Stefaan Verhulst
Report by Seiling, LK et al: “As digital platforms play an increasingly prominent role in societies around the globe, calls from policymakers, civil society, and the public for transparency, accountability and evidence-based regulation of these digital services have become louder and more urgent. Independent research seeking to provide such empirical evidence has either taken place in a legal gray zone, running the risk of legal retaliation, or depended on close collaboration with platforms. The Digital Services Act (DSA), adopted in 2022 and in force since 2024, promises to change this dynamic by clearly outlining under which conditions platforms must grant data access to researchers. The recently adopted Delegated Act on data access (DA) provided more detail on the implementation of this new right to data access for researchers.
This paper provides an overview of researchers’ initial practical experience with access to publicly available data based on Art. 40(12) DSA as well as an in-depth description of procedure for access as set out in Art. 40(4) DSA, thereby comprehensively characterising the data access options outlined in the DSA and DA. We outline key provisions and their underlying rationales to provide an overview of the goals, procedures and limits of DSA-based data access, as well as an account of external factors likely to weigh in its realisation. The goal is to offer a valuable point of reference for the European as well as global community of researchers considering applications under the DSA, as well as other stakeholders aiming to understand or support the development of robust data access frameworks…(More)”.
Article by John Gautam: “In systems of social change, we grapple with an enduring tension: connection versus abstraction. Connection is slow, human, and relational. It thrives on trust, listening, and collaboration. Abstraction, on the other hand, simplifies complexity into patterns, insights, and models. It is fast, scalable, and efficient.
Both serve a purpose, but they pull in opposite directions. And now, with the rise of AI tools like large language models (LLMs), this tension has reached new heights. LLMs thrive on abstraction; they reduce human interaction into data points, surface patterns, and generate outputs.
While LLMs are not intelligent in the sense of reasoning or self-awareness, they can serve as tools that reframe, rephrase, and reorganise a person’s ideas in ways that feel expressive. This can enable creativity and reflection, but let’s be clear: It’s not agency. The tool reshapes inputs but does not make meaning…(More)”.
Paper by Heather Openshaw: “Governments are collecting and storing vast amounts of data. The majority of data collected globally is considered dark data. This is unused, unanalyzed, and largely unstructured data that simultaneously burns budget holes and weighs down potential as an untapped resource. Dark data can exist across all forms of data collection, from IoT device logs and sensor metadata to historical paper archives and unlabeled multimedia files. Every department of a government is affected, from legal, health, financial, intelligence and so on.
While high-income countries are beginning to invest in tools, such as artificial intelligence (AI), and governance frameworks to surface and use this data, low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) often lack the institutional infrastructure, technical capacity, and legal safeguards needed to do the same…(More)”.
Article by Enrique Segura: “Smart cities are no longer just about sensors and data. Today, artificial intelligence is helping cities worldwide improve urban life for its citizens in innovative ways while saving money and delivering services in faster, more efficient ways. Whether through government WhatsApp chatbots, graffiti detection or urban tree health monitoring, AI is reshaping the way cities work.
City chatbot with AI
Back in 2019, the Buenos Aires city government launched Boti, a WhatsApp chatbot originally designed to share COVID-19 updates. Since then, Boti has evolved into a citywide digital assistant. It now processes images sent by users (such as license plates for parking violations), alerts citizens of any real-time event, and allows residents to report crimes directly from WhatsApp. With its conversational tone, Boti is designed for locals but also supports English, making it also useful for visitors.
Its success demonstrates how AI-powered communication tools can strengthen trust and streamline services in urban environments.
AI for graffiti detection
Meanwhile, cities like Lisbon and Tempe, Arizona, are piloting AI-powered vision models to detect and map graffiti. By analyzing real-time data from cameras mounted on vehicles or drones, these advanced systems can spot new graffiti in real time, geo-tag affected areas and help city teams respond more quickly. This means city workers no longer must rely solely on citizen reports; instead, they can prioritize areas based on data-driven insights.
