Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Meike Ramon, Bigna Lenggenhager, Marte Roel Lesur, Dila Suay, Linda Baines, and Amanda J. Haste: “Contemporary research systems are increasingly shaped by structural constraints that limit how and where scientific knowledge can be produced. Academic institutions, historically associated with intellectual autonomy, are now frequently governed by metric-driven evaluation, administrative burdens, and competitive funding regimes that prioritize economic productivity over cultural and epistemic value. At the same time, they offer limited and inflexible employment opportunities—often due to funding constraints or a predominant focus on teaching. Public or government-funded laboratories have traditionally been more akin to universities in culture and approach, while industry laboratories, though often well-resourced, prioritize commercial outputs. Between these worlds lies a growing population of practitioners, independent scholars, citizen scientists, individuals working at the intersection of art and science, and retired researchers, who—despite losing formal institutional affiliation—retain deep domain expertise and a continued drive to develop new research ideas. All possess the expertise to conduct meaningful research yet lack access to the institutional conditions required to do so, leading them to seek environments grounded in curiosity, collaboration, and shared inquiry. Despite the widely recognized societal importance of scientific research, very few spaces exist for independent researchers to pursue practices that reach the public in meaningful and sustainable ways…(More)”.

Report by Hugo Leal and Marie Santini: “The report is the first to apply the Social Media Data Transparency Index, a systematic, first-of-its-kind evaluation of data access conditions across 15 major social media platforms in three key regulatory environments — the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. Assessments were conducted between October and December 2025 and validated in early 2026.

The findings are stark. Widely used platforms including Discord, Kwai, Pinterest, Snapchat, and WhatsApp provide no meaningful mechanisms for independent public scrutiny of either user-generated content or advertising data in any of the regions assessed. Even platforms subject to Europe’s landmark Digital Services Act — including X (formerly Twitter) and Snapchat — maintain advertising transparency tools that are either non-functional or produce no results, amounting to what the researchers term ‘performative transparency’.

The report findings include:

1. Social Media Data Transparency Remains Poor: Most platforms are ranked ‘Deficient’ or worst in data access.

2. Regulation helps, but does not guarantee compliance: The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and UK regulators have improved advertising data access conditions, but many platforms including X, Snapchat, and Pinterest — all subject to DSA requirements — still fail to provide functional transparency tools.

3. Stark regional disparities reflect a compliance-driven model of selective transparency: Brazil, which lacks a dedicated platform transparency framework, consistently records the lowest levels of data access.

4. Advertising data tools are too limited for meaningful scrutiny. Many platforms require researchers to search by advertiser name rather than by topic, keyword, or targeting criteria — an architectural choice that functions as a mechanism of opacity, making it effectively impossible to identify fraudulent, misleading, or politically harmful ads without prior knowledge of the advertiser’s identity…(More)“.

Book by Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, Mervi Pantti and Olga Dovbysh: “There is a growing public and scholarly attention to the environmental footprint of digital technologies, and to the climate responsibility of technology corporations and social media platforms specifically. Developing a critical understanding of the environmental responsibility and accountability of digital platforms, Platforms and the Planet focuses on the environmental responsibility of the so-called Big Tech, their digital media platforms and their role in the sustainability transition as a discursive, material, and ethical question.

Written from a much-needed critical and cross-disciplinary perspective, challenging the prevailing perspective on digital platforms as “green” and non-material entities, the chapters unpack their non-sustainable, material essence. Bridging critical platform studies with environmental studies and environmental communication studies, the chapters explore three broad themes. First, the chapters unpack what environmental sustainability means in relation to platforms. The second theme scrutinises the material and infrastructural dimensions of the digital platform society from the perspective of sustainability and global justice. Third, the chapters dive into the discourses of accountability by both digital platforms and actors criticizing them…(More)”.

