Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sandra Braman: “For over two decades, information policy-making for human society has been increasingly supplemented, supplanted, and/or superceded by machinic decision-making; over three decades since legal decision-making has been explicitly put in place to serve machinic rather than social systems; and over four decades since designers of the Internet took the position that they were serving non-human (machinic, or daemon) users in addition to humans. As the “Internet of Things” becomes more and more of a reality, these developments increasingly shape the nature of governance itself. This paper’s discussion of contemporary trends in these diverse modes of human-computer interaction at the system level — interactions between social systems and technological systems — introduces the changing nature of the law as a sociotechnical problem in itself. In such an environment, technological innovations are often also legal innovations, and legal developments require socio-technical analysis as well as social, legal, political, and cultural approaches.

Examples of areas in which sensors are already receiving legal attention are rife. A non-comprehensive listing includes privacy concerns beginning but not ending with those raised by sensors embedded in phones and geolocation devices, which are the most widely discussed and those of which the public is most aware. Sensor issues arise in environmental law, health law, marine law, intellectual property law, and as they are raised by new technologies in use for national security purposes that include those confidence- and security-building measures intended for peacekeeping. They are raised by liability issues for objects that range from cars to ovens. And sensor issues are at the core of concerns about “telemetric policing,” as that is coming into use not only in North America and Europe, but in societies such as that of Brazil as well.

Sensors are involved in every stage of legal processes, from identification of persons of interest to determination of judgments and consequences of judgments. Their use significantly alters the historically-developed distinction among types of decision-making meant to come into use at different stages of the process, raising new questions about when, and how, human decision-making needs to dominate and when, and how, technological innovation might need to be shaped by the needs of social rather than human systems.

This paper will focus on the legal dimensions of sensors used in ubiquitous embedded computing….(More)”

Tim O’Reilly at Radar: “It was big news recently that former Twitter executive Jason Goldman is joining the White House to head up a new office of Digital Strategy.

In his post, Jason asked for advice, posted anywhere, using the hashtag #socialcivics. I decided to do a writeup, as he asked, to share my ideas and to spark further conversation.

Briefly, Jason’s mission, on behalf of the White House, is to create new tools and processes for civic engagement, so that all of us are working more effectively together to build a nation that works for everyone, not just for the few with privileged access.

One of the key ideas I have to offer is something that years ago, in the context of open source software, I called “the architecture of participation.” I wrote:

[Open source software projects] that have built large development communities have done so because they have a modular architecture that allows easy participation by independent or loosely coordinated developers … The Web, however, took the idea of participation to a new level because it opened that participation not just to software developers, but to all users of the system.

Modularity depends on standards — formal or informal expectations about behavior and interfaces — and interoperability. To take an example that is not from software, consider that our most competitive, participatory industries all feature devices made from standardized parts. Whether you’re talking automobiles or personal computers or cell phones, a rich ecosystem of suppliers is possible only because we agreed that the threads on bolts and nuts should be a certain size, that electronic parts should be interchangeable, and that complex, custom assemblies should be kept to a minimum. Even large systems depend on small modular parts, but the fewer modular parts a system has, the more expensive it is, and generally, it can be modified and improved by far fewer people….(More)”

Paper by Henrik Serup Christensen, Maija Karjalainen and Laura Nurminen: “Crowdsourcing legislation gives ordinary citizens, rather than political and bureaucratic elites, the chance to cooperate to come up with innovative new policies. By increasing popular involvement, representative democracies hope to restock dwindling reserves of political legitimacy. However, it is still not clear how involvement in legislative decision making affects the attitudes of the participants. It is therefore of central concern to establish whether crowdsourcing can actually help restore political legitimacy by creating more positive attitudes toward the political system. This article contributes to this research agenda by examining the developments in attitudes among the users on the Finnish website Avoin Ministeriö (“Open Ministry”) which orchestrates crowdsourcing of legislation by providing online tools for deliberating ideas for citizens’ initiatives. The developments in attitudes are investigated with a two-stage survey of 421 respondents who answered questions concerning political and social attitudes, as well as political activities performed. The results suggest that while crowdsourcing legislation has so far not affected political legitimacy in a positive manner, it has the potential to do so….(More)”

Jessica Weiss at the International Center for Journalists: “An innovative tool developed to help people register to vote in Kenya is proving to be a valuable asset to voters across the African continent.

GotToVote was created in 2012 by two software developers under the guidance of ICFJ’s Knight International Journalism Fellow Justin Arenstein for use during Kenya’s general elections. In just 24 hours, the developers took voter registration information in a government PDF and turned it into a simple website with usable data that helped people locate the nearest voting center where they could register for elections. Kenyan media drove a large audience to the site, which resulted in a major boost in voter registrations.

Since then, GotToVote has helped people register to vote in Malawi and Zimbabwe. Now, it is being adapted for use in national elections in Ghana and Uganda in 2016.

Ugandan civic groups led by The African Freedom of Information Centre are planning to use it to help people register, to verify registrations and for SMS registration drives. They are also proposing new features—including digital applications to help citizens post issues of concern and compare political positions between parties and candidates so voters better understand the choices they are being offered.

In Ghana, GotToVote is helping citizens find their nearest registration center to make sure they are eligible to vote in that country’s 2016 national elections. The tool, which is optimized for mobile devices, makes voter information easily accessible to the public. It explains who is eligible to register for the 2016 general elections and gives a simple overview of the voter registration process. It also tells users what documentation to take with them to register…..

