Stefaan Verhulst
JRC European Commission Report: “…explores how public administrations can foster more effective collaboration by intentionally shaping the behaviours, routines, and mindsets of public servants. Drawing on cutting-edge insights from cognitive, behavioural, and organisational sciences, it presents a rigorous review of the key drivers of collaboration and how to leverage them. It serves as an evidence-informed compass to help public administrations harness their collaborative potential to effectively address today’s complex policy challenges. The main findings are distilled into twelve actionable principles that outline a clear vision for working together more effectively…(More)”.
Paper by Eray Erturk: “Wearable devices record physiological and behavioral signals that can improve health predictions. While foundation models are increasingly used for such predictions, they have been primarily applied to low-level sensor data, despite behavioral data often being more informative due to their alignment with physiologically relevant timescales and quantities. We develop foundation models of such behavioral signals using over 2.5B hours of wearable data from 162K individuals, systematically optimizing architectures and tokenization strategies for this unique dataset. Evaluated on 57 health-related tasks, our model shows strong performance across diverse real-world applications including individual-level classification and time-varying health state prediction. The model excels in behavior-driven tasks like sleep prediction, and improves further when combined with representations of raw sensor data. These results underscore the importance of tailoring foundation model design to wearables and demonstrate the potential to enable new health applications…(More)”.
Article by ‘Gbenga Sesan: “The world is witnessing an unprecedented convergence of challenges that threaten digital democracy, social innovation, and international relations. At the heart of these threats are three fundamental shifts: the shrinking of civic space, the decline in funding for digital rights programs (or “digital funding”), and the erosion of legitimacy in global governance. These trends, while distinct, are interconnected in ways that reveal deep fractures in the global order. How high-level structural changes will impact the field of digital democracy should be continuously explored to help advocacy groups identify the necessary actions to ensure resilience, as well as help shape the role of all stakeholders in rebuilding trust in the digital democratic landscape.
Shrinking Civic Space: The Last Line Under Attack
The emergence of a post-truth era characterized by an increasing abuse of technology has significantly eroded civic space—a fundamental platform for free expression, activism, and advocacy. Governments, both authoritarian and ostensibly democratic, have weaponized technology to surveil, censor, and suppress dissent, effectively transforming many civic spaces from sites of resistance into zones of control. In a recent collection of essays from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “New Digital Dilemmas: Resisting Autocrats, Navigating Geopolitics, Confronting Platforms,” various authors highlighted trends in digital repression. Jan Rydzak’s essay, “The Stalled Machines of Transparency Reporting,” for example, revealed a troubling pattern: as technology platforms are retreating from their transparency commitments and disbanding trust and safety teams, authoritarian governments are stepping in to define the limits of permissible speech. Other pieces described the intensification of identity-based repression in the Middle East and North Africa and explained how governments and digital mobs alike are using AI-driven profiling, facial recognition, and doxxing campaigns to target human rights defenders, LGBTQ activists, and dissidents.
What makes this moment particularly dangerous is a shift in both the tools and targets employed…(More)”.
Report by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Over the last decade, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have created transformational opportunities for health, health care, and biomedical science. While new tools are available to improve effectiveness and efficiency in myriad applications in health and health care, challenges persist, including those related to increasing costs of care, staff burnout and shortages, and the growing disease burden of an aging population. The need for new approaches to address these long-standing challenges is evident and AI offers both new hope and new concerns.
An Artificial Intelligence Code of Conduct for Health and Medicine: Essential Guidance for Aligned Action presents a unifying AI Code of Conduct (AICC) framework developed to align the field around responsible development and application of AI and to catalyze collective action to ensure that the transformative potential of AI in health and medicine is realized. Designed to be applied at every level of decision making—from boardroom to bedside and from innovation labs to reimbursement policies—the publication serves as a blueprint for building trust, protecting patients, and ensuring that innovation benefits people…(More)”.
Paper by Oliver Escobar and Adrian Bua: “The world faces social, political, economic, and ecological crises, and there is doubt that democratic governance can cope. Democracies rely on a narrow set of institutions and processes anchored in dominant forms of political organisation and imagination. Power inequalities sustain the (re)production of current ills in democratic life. In this context, what does the field of democratic innovation offer to the task of sociopolitical reimagining and change? The field has advanced since the turn of the century, building foundations for democratic renewal. It draws from various traditions of democracy, including participatory and deliberative streams. But there is concern that a non-critical version of deliberative democracy is becoming hegemonic. Deliberative theory generated useful correctives to participatory democracy – that is, a deeper understanding of the communicative fabric of the public sphere as worthy of democratisation; public reasoning as a bridge-builder between streets and institutions and a key precursor to democratic collective action. However, we argue that democratic innovation now needs a participatory corrective to strengthen its potential to mobilise capacity for change. We review emerging critiques in conversation with participatory ideas and practices, illustrating our argument with four gaps in democratic innovation that can become field-expanding dimensions to deliver emancipatory change more effectively: pluriversality, policy, political economy, and empowerment…(More)”.
