Article by Authors Alliance: “…is pleased to announce a new project, supported by the Mellon Foundation, to develop an actionable plan for a public-interest book training commons for artificial intelligence. Northeastern University Library will be supporting this project and helping to coordinate its progress. Access to books will play an essential role in how artificial intelligence develops. AI’s Large Language Models (LLMs) have a voracious appetite for text, and there are good reasons to think that these data sets should include books and lots of them. Over the last 500 years, human authors have written over 129 million books.... (More >)
Experts warn about the ‘crumbling infrastructure’ of federal government data
Article by Hansi Lo Wang: “The stability of the federal government’s system for producing statistics, which the U.S. relies on to understand its population and economy, is under threat because of budget concerns, officials and data users warn. And that’s before any follow-through on the new Trump administration and Republican lawmakers‘ pledges to slash government spending, which could further affect data production. In recent months, budget shortfalls and the restrictions of short-term funding have led to the end of some datasets by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, known for its tracking of the gross domestic product, and to proposals... (More >)
Path to Public Innovation Playbook
Playbook by Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation: “…a practical, example-rich guide for city leaders at any stage of their innovation journey. Crucially, the playbook offers learnings from the past 10-plus years of government innovation that can help municipalities take existing efforts to the next level… Innovation has always started with defining major challenges in cooperation with residents. But in recent years, cities have increasingly tried to go further by working to unite every local actor around transformational changes that will be felt for generations. What they’re finding is that by establishing a North Star for action—the playbook calls them... (More >)
Data Stewardship as Environmental Stewardship
Article by Stefaan Verhulst and Sara Marcucci: “Why responsible data stewardship could help address today’s pressing environmental challenges resulting from artificial intelligence and other data-related technologies… Even as the world grows increasingly reliant on data and artificial intelligence, concern over the environmental impact of data-related activities is increasing. Solutions remain elusive. The rise of generative AI, which rests on a foundation of massive data sets and computational power, risks exacerbating the problem. In the below, we propose that responsible data stewardship offers a potential pathway to reducing the environmental footprint of data activities. By promoting practices such as data... (More >)
Data Governance Meets the EU AI Act
Article by Axel Schwanke: “..The EU AI Act emphasizes sustainable AI through robust data governance, promoting principles like data minimization, purpose limitation, and data quality to ensure responsible data collection and processing. It mandates measures such as data protection impact assessments and retention policies. Article 10 underscores the importance of effective data management in fostering ethical and sustainable AI development…This article states that high-risk AI systems must be developed using high-quality data sets for training, validation, and testing. These data sets should be managed properly, considering factors like data collection processes, data preparation, potential biases, and data gaps. The... (More >)
Building Safer and Interoperable AI Systems
Essay by Vint Cerf: “While I am no expert on artificial intelligence (AI), I have some experience with the concept of agents. Thirty-five years ago, my colleague, Robert Kahn, and I explored the idea of knowledge robots (“knowbots” for short) in the context of digital libraries. In principle, a knowbot was a mobile piece of code that could move around the Internet, landing at servers, where they could execute tasks on behalf of users. The concept is mostly related to finding information and processing it on behalf of a user. We imagined that the knowbot code would land at... (More >)
Why Digital Public Goods, including AI, Should Depend on Open Data
Article by Cable Green: “Acknowledging that some data should not be shared (for moral, ethical and/or privacy reasons) and some cannot be shared (for legal or other reasons), Creative Commons (CC) thinks there is value in incentivizing the creation, sharing, and use of open data to advance knowledge production. As open communities continue to imagine, design, and build digital public goods and public infrastructure services for education, science, and culture, these goods and services – whenever possible and appropriate – should produce, share, and/or build upon open data. Open Data and Digital Public Goods (DPGs) CC is a member... (More >)
Leveraging Crowd Intelligence to Enhance Fairness and Accuracy in AI-powered Recruitment Decisions
Paper by Zhen-Song Chen and Zheng Ma: “Ensuring fair and accurate hiring outcomes is critical for both job seekers’ economic opportunities and organizational development. This study addresses the challenge of mitigating biases in AI-powered resume screening systems by leveraging crowd intelligence, thereby enhancing problem-solving efficiency and decision-making quality. We propose a novel counterfactual resume-annotation method based on a causal model to capture and correct biases from human resource (HR) representatives, providing robust ground truth data for supervised machine learning. The proposed model integrates multiple language embedding models and diverse HR-labeled data to train a cohort of resume-screening agents. By... (More >)
Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior
Book by Sandra Matz: “There are more pieces of digital data than there are stars in the universe. This data helps us monitor our planet, decipher our genetic code, and take a deep dive into our psychology. As algorithms become increasingly adept at accessing the human mind, they also become more and more powerful at controlling it, enticing us to buy a certain product or vote for a certain political candidate. Some of us say this technological trend is no big deal. Others consider it one of the greatest threats to humanity. But what if the truth is more... (More >)
The Attention Crisis Is Just a Distraction
Essay by Daniel Immerwahr: “…If every video is a starburst of expression, an extended TikTok session is fireworks in your face for hours. That can’t be healthy, can it? In 2010, the technology writer Nicholas Carr presciently raised this concern in “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist. “What the Net seems to be doing,” Carr wrote, “is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” He recounted his increased difficulty reading longer works. He wrote of a highly accomplished philosophy student—indeed, a Rhodes Scholar—who didn’t read books at all but gleaned... (More >)
