Stefaan Verhulst
Book edited by Johanna Seibt, Raul Hakli and Marco Nørskov: “Robophilosophy is the philosophical engagement with the phenomena and problems that arise with “social robots”: robots developed for use everywhere in society, at work, in public spaces, or at home. This new area of research is applied philosophy undertaken in close contact with, or even as part of, empirical research in the multidisciplinary areas of human–robot interaction studies and social robotics. It includes, but goes beyond, ethical considerations, offering new research in social ontology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and more.
The book explores the wide-ranging questions we currently have about the new class of artificial social agents generated by robotics technology. Written by researchers from philosophy, psychology, and the technical sciences, the book shows how philosophical knowledge can help us to navigate the unprecedented sociocultural risks arising from this technology…(More)”.
Paper by Stefaan Verhulst: “As societal challenges grow more complex, access to data for public interest use is paradoxically becoming more constrained. This emerging data winter is not simply a matter of scarcity, but of shrinking legitimate and trusted pathways for responsible data reuse. Concerns over misuse, regulatory uncertainty, and the competitive race to train AI systems have concentrated data access among a few actors while raising costs and inhibiting collaboration. Prevailing data governance models, focused on compliance, risk management, and internal control, are necessary but insufficient. They often result in data that is technically available yet practically inaccessible, legally shareable yet institutionally unusable, or socially illegitimate to deploy. This paper proposes strategic data stewardship as a complementary institutional function designed to systematically, sustainably, and responsibly activate data for public value. Unlike traditional stewardship, which tends to be inwardlooking, strategic data stewardship focuses on enabling cross sector reuse, reducing missed opportunities, and building durable, ecosystem-level collaboration. It outlines core principles, functions, and competencies, and introduces a practical Data Stewardship Canvas to support adoption across contexts such as data collaboratives, data spaces, and data commons. Strategic data stewardship, the paper argues, is essential in the age of AI: it translates governance principles into practice, builds trust across data ecosystems, and ensures that data are not only governed, but meaningfully mobilized to serve society…(More)”.
Paper by Stefaan Verhulst, Cosima Lenz, Roshni Singh, Marta Dellaquilla and Leonie Kunze: “Women’s health remains under-resourced, underprioritized, and narrowly defined. Across the life course, women experience distinct health needs with significant implications for health and wellbeing, yet persistent gaps in evidence and data continue to reinforce inequities. In the absence of a universally accepted definition of women’s health, this study aimed to develop a topic map to capture its breadth and to identify an evidence-informed set of the top ten priority questions to guide future women’s health research and innovation. We used a participatory, iterative methodology inspired by the 100 Questions Initiative, combining structured stakeholder engagement, rapid evidence synthesis, and iterative validation. An initial topic map was developed through an in-person workshop and refined through ongoing engagement with 77 global experts in women’s health and data science. Guided by the topic map, experts submitted research questions via a virtual survey, which were refined, clustered, prioritized, and ranked. The topic map served as a shared framework to guide the submission of actionable research questions and comprised four branches: (1) key domains of women’s health; (2) determinants and barriers; (3) technology and innovation; and (4) research and evidence gaps. A total of 113 questions were submitted, clustered into 56 themes, and narrowed to a top ten through expert prioritization, followed by public ranking. The highest-ranked questions focused on reframing and prioritizing women’s health, strengthening investment and innovation ecosystems, and addressing evidence gaps, research participation, data quality, and equity. This study presents a comprehensive topic map that captures the complexity of women’s health and provides a unifying framework for the field. The prioritized questions offer a strategic foundation to guide future research, policy, and investment to advance women’s health innovation…(More)”.
Report by Claudia Chwalisz and Sammy McKinney: “Citizens’ assemblies and other democratic innovations are spreading around the world. But they do not spread by themselves. Behind every successful scaling story sits a constellation of organisations doing the essential, often invisible work of building capacity, establishing networks, advocating with decision makers, and ensuring quality standards.
These are what we call scaling catalysts: organisations that intentionally drive the expansion of democratic innovations in their regions.