Paper by Matthew Liao et al: “As AI and digital technologies advance rapidly, governance frameworks struggle to keep pace with emerging applications and risks. This paper introduces a “5W1H” framework to systematically analyze AI governance proposals through six key questions: What should be regulated (data, algorithms, sectors, or risk levels), Why regulate (ethics, legal compliance, market failures, or national interests), Who should regulate (industry, government, or public stakeholders), When regulation should occur (upstream, downstream, or lifecycle approaches), Where it should take place (local, national, or international levels), and How it should be enacted (hard versus soft regulation). The framework is applied to compare the European Union’s AI Act with the current US regulatory landscape, revealing the EU’s comprehensive, risk-based approach versus America’s fragmented, sector-specific strategy. By providing a structured analytical tool, the 5W1H framework helps policymakers, researchers, and stakeholders navigate complex AI governance decisions and identify areas for improvement in existing regulatory approaches…(More)”.
Paper by Amit Misra, Kevin White, Simone Fobi Nsutezo, William Straka III & Juan Lavista: “Floods cause extensive global damage annually, making effective monitoring essential. While satellite observations have proven invaluable for flood detection and tracking, comprehensive global flood datasets spanning extended time periods remain scarce. In this study, we introduce a deep learning flood detection model that leverages the cloud-penetrating capabilities of Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite imagery, enabling consistent flood extent mapping through cloud cover and in both day and night conditions. By applying this model to 10 years of SAR data, we create a unique, longitudinal global flood extent dataset with predictions unaffected by cloud coverage, offering comprehensive and consistent insights into historically flood-prone areas over the past decade. We use our model predictions to identify historically flood-prone areas in Ethiopia and demonstrate real-time disaster response capabilities during the May 2024 floods in Kenya. Additionally, our longitudinal analysis reveals potential increasing trends in global flood extent over time, although further validation is required to explore links to climate change. To maximize impact, we provide public access to both our model predictions and a code repository, empowering researchers and practitioners worldwide to advance flood monitoring and enhance disaster response strategies…(More)“
Paper by Lucy van Eck et al: “Public sector innovation labs (PSI-labs) are emerging as experimental spaces where governments attempt to generate knowledge for navigating uncertain, technology-driven futures. However, the knowledge they produce often remains “liquid”; relational and difficult to embed in traditional bureaucratic structures. This paper investigates these tensions through an ethnographic study of Vonk, Rotterdam’s digital innovation lab which prepares the municipality for emerging digital technologies in policymaking and service delivery.
Based on over 200 h of participant observation and 15 interviews, it examines how knowledge is created, shared, and embedded – or fails to be. Employing Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes as a metaphor, the analysis highlights the relational and processual nature of knowledge in PSI-labs.
The findings reveal that PSI-labs hold potential for future-oriented governance, but face challenges in translating and embedding their “liquid” knowledge. We argue that knowledge becomes actionable through enactment within dynamic actor-networks. Knowledge is thus not merely a product of PSI-labs, but a shared accomplishment that materialises in the “doing”. This paper argues for strategic mechanisms to ensure the visibility and usability of such knowledge. By combining ethnographic insights with creative storytelling, it offers fresh perspectives on the governance of public sector innovation…(More)”.
Blog by Rainer Kattel: “The UK government published last week the Public Design Evidence Review (PDER), an ambitious attempt to answer a deceptively simple question: How do we create better public policies and services that consistently achieve their intended outcomes? One of the answers, the report argues, lies in public design — a term the report introduces… public design fundamentally challenges modernist assumptions about how governments should work: it questions and expands the idea that politics is about representation and that bureaucracy is about neutral expertise. Instead, it imagines governance as a dynamic, participatory, and creative process, as summarised in the figure below from the PDER report.
Despite these promising ideas and examples, public design remains underdeveloped as a system-wide public practice. Evidence is often limited to individual case studies, with few robust measures of impact — especially on systemic change. There are brilliant cases like Dan Hill’s work Swedish innovation agency, Vinnova. But mostly design roles are still not embedded across the civil service. Toolkits are scattered. Teams often lack shared job descriptions or metrics to evaluate success.
That’s why the Public Design Evidence Review is so important. It systematises the scattered evidence, identifies promising practices, and points toward what needs to change.
To make public design transformative, we need to learn from the digital transformation journey. That means:
- Standardising design roles in government job descriptions and team structures
- Scaling access to design toolkits across departments and agencies
- Measuring impact not just in outputs but in terms of systemic change, dynamic capabilities, and long-term value creation…(More)”.
Article by Eric Mosley: Every organization wants better people data. This information about employee satisfaction and engagement is often used by organizations to assess and improve company culture. But how does the way we collect people data affect its ultimate value to the organization?
In the race to use artificial intelligence (AI), many organizations have defaulted to a familiar mindset around data: Collect everything and sort it out later. But most Americans are uneasy about how companies use their data and are resigned to feeling that they’ve lost control, according to a Pew Research Center survey. And nearly 68% of consumers globally say they are either somewhat or very concerned about their privacy online. These kinds of feelings are dangerous because trust evaporates when people feel watched rather than respected.
From quiet monitoring to inferred behaviour, the rise of passive data mining is triggering a backlash. Some people are setting their own boundaries by asking companies not to track their clicks, mine their Slack or email messages, or make their data part of the company’s algorithm without consent.
If we want people to trust AI systems – or the organizations building them – we need to start with data practices that earn that trust. That means moving from pure extraction to something more cooperative, human and voluntary…(More)”.