Article by Stefaan Verhulst and Claudia Chwalisz: “The race to build the infrastructure of artificial intelligence is accelerating. Across the world, fields, industrial parks, and suburban edges are being transformed into data centers — vast, warehouse-like facilities that power everything from cloud storage to large language models.

For technology companies, this expansion is claimed to be essential. For the communities where these facilities are built, it is becoming increasingly contentious.

Recent reporting in The New York Times and elsewhere has captured the growing unease. Residents are questioning the scale of water consumption required to cool servers, the strain on local energy grids, and the transformation of landscapes once defined by entirely different economic and environmental logics. In many cases, the promised benefits — jobs, investment, growth — feel limited when set against the demands these facilities place on shared resources.

What is emerging is not simply a series of local disputes. It is a broader challenge of legitimacy.

There is a concept for this, though it predates the digital economy. In the 1990s, mining and energy companies (often called extractive industries) began to recognize that regulatory approval was no longer sufficient to ensure that projects could proceed smoothly. Communities could — and did — push back against developments that were fully legal but widely perceived as unfair or harmful. The term that emerged to describe what was missing was “a social license to operate”.

A social license is not granted by governments. It is conferred, informally but powerfully, by the people who live with the consequences of a project. It depends on trust, on transparency, and on a sense that the balance between costs and benefits is acceptable. Crucially, it is not static. It can be strengthened over time — or withdrawn.

Data centers are now encountering this reality…(More)”.

White Paper by the Siegel Family Endowment: “We’re living in an era of unprecedented information abundance, yet still struggling to generate real insight. The issue isn’t a lack of data, but a lack of well-formed questions. The way we frame problems—and who gets to frame them—shapes everything that follows.

Better Questions, Better Insights introduces the emerging science of questions: a more rigorous approach to defining, testing, and refining the inquiries that guide our work.

At Siegel Family Endowment, this approach has shaped an inquiry-driven model of philanthropy—one that moves beyond linear solutions toward deeper systems change.

This paper offers a practical framework for embedding inquiry into decision-making, helping organizations move from information to insight—and from insight to impact…

This paper is an invitation. A look under the hood at how we’ve approached inquiry in our own work, and a starting point for shared exploration.

As the complexity of societal challenges grows, our approaches must evolve with it. That means embracing a more rigorous practice of curiosity—asking better questions, together—and expanding who gets to ask them.

If we can do that, we have an opportunity to modernize and democratize philanthropy in ways that better meet this moment…(More)”.

Report by the World Economic Forum: “Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is driving a fundamental shift in capability, allowing systems to autonomously execute end-to-end, multi-step workflows. This technological progress is poised to transform how governments operate and serve citizens. However, without a strategic, evidence-based grasp of where agentic AI can deliver the greatest public value – balancing high potential with manageable complexity – governments risk investing in the wrong places, undermining confidence in the technology and launching pilots that fail to scale…(More)”.

Initiative by Hugging Face: “Many of the deepest challenges in advancing AI for scientific discovery are not purely technical—they are social and organizational. Progress is often limited not by algorithms or computational power, but by how effectively we coordinate efforts, share resources, and collaborate across disciplinary boundaries. Hugging Science brings together a global community of researchers, developers, and practitioners committed to accelerating breakthroughs in physics, biology, chemistry, neuroscience, and beyond through open collaboration.

Our vision is grounded in the argument presented in our position paper: democratizing AI for science requires treating it as a collective social project where equitable participation and sustainable collaboration are prerequisites for technical progress.

What We Do

• Launch collaborative challenges and open problem calls to identify and mobilize collective effort around upstream computational bottlenecks with broad applicability across scientific domains—such as efficient PDE solvers, multi-scale coupling, and high-dimensional sampling—rather than fragmenting resources across narrow, domain-specific applications
• Build open toolkits, benchmarks, and workflows that address data fragmentation through standardized formats and shared evaluation metrics, making it easier for researchers at institutions of all resource levels to collaborate and build on each other’s work
• Support cross-disciplinary exchange and education by creating resources that bridge the communication gap between domain scientists who prioritize mechanistic understanding and ML researchers who focus on predictive performance, enabling more effective collaboration
• Nurture a community that values contributions to data curation, infrastructure development, and educational resources alongside algorithmic innovation—recognizing that datasets and infrastructure often have far greater long-term impact than individual models
• Learn together through open discussion of both technical advances and the social and institutional barriers that constrain progress, working to align incentives and build sustainable practices for scientific AI..(More)”.