In this paper, we make three core contributions to the field:
1. We distil six features of effective scaling catalyst organisations, aiming to elevate the important role they play.
2. We examine critical tensions and trade-offs these organisations face, and how they can navigate these.
3. We identify five frontiers of future practice that can further accelerate the scaling of democratic innovations and promote more deliberative cultures beyond the work of individual catalyst organisations.
This paper is for three key audiences: We offer insights for practitioners building similar organisations, for funders seeking to support this vital work, and for researchers identifying knowledge gaps…(More)”
Article by Cade Metz: “For decades, elite mathematicians have struggled to solve a collection of thorny problems posed by a 20th-century academic named Paul Erdos.
This month, an artificial intelligence start-up called Harmonic jumped into the mix. Harmonic said its A.I. technology, Aristotle, had solved an “Erdos problem” with help from a collaborator: OpenAI’s latest technology, GPT-5.2 Pro.
For many computer scientists and mathematicians, solving an Erdos problem showed that artificial intelligence had reached a point where it was capable of doing legitimate academic research. But some experts were quick to point out that the solution generated by A.I. was not very different from earlier work done by human mathematicians.
“It feels to me like a really clever student who has memorized everything for the test but doesn’t have a deep understanding of the concept,” said Terence Tao, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is regarded by many as the finest mathematician of his generation. “It has so much background knowledge that it can fake actual understanding.”
The debate over what Harmonic’s system accomplished was a reminder of two consistent questions about the head-spinning progress of the tech industry’s A.I. development: Did the A.I. system truly do something brilliant? Or did it merely repeat something that had already been created by brilliant humans?
The answers to those questions could provide a better understanding of the ways A.I. could transform science and other fields. Whether A.I. is generating new ideas or not — and whether it may one day do better work than human researchers — it is already becoming a powerful tool when placed in the hands of smart and experienced scientists.
These systems can analyze and store far more information than the human brain, and can deliver information that experts have never seen or have long forgotten.
Dr. Derya Unutmaz, a professor at the Jackson Laboratory, a biomedical research institution, said the latest A.I. systems had reached the point where they would suggest a hypothesis or an experiment that he and his colleagues had not previously considered.
“That is not a discovery. It is a proposal. But it lets you narrow down where you should focus,” said Dr. Unutmaz, whose research focuses on cancer and chronic diseases. “It allows you to do five experiments rather than 50. That has a profound, accelerating effect.”
The excitement around GPT-5’s math skills began in October when Kevin Weil, vice president of science at OpenAI, said on social media that the start-up’s technology had answered several of the mind-bending Erdos problems.
Designed as a way of measuring mathematical ingenuity, the Erdos problems are elaborate conjectures or questions that test the limits of the field. The aim is to prove whether each is right or wrong.
Some problems are enormously difficult to solve, while others are easier. One of the more famous problems asks: If the integer n is greater than or equal to 2, can 4/n be written as the sum of three positive fractions? In other words, is there a solution to 4/n=1/x+1/y+1/z?
That problem is still unsolved. But on social media, Mr. Weil boasted that GPT-5 had cracked many others. “GPT-5 just found solutions to 10 (!) previously unsolved Erdos problems, and made progress on 11 others,” Mr. Weil wrote. “These have all been open for decades.”
Mathematicians and A.I. researchers quickly pointed out that the system had identified existing solutions buried in decades of research papers and textbooks. The OpenAI executive deleted his social media post. But even if the initial excitement was overstated, the technology had proved its worth…(More)”.
Article by Gareth Harris: “UK museums are asking members of the public to help them define future policy and direction—even encompassing funding decisions—as part of a growing trend towards embracing citizens’ assemblies.
The National Gallery in London launched its NG Citizens panel last year, aiming to put audiences at the heart of its decision making. It follows other institutions, including Birmingham Museums Trust (BMT), which launched a “citizens’ jury” comprising 26 local residents in 2024. The Imperial War Museum and London’s Migration Museum have also announced plans to set up assemblies.
