Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Tom Williams: “… explores critical questions at the intersection of robotics and social justice. He considers the ways in which roboticists design their robots’ appearance, how robots think and act, how robots perceive people, and the domains into which robots are deployed. The book highlights not only the ways roboticists tend to reinforce white patriarchal power structures, but also how roboticists might instead subvert those power structures by applying theories and methods from a diverse range of fields.

Drawing on computer science; history and politics; law, criminology, and sociology; feminist, ethnic, and Black studies; literary and media studies; and social, moral, and cognitive psychology, the book connects questions of robot design with larger abolitionist movements by presenting a vision for a more socially just future of robotics…(More)”.

Interview by Margo Anderson: “For years, Gwen Shaffer has been leading Long Beach, Calif. residents on “data walks,” pointing out public Wi-Fi routers, security cameras, smart water meters, and parking kiosks. The goal, according to the professor of journalism and public relations at California State University, Long Beach, was to learn how residents felt about the ways in which their city collected data on them.

She also identified a critical gap in smart city design today: While cities may disclose how they collect data, they rarely offer ways to opt out. Shaffer spoke with IEEE Spectrum about the experience of leading data walks, and about her research team’s efforts to give citizens more control over the data collected by public technologies…Residents want agency. So that’s what led my research team to connect with privacy engineers at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. Norman Sadeh and his team had developed what they called the IoT Assistant. So I told them about our project, and proposed adapting their app for city-deployed technologies. Our plan is to give residents the opportunity to exercise their rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act with this app. So they could say, “Passport Parking app, delete all the data you’ve already collected on me. And don’t collect any more in the future.”..(More)”

Book edited by Luca Belli and Walter Britto Gaspar: “This book provides a comprehensive analysis of personal data protection frameworks within the BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—and explores the potential for enhanced cooperation as regards the management and regulation of international data flows, amongst the increasing number of new group members. This study is particularly relevant in light of the recent BRICS commitment, enshrined in the grouping’s 2024 Declaration, aimed at jointly promoting ‘a global framework for data governance’. The ways in which this policy objective can be achieved are explored in the conclusion of this volume, highlighting what concrete path might be realistically followed by the group. Drawing on the pioneering research of the CyberBRICS project, each chapter delves into the unique legislative landscapes of the member countries, highlighting significant regulatory developments such as Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD), Russia’s evolving privacy and data localization regulations, India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 and its Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture, China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), and South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). The authors examine the complexities and challenges each nation faces in harmonizing data protection with economic growth and technological innovation, while also addressing issues of national sovereignty, cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, and international coordination. A comparative analysis of the BRICS personal data architectures underscores the distinctive approaches and institutional frameworks adopted by BRICS countries and how this unusual grouping is growing, influencing an increasing number of countries with its policy and governance choices. The concluding chapter synthesizes these insights to offer concrete solutions and mechanisms for sustainable transborder data transfers and digital trade, emphasizing the importance of fostering legal interoperability and shared governance principles. By proposing model contractual clauses and strategic cooperation pathways, the book advocates for a shared BRICS stance on personal data protection, aiming to balance data subject rights with the imperatives of cybersecurity and digital sovereignty in a connected digital economy. This volume is an essential resource for policymakers, legal practitioners, and scholars interested in understanding a future where emerging economies are increasingly shaping the dynamics of data governance and digital cooperation…(More)”.

Article by John Thornhill: “…Trump’s Maga movement has also found its natural home on social media, with many thousands of accounts amplifying his messages. That makes it all the more jarring to discover that some of the most active “America First” accounts are run from abroad. 

In a move to secure “the integrity of the global town square”, the social media platform X last Friday began posting user location data. As a result, it emerged that dozens of influential Maga accounts are run out of foreign countries, including Russia, India and Nigeria. 

For example, the MAGA NATION account, which claims to be a “Patriot Voice for We The People” with more than 393,000 followers, is based in eastern Europe (Non-EU), X revealed.

Malign foreign actors are known to use imposter accounts — either to manipulate political debate or to generate traffic and make money. That is just one of the ways in which our infosphere is being deliberately degraded. 

There are three other types of social media deformities, too. Call them the four horsemen of the infocalypse. Unchecked, they will surely destroy our trust in almost anything we read online.

The second corrosive influence is how extremist views, once confined to the darker corners of the web, have seeped into mainstream debate, as documented by Julia Ebner, a researcher at Oxford university and author of Going Mainstream…(More)”

Article by Stefaan Verhulst and Friederike Schüür: “As governments and international bodies race to establish guardrails for AI, most of the global agenda still focuses on managing what AI systems produce—their outputs. This article argues that such an approach is incomplete. The real foundations of safe, rights-respecting, and equitable AI lie upstream in how data is collected, governed, shared, and stewarded. Without integrating mature data governance practices, such as data stewardship and data commons, into AI governance, countries will struggle to protect fundamental rights or ensure that AI’s economic and social benefits are distributed fairly. A future-ready AI governance framework must therefore unite input and output governance into a single, coherent system…(More)”.