Blog by Michael Hallsworth: “Last week, I was in San Francisco for the HumanX conference. Listening to people there pushed me to ask a question that’s been bouncing around in my head with increasing insistency:

What’s the psychological impact of being the human in the loop?

I feel like this issue is a time bomb that could destroy current plans of how AI will be governed. If you listen to any AI policy conversation for more than a few minutes, you’re likely to hear the phrase “human-in-the-loop” (HITL). It’s a catch-all term that provides reassurance and allow us carry on with the technical discussion. Like in the workplace, if we just keep the right people “in the loop,” all will be well.

The idea evokes an image of a capable, watchful person who will intervene expertly if the system goes wrong. Whole governance frameworks are built on top of this comforting picture. For example, Article 14 of the EU AI Act tries to put a set of requirements on humans to “prevent or minimise the risks to health, safety or fundamental rights”.

But the Act says nothing about whether these humans will have the skills, attention, or motivation to perform this oversight. Or, even if they can, for how long. Or what the experience would be like.

In other words, we’re not thinking enough about what it actually feels like to be the human in the loop.

I find that gap increasingly hard to ignore because billions (?) of humans-in-the-loop may soon face two contrasting problems that we’ve been neglecting:

• Verification burdens caused by too much cognitive stimulus;1
• Vigilance atrophy caused by too little stimulus.

The tricky thing is that these two risks can affect the same person on the same day. Moreover, they call for almost opposite responses. Even trickier! Here I suggest how we should start tackling this problem…(More)”.

Paper by Colleen Thouez and Raphaela Schweiger: “Municipal leadership has become increasingly central to addressing global challenges such as war-related displacement, migration governance, and climate change, reflecting a broader shift toward polycentric and networked forms of multilateralism. This study examines how cities have expanded their international roles over the past decade, responding to governance gaps with pragmatic, people-centred action. Using a qualitative, theory-informed comparative case study design, it draws on three original case studies grounded in direct practitioner experience: European municipal cooperation supporting Ukraine during war; city engagement in shaping the Global Compact for Migration; and municipal leadership in advancing climate action and the emerging climate mobility agenda. Across these cases, the analysis identifies consistent patterns of multi-scalar municipal agency, including decentralized humanitarian action, norm-setting in international negotiations, and innovations in multilevel climate governance. Cities leverage transnational networks—such as the Mayors Migration Council and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group—to amplify political influence, exchange solutions, and secure resources, even as fiscal pressures and political polarization increasingly constrain local capacity. It concludes that cities are becoming important actors in shaping global governance, yet their effectiveness depends on institutionalized representation, enhanced fiscal autonomy, and stronger protections for local leaders. Embedding municipalities more fully within evolving multilateral architectures can better align global commitments with local implementation and improve the resilience and legitimacy of international policy coordination..(More)”.

Book by Gustavo Moreira Maia: “… the first comprehensive examination of how states can transition from reactive bureaucracies to anticipatory public services. Written for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars, it combines theoretical frameworks with practical implementation guidance.

The book argues that expanding state informational capacity creates both an opportunity and an obligation to redesign public services around citizen life events rather than administrative processes.

“The principal limitation of contemporary digital government does not lie in the absence of technological tools, but in the persistence of an action model structured to respond after the request, and not to recognize the context.”

Through detailed analysis of global examples and original case studies, the book maps the conditions under which proactive government becomes possible, desirable, and democratically legitimate…(More)“.