Last year, Malawi’s national government used GotToVote to check whether voters were correctly registered. As a result, more than 20,000 were found to be incorrectly registered, because they were not qualified voters or were registered in the wrong constituency. In 2013, thousands used GotToVote via their mobile and tablet devices to find their polling places in Zimbabwe.

The successful experiment provides a number of lessons about the power and feasibility of open data projects, showing that they don’t require large teams, big budgets or a lot of time to build…(More)“

Carol Coletta at Knight Foundation: “32 civic innovators receive $5 million in funding in first Knight Cities Challenge…

Several themes emerged among the winning applications, which all sought to accelerate talent, opportunity or engagement—the three primary drivers of city success—in some way. “Bringing life back to public and vacant space” was the theme of our largest category of winners, representing almost a third of the group. The second largest category was “changing the stories people tell about their cities” with almost 20 percent. Three more themes each represented 13 percent of the winning ideas: “reimagining the civic commons,” “retaining talent” and “promoting civic engagement.” A full list of the winners appears below…. (More)”

Paper by Kim Erwin; Maggee Bond; Aashika Jain in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews: “This paper attempts to address two issues relevant to the sense-making of Big Data. First, it presents a case study for how a large dataset can be transformed into both a visual language and, in effect, a ‘text’ that can be read and interpreted by human beings. The case study comes from direct observation of graduate students at the IIT Institute of Design who investigated task-switching behaviours, as documented by productivity software on a single user’s laptop and a smart phone. Through a series of experiments with the resulting dataset, the team effects a transformation of that data into a catalogue of visual primitives — a kind of iconic alphabet — that allow others to ‘read’ the data as a corpus and, more provocatively, suggest the formation of a personal pattern language. Second, this paper offers a model for human-technical collaboration in the sense-making of data, as demonstrated by this and other teams in the class. Current sense-making models tend to be data- and technology-centric, and increasingly presume data visualization as a primary point of entry of humans into Big Data systems. This alternative model proposes that meaningful interpretation of data emerges from a more elaborate interplay between algorithms, data and human beings….(More)”

Professor Chetty has been widely recognized for his research that combines empirical evidence and economic theory to help design more effective government policies. This is Part One of our conversation.

For part 2 of our conversation, on the use of administrative data (or “big data”) for research on what works in public policy, click here.”

Ernesto Ramirez at Quantified Self: ….“Open Humans aims to break down data silos in human health and research. We believe data has a huge potential to live and grow beyond the boundaries a single study or program. Our online portal allows members to aggregate data from the research they participate in. By connecting individuals willing to share existing research data about themselves with researchers who are interested in using that data, data can be re-used and built upon.” — OpenHumans.org

On March 24, 2015 the Open Humans Network officially opened their virtual doors and began allowing individuals to sign up and engage in a new model of participatory research. We spoke with Co-founder & Principal Investigator of the Public Data Sharing study, Madeleine Ball, Ph.D. about Open Humans, what it means for research, and what we can look foward to from this exciting initiative. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation….

What excites me about Open Humans is the potential we have to transform future research studies — from how they treat data to how they think about data sharing. We’re building our system so that participants are central to the data process. A good example of this when researchers use our member’s data they must also agree to return any new data that results from their research back to the original participant. This decentralization of data is a key component of our design. No single person, researchers, or study has all the data…(More)

Benedict Carey in the New York Times: “FOR the past year or so genetic scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York have been collaborating with a specialist from another universe: Daniel Kohn, a Brooklyn-based painter and conceptual artist.

Mr. Kohn has no training in computers or genetics, and he’s not there to conduct art therapy classes. His role is to help the scientists with a signature 21st-century problem: Big Data overload.

Advanced computing produces waves of abstract digital data that in many cases defy interpretation; there’s no way to discern a meaningful pattern in any intuitive way. To extract some order from this chaos, analysts need to continually reimagine the ways in which they represent their data — which is where Mr. Kohn comes in. He spent 10 years working with scientists and knows how to pose useful questions. He might ask, for instance, What if the data were turned sideways? Or upside down? Or what if you could click on a point on the plotted data and see another dimension?….

And so it is in many fields, whether predicting climate, flagging potential terrorists or making economic forecasts. The information is all there, great expanding mountain ranges of it. What’s lacking is the tracker’s instinct for picking up a trail, the human gut feeling for where to start looking to find patterns and meaning. But can such creative instincts really be trained systematically? And even if they could, wouldn’t it take years to do so?

The answers are yes and no, at least when it comes to some advanced skills. And that should give analysts drowning in data some cause for optimism.

Scientists working in a little-known branch of psychology called perceptual learning have shown that it is possible to fast-forward a person’s gut instincts both in physical fields, like flying an airplane, and more academic ones, like deciphering advanced chemical notation. The idea is to train specific visual skills, usually with computer-game-like modules that require split-second decisions. Over time, a person develops a “good eye” for the material, and with it an ability to extract meaningful patterns instantaneously.

Perceptual learning is such an elementary skill that people forget they have it. It’s what we use as children to make distinctions between similar-looking letters, like U and V, long before we can read. It’s the skill needed to distinguish an A sharp from a B flat (both the notation and the note), or between friendly insurgents and hostiles in a fast-paced video game. By the time we move on to sentences and melodies and more cerebral gaming — “chunking” the information into larger blocks — we’ve forgotten how hard it was to learn all those subtle distinctions in the first place….(More)