This proactive use of AI not only saves time and resources but also contributes for cleaner and safer cities.
AI for urban tree health
Tokyo is leveraging AI to monitor and protect its urban trees through the Plant Doctor system, developed by Waseda University and Ryukoku University. Using advanced computer vision powered by YOLOv8, DeepSORT and DeepLabV3+, the system analyzes images of street trees to detect signs of disease or pest damage.
Mounted on drones or vehicles, Plant Doctor tracks the health of individual leaves and enables proactive care. This ensures healthier urban forests, reduces costly maintenance and enhances the quality of public places in the city.
Smarter cities, better services for citizens
In New York City, an AI company uses crowdsourced dashcam imagery for crosswalk inspections, enabling its model to analyze the conditions of individual paint lines and track conditions over time. Shanghai and Singapore have developed digital twins, allowing them to model the impact of urban planning efforts, such as new construction or mobility improvements. From the minute to the massive, AI is proving to be a powerful ally in city management…(More)”.
Paper by Jorrit de Jong et al: “Over the last decades, scholars and practitioners have focused their attention on the use of data for improving public action, with a renewed interest in the emergence of big data and artificial intelligence. The potential of data is particularly salient in cities, where vast amounts of data are being generated from traditional and novel sources. Despite this growing interest, there is a need for a conceptual and operational understanding of the beneficial uses of data. This article presents a comprehensive and precise account of how cities can use data to address problems more effectively, efficiently, equitably, and in a more accountable manner. It does so by synthesizing and augmenting current research with empirical evidence derived from original research and learnings from a program designed to strengthen city governments’ data capacity. The framework can be used to support longitudinal and comparative analyses as well as explore questions such as how different uses of data employed at various levels of maturity can yield disparate outcomes. Practitioners can use the framework to identify and prioritize areas in which building data capacity might further the goals of their teams and organizations…(More)”.
Book by Blaise Agüera y Arcas: “It has come as a shock to some AI researchers that a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system with general intelligence. Yet this is consistent with a long-held view among some neuroscientists that the brain evolved precisely to predict the future—the “predictive brain” hypothesis.
In What Is Intelligence?, Blaise Agüera y Arcas takes up this idea—that prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain but to life itself—and explores the wide-ranging implications. These include radical new perspectives on the computational properties of living systems, the evolutionary and social origins of intelligence, the relationship between models and reality, entropy and the nature of time, the meaning of free will, the problem of consciousness, and the ethics of machine intelligence.
The book offers a unified picture of intelligence from molecules to organisms, societies, and AI, drawing from a wide array of literature in many fields, including computer science and machine learning, biology, physics, and neuroscience. It also adds recent and novel findings from the author, his research team, and colleagues. Combining technical rigor and deep up-to-the-minute knowledge about AI development, the natural sciences (especially neuroscience), and philosophical literacy, What Is Intelligence? argues—quite against the grain—that certain modern AI systems do indeed have a claim to intelligence, consciousness, and free will…(More)”.
Open Access Book by Matthijs M. Maas: “The impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) are often framed as an uncontrollable wave of technological change. But AI’s trajectory is not preordained-its governance is a human choice, one that hinges on global institutions that are effective, coherent, and resilient to AI’s own disruptions.
As AI systems grow more powerful, states and international institutions today face mounting pressure to address their impacts. How can they govern this changing technology, in a rapidly changing world, using tools that may themselves be altered by AI? Architectures of Global AI Governance provides the conceptual and practical tools to tackle this question.
Drawing from technology law, global governance scholarship, and history, the book maps AI’s growing global stakes, traces the trajectory of the global AI regime complex, and sets the scaffolding for new institutions. The book argues that, in crafting a global AI governance architecture, we must reckon with three facets of change: sociotechnical changes in AI systems’ uses and impacts; AI-driven changes in the fabric of international law; and political changes in the global AI regime complex. Many AI governance approaches will be too static unless they adapt to these forces….(More)”.