To the National Gallery, “it is a culture-shaping step that deepens our relationship with audiences across the UK and ensures we remain relevant, inclusive and genuinely reflective of the public we serve”, Jane Knowles, the museum’s director of public engagement, said in a statement. “This isn’t a consultation, it’s a collaboration.”
Citizens’ assemblies have been gaining momentum in countries around the world, making decisions on issues ranging from national constitutions to electricity supply, from public transport to municipal budgets. Advocates say they can help raise awareness of policy-making in the general public, increase the public’s sense of democratic agency, build bridges between diverse communities, and give institutional policy-makers greater insight into the views of informed citizens, representing a cross-section of society, after debate.
Lucy Reid at Democracy Next, a Dutch research and advocacy group, says that museums can play a particularly important role in advancing the use of such panels. “Museums are relatively trusted compared to many institutions, which means they have a responsibility—and an opportunity—to model what democratic decision-making can look like,” says Reid, whose organisation has advised BMT and two German museums, the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, and the Decorative Arts Museum of the Dresden State Art Collections, in setting up assemblies.
“When a museum demonstrates that randomly-selected ‘ordinary’ citizens can grapple with complex trade-offs and produce thoughtful recommendations, it challenges assumptions about who is seen to be capable of making decisions,” she says. “We need to see major cultural institutions like museums, funders and, for instance, the BBC following Birmingham’s lead. These are publicly-funded institutions—and the public should have genuine power in shaping their future, for all of us.”..(More)”.
Article by Émilie Frenkiel: “…Since 2021, the University of Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC) has organised an annual Student Citizens’ Assembly on a different theme. The Assembly involves students alongside teaching and administrative staff, partners in a deliberative process lasting several months. Deliberation culminates in recommendations aimed at transforming the university to face current social and environmental challenges. Between 2021 and 2025, five assemblies involved about 2,400 students.
Over time, the scheme has become institutionalised. It is now recognised by UPEC’s council, committees, services, and student parliament, and contributes to UPEC’s broader project to build a university committed to social and environmental transformation and justice. Alongside other initiatives, the Assembly helps reduce the university’s carbon footprint and foster a fair ecological transition. Its success has aroused the interest of national and local authorities, associations, and other universities.
The birth of an experiment
The Assembly follows the French Citizens’ Assembly on Climate which decides collectively, in a democratic and fair way, on public policies and lifestyle changes to keep our planet habitable.
The co-construction of the Assembly began in October 2020, during lockdown. About thirty students on the Global Politics Master’s programme at the Institute of Political Studies of Fontainebleau adapted the Citizens’ Climate Assembly for use in a university setting. In seminars on Global Health and Environment, and Democracy and Citizen Participation, students met experts in participatory mechanisms, defined the Assembly’s principles and decision-making processes, and pre-selected speakers. ..(More)”.
Article by Erika Tyagi et al: “In this post, we offer a behind-the-scenes look at our approach and the lessons we’ve learned, with the aim of helping other organizations and leaders build the foundations for data systems that unlock insights and improve outcomes.
- Start privacy and governance conversations early
Successfully managing risks requires treating privacy, governance, and disclosure protections as first-order design choices—not afterthoughts. Starting these conversations early helps align goals, clarify decisionmaking authority, and design processes that scale, especially in multiagency or cross-jurisdictional projects with significant legal and operational constraints. These early conversations can enable trust and efficiency down the line.
Urban’s work with the DC Education Research Collaborative demonstrates the importance of early governance. From the start, the collaborative was structured as a research-practice partnership, bringing together education agencies, researchers, and community stakeholders through formal governance bodies. These included a cross-sector advisory committee and a research council of academic and analytic partners.
Governance and disclosure processes were established early and collaboratively, allowing agencies to securely and easily share data once with the collaborative, where a central team generates consistent, research-ready datasets that are then used by researchers across different organizations and teams. This approach, combined with regular meetings and feedback loops, reduces administrative burden, provides predictable data access, and keeps use aligned with the collaborative’s shared values.
