourselves, the technologies we create, and the very nature of intelligence itself…(More)”.
Tool developed by the Center for Collective Learning (CCL): “Explore academic impact – without flattening it into a rank.
Rankless visualizes the global flow of ideas across universities, journals, scholars, and countries – revealing who influences whom, where knowledge travels, and which topics bind the world together…
We need to understand more and rank less.
Rankings flatten complexity into a single number. Rankless restores the context: domain, geography, collaboration, and time. Use it to make better-informed decisions – whether you’re a student, researcher, policymaker, or funder.
Rankless is an experimental data visualization project that allows users to explore the impact of thousands of universities. It is built on the idea that universities generate impact that is specific to a geography and to certain topics, and that rankings obscure that impact by reducing it to a single dimension. By transcending rankings, we highlight a university’s multidimensional impact by showing you who they work with and who cites them. To understand more, sometimes, we need to rank less…(More)”.
Essay by Akash Wadhwani: “On the morning of February 6, 2023, an earthquake killed more than fifty thousand people in Türkiye and Syria. I spent a week inside the edit history of the world’s free map, reading what the internet did that morning. I haven’t stopped thinking about it…
Why would a city of half a million people be missing from the map? That sounded impossible to me in 2023, so I went and looked it up, and the answer turns out to be money, twice.
Commercial maps are built where the money is. Google and Apple map roads because cars navigate them, and they map shops because businesses pay to be found. That works beautifully in London or Los Angeles. In a working-class Turkish city, and in the Syrian towns across the border, there is no ad revenue in knowing where each house stands, so no company ever paid to find out. The satellites photograph everything, but a photograph is not a map. Someone still has to look at the pixels and say: this shape is a building, this line is the road that reaches it.
The second reason surprised me more. Even where a commercial map looks complete, rescue teams mostly cannot use it. They can’t download it onto a GPS unit and carry it into a zone where the internet is down. They can’t count its buildings to estimate how many people might be trapped in a district. The data belongs to the company, and the license says no. OpenStreetMap is the exception, and it is the exception on purpose: it is the Wikipedia of maps, free for anyone to copy, carry, and analyse. When things go wrong, it is the map that gets used. It just has to be drawn first, by someone.
That morning, rescue teams were already in the air. They were flying toward a city the free map could not yet describe.
You cannot search rubble you don’t know exists…(More)”.
Essay anthology by the Bennett School of Public Policy : “…brings together visionary thinkers, policymakers, and experts to challenge the narrative of AI as a zero-sum competition.
The idea that AI is an arms race between the US and China has taken hold of contemporary geopolitics. But is it the right framing?
Drawing on diverse perspectives from diplomacy, philanthropy, civil rights, national security and economics, the essays in this anthology explore the limitations of the arms race metaphor and ask key questions about its origins and influence. While each author offers a unique viewpoint from their own expertise, taken together their collective insights reveal the shortcomings of this framework as a lens for interpreting the complex geopolitical realities of AI and reveal alternative ways of understanding AI’s geopolitical influence and potential…(More)”.
Paper by Daniel Berliner: “Participatory institutions often aim to yield information useful to policymakers, whether about public preferences, problems, or solutions. But how can large numbers of public contributions be processed into interpretable and actionable information outputs? As theorists and practitioners increasingly call for participatory institutions to operate at larger scales, often enabled by new technologies, this challenge only becomes more important. This article reviews recent work on participatory institutions in order to develop several insights: (a) that there are different types of information that policymakers may aim to learn and that are relevant to different policy stages; (b) that information must be effectively processed in order to be interpretable and actionable for policymakers; (c) that there are different types of information processing, depending on the specificity and novelty of the information outputs that policymakers aim to learn; and (d) that there are different ways in which this processing can be delegated, whether to experts, ordinary people, or automated algorithms. Better recognizing these differences will help both researchers and practitioners better understand the potential and the limitations of participatory institutions in different settings and with different goals…(More)”.
Article by Heather Pearson: “A UK survey published in January found that only 40% of people think that science information they hear is “generally true”. Another global poll showed that 70% of people believe at least one false or unproven claim, such as that the risks of childhood vaccines outweigh the benefits.
In the United States, President Donald Trump and his administration are using the idea that science is not trustworthy as one reason to cut research budgets, reject evidence-based medical advice and exert unprecedented political control over research. “Over the last 5 years, confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public has fallen significantly,” said Trump in an executive order last year.
Even the Vatican is voicing concern. This September, a meeting at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences will examine how “the crisis of trust in science has become a pressing issue”.
But is trust in science really that weak? Researchers studying this have reached some surprising conclusions. From a global perspective, public trust in science and scientists is high, they say. One of the largest studies, which surveyed nearly 72,000 people across 68 countries in 2022–23, reported a “moderately high” average trust score of 3.6 out of 5. “The idea that there’s a generalized, pervasive lack of trust in science and experts is just completely unfounded in my mind,” says David Bersoff, head of research at the Edelman Trust Institute, a think tank in New York City…(More)”
Press Release by Google Research: “Approximately 500,000 deaths every year are attributed to extreme heat, a crisis intensified by the urban heat island effect, which causes metropolitan areas to warm at double the worldwide average. Earlier this month, record-breaking heat waves across Western Europe pushed temperatures past 40°C (104°F). The prevalence of heat-trapping materials, like dark pavements and roofs, combined with a lack of vegetation, largely drives this localized warming. Heat mitigation measures are critical to reducing this toll, and cool roofs offer a highly cost-effective solution. By increasing rooftop reflectivity (albedo), we can significantly reduce the amount of solar energy absorbed by buildings, ultimately lowering local surface temperatures and protecting vulnerable communities.
To address this, Google Research is building AI-driven tools to help lower city temperatures and keep communities safe. By applying AI to high-resolution satellite and aerial imagery, our Heat Resilience tools help cities quantify the impact of targeted cooling interventions. In 2024, we piloted this approach with 14 cities, providing them with rooftop reflectivity data to identify highly vulnerable neighborhoods and determine where cool roofs would yield the greatest temperature reductions. This data guided critical decisions across several cities, resulting in initiatives such as cool roof ordinances and adaptation plans.
Now, we are scaling this impact. In “Estimating high-resolution albedo for urban applications“, published in Nature Communications, we detail our methodology for mapping building-level reflectivity across diverse urban environments. This research bridges the gap between general climate observations and actionable, building-level data. We are also releasing an expanded albedo dataset covering over 50 global cities to empower urban planners worldwide to prioritize cool-roof interventions. This dataset is open and accessible through our new, high-resolution Heat Resilience Earth Engine App…(More)”.