Blog by Hollie Russon Gilman: “The shocking assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on a university campus last week has jolted the nation into confronting the fragility of public discourse—and the limits of free speech when threats of violence loom over political life. In the shadow of this tragedy, we need to invest and support new institutions that support civic voice and protect democratic engagement. Citizen assemblies, a model for engaging residents through civic lottery, are one such vital institution: a way of dignifying speech and reweaving trust in our democracy.
Unlike the adversarial debates that dominate our media and campuses, citizen assemblies bring together randomly selected, demographically representative residents in small groups to deliberate with experts and produce policy recommendations. In this way, they are a living extension of the First Amendment—they don’t just protect the right to speak, they structure more generative spaces for voices to emerge, be heard, and be acted upon. Especially now, when rhetoric risks becoming the dangerous fuel for violence, assemblies offer a path for communities to reclaim ownership over public life.
Globally and domestically, civic assemblies have already addressed climate policy, electoral reform, and land use. Here in the US, assemblies have been used to tackle long-standing local issues. For example, citizen assemblies in Colorado and California convened to determine the future of specific public land sites. Similarly, civic assemblies, a method which does not necessarily involve lottery based sortition, in Washington State have also played a significant role in setting policy agendas around climate issues. In this example, Washington State provided public dollars around climate resilience, which key civil society and grassroots groups were able to leverage to organize a people’s assembly. This includes intentionally over-sampling for traditionally underrepresented and marginalized communities. In the U.S., they have anchored local processes for redesigning public land or shaping resilience plans. These cases underscore how—for those often relegated to the margins—assemblies provide direct access to democracy…(More)”.
Book by Jonathan W. Y. Gray: “Public data shapes what we know and how we live together. It is often digital, freely available and related to matters of shared concern, from global warming graphs to collaborative spreadsheets documenting mass layoffs. It circulates via maps and apps which enable us to discover, report and rate what is around us.
Public Data Cultures explores the practices and cultures of how data is made public in the age of the Internet. Looking beyond familiar narratives of data as a resource to be liberated or protected, this book offers new perspectives on public data as networked cultural material, as medium of participation and as site of transnational politics. To better account for how data makes a difference, the book argues for a more expansive conception of what is involved in making data public. In doing so, it focuses not just on removing restrictions but also on caring for arrangements involved in making data public in ways that grow shared understanding and solidarity in responding to the many intersecting troubles of our times.
Nurturing critical and creative engagements with data, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of media, communications, Internet studies, science and technology studies and digital humanities, as well as artists, designers, engineers, reporters, public sector workers, community organisers and activists working with data…(More)”.
Article by Iason Gabriel, Geoff Keeling, Arianna Manzini & James Evans: “The rise of more-capable AI agents is likely to have far-reaching political, economic and social consequences. On the positive side, they could unlock economic value: the consultancy McKinsey forecasts an annual windfall from generative AI of US$2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion globally, once AI agents are widely deployed (see go.nature.com/4qeqemh). They might also serve as powerful research assistants and accelerate scientific discovery.
But AI agents also introduce risks. People need to know who is responsible for agents operating ‘in the wild’, and what happens if they make mistakes. For example, in November 2022 , an Air Canada chatbot mistakenly decided to offer a customer a discounted bereavement fare, leading to a legal dispute over whether the airline was bound by the promise. In February 2024, a tribunal ruled that it was — highlighting the liabilities that corporations could experience when handing over tasks to AI agents, and the growing need for clear rules around AI responsibility.
Here, we argue for greater engagement by scientists, scholars, engineers and policymakers with the implications of a world increasingly populated by AI agents. We explore key challenges that must be addressed to ensure that interactions between humans and agents — and among agents themselves — remain broadly beneficial…(More)”.