- Design for change
Data systems must evolve as new data sources, users, and technologies emerge. The Education Data Portal, launched in 2018, was intentionally designed with this flexibility in mind. It uses an API-first, metadata-rich design to harmonize datasets over time and across sources and pairs those data with detailed, programmatically accessible documentation. This approach allows us to add new data sources and build downstream tools, such as programming libraries and interactive dashboards, without requiring changes to the underlying system.
Because the portal’s core architecture is modular and scalable, it’s remained resilient while expanding to support new use cases and audiences. Today, it’s evolving in response to federal policy shifts and advances in artificial intelligence. We are incorporating nonfederal data from states, for example, and integrating with initiatives like Google’s Data Commons to broaden access and usability. While Urban could not have anticipated these specific developments in 2018, the decision to prioritize an API-first design and curated metadata has enabled us to adapt the portal to new datasets, users, and tools without reengineering its foundation…(More)”.
Article by Indranil Ghosh: “Iran is systematically crippling Starlink, the satellite internet service said to be almost impossible to jam.
Military-grade GPS jammers deployed since January 8 have cut satellite internet performance by as much as 80% in parts of the country, according toAmir Rashidi, director of digital rights at the Miaan Group, a U.S.-based nonprofit focused on Iranian internet censorship and digital rights.
“The level of violence by the government is unlike anything I have ever witnessed,” Rashidi wrote on LinkedIn. “The Islamic Republic is killing to survive.”
The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reports at least 572 people have been killed and more than 10,600 arrested since protests erupted on December 28. Iran Human Rights, based in Norway, said the real toll could be far higher. Iranian Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi warned of a potential “massacre under the cover of a sweeping communications blackout.”
The nationwide internet shutdown, which started on January 8, has disconnected 85 million Iranians from the outside world. Cloudflare, a major internet infrastructure company, recorded a 98.5% collapse in Iranian internet traffic within 30 minutes of the shutdown starting. NetBlocks, an internet monitoring group, confirmed non-satellite connectivity dropped below 2% of normal levels.
Iran has cut internet access 17 times since 2018, according to the Internet Society, a nonprofit that advocates for an open internet. Mohammed Soliman, a technology analyst at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said years of sanctions have left the government with near-total control over internet infrastructure…(More)”.
Article by Noam Angrist, Amanda Beatty, Claire Cullen & Tendekai Mukoyi Nkwane: “Many nonprofits in low- and middle-income countries face a critical mismatch: urgent social problems demand rapid program iteration, yet organizations often wait years for externally-produced evaluation results. When they do conduct rigorous evaluations, these are typically one-off studies that rarely keep pace with evolving implementation contexts or inform real-time decisions.
This tension between problem urgency and evidence generation speed is familiar to many implementers. After our organization, Youth Impact, ran an initial Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) in Botswana on an HIV and teen pregnancy prevention program, we faced new questions relevant for government scale-up. The RCT showed near-peer educators effectively changed risky teen behavior while other messengers like public school teachers did not, but government partners needed ongoing answers about cost-effectiveness, implementation variations, and program adaptations. Waiting years between evaluation cycles meant missing the window to influence program design and consequential government reforms.
We needed an approach that maintained rigorous standards but operated at implementation speed. The technology sector offered a model: Microsoft alone runs approximately 100,000 A/B tests each year to continuously optimize products. A famous Gmail experiment, testing different advertising link colors, generated $200 million annually for Google and showed how small, rigorously tested variations can have outsized impact.
While social impact programs present unique complexities, we have found that a similar underlying approach can translate well to the social sector. Iterative A/B testing uses randomization to compare multiple program variations to answer questions about efficiency and cost-effectiveness, in addition to questions about general effectiveness (as in a traditional RCT). A/B testing also produces causal evidence in weeks or months, instead of years as in traditional randomized trials. Iterative A/B testing has a critical role to play to unlock social impact: causal evidence delivered rapidly enough to optimize programs during implementation and scale-up…(More)”.