Article by Davidson Heath: “A century ago, two oddly domestic puzzles helped set the rules for what modern science treats as “real”: a Guinness brewer charged with quality control and a British lady insisting she can taste whether milk or tea was poured first.

Those stories sound quaint, but the machinery they inspired now decides which findings get published, promoted, and believed—and which get waved away as “not significant.” Instead of recognizing the limitations of statistical significance, fields including economics and medicine ossified around it, with dire consequences for science. In the 21st century, an obsession with statistical significance led to overprescription of both antidepressant drugs and a headache remedy with lethal side effects. There was another path we could have taken.

Sir Ronald Fisher succeeded 100 years ago in making statistical significance central to scientific investigation. Some scientists have argued for decades that blindly following his approach has led the scientific method down the wrong path. Today, statistical significance has brought many branches of science to a crisis of false-positive findings and bias.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the young science of statistics was blooming. One of the key innovations at this time was small-sample statistics—a toolkit for working with data that contain only a small number of observations. That method was championed by the great data scientist William S. Gosset. His ideas were largely ignored in favor of Fisher’s, and our ability to reach accurate and useful conclusions from data was harmed. It’s time to revive Gosset’s approach to experimentation and estimation…(More)”.

Article by Claire Brown: “Zillow, the country’s largest real estate listings site, has quietly removed a feature that showed the risks from extreme weather for more than one million home sale listings on its site.

The website began publishing climate risk ratings last year using data from the risk-modeling company First Street. The scores aimed to quantify each home’s risk from floods, wildfires, wind, extreme heat and poor air quality.

But real estate agents complained they hurt sales. Some homeowners protested the scores and found there was no way to challenge the ratings.

Earlier this month Zillow stopped displaying the scores after complaints from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which operates a private database funded by real estate brokers and agents. Zillow relies on that listing service and others around the country for its real estate data. The California listing service, one of the largest in the country, raised concerns about the accuracy of First Street’s flood risk models.“Displaying the probability of a specific home flooding this year or within the next five years can have a significant impact on the perceived desirability of that property,” said Art Carter, California Regional Multiple Listing Service’s chief executive officer.

In a statement, Zillow spokeswoman Claire Carroll said the company remains committed to providing consumers with information that helps them make informed decisions. Real estate listings on Zillow now display hyperlinks to First Street’s website, and users can click through to view climate risk scores for a specific property.

The development highlights a growing tension within the real estate industry. Fires, floods and other disasters are posing more risks to homes as the planet warms, but forecasting exactly which houses are most vulnerable — and might sell for less — has proved fraught.

First Street models have shown that millions more properties are at risk of flooding than government estimates suggest.

Other real estate sites, including Redfin, Realtor.com and Homes.com, display similar First Street data alongside ratings for factors like walkability, public transportation and school quality…(More)”.

New Public: “Last June, our Co-Director Eli Pariser laid out a bold new direction for New_ Public in this newsletter: “You may not think of this as social media, but most towns in America have some sort of general-purpose, locals-only digital forum: a Facebook group, a Google group, a Nextdoor neighborhood. These groups mostly run below the radar — they seem quotidian, maybe even boring. But according to Pew, “about half of US adults say they get their local news from online groups or forums,” more even than from newspapers. If they were strengthened into resilient, flourishing spaces, they could be crucial to reinforcing American democracy. That’s why we’re going to make them a major focus of our work at New_ Public.”

Since then, we’ve deeply explored local digital spaces, including Front Porch Forum’s inspiring example of what’s possible, and grim reminders of how the status quo is not sufficient with platforms like Nextdoor….

The main thing to know, maybe the most important thing, is that this is not just another social media app. Roundabout is a community space, built from the ground up with community leaders and neighbors.

We’re so excited to share more about Roundabout in the coming months, and we’re determined to grow and learn in public, along with you. Here’s a preview:

• Roundabout is for building real relationships with people who actually live, work, and play in your community through trusted information sharing, genuine conversations, and mutual support, not posts competing for likes and virality.
• Users can quickly find what they’re looking for via content that’s organized into topic-based channels, with a separate calendar to find events and a Guides section to find more evergreen resources.
• Local stewards are supported and empowered. Each community will have its own vibes and culture.

The big platforms, some several decades old now, were built for profit — every decision, every design, optimized for uncontrolled growth and extraction. We’re doing something different.

As a project incubated within New_ Public, a nonprofit, Roundabout will grow incrementally, sustained by a diverse and balanced set of revenue sources. With business incentives aligned towards utility and everyday value, instead of engagement and relentless scale, we’re designing Roundabout to be shielded from the cycle of enshittification. The ultimate goal is to build for social trust — every decision, every design, optimized to build bonds and increase belonging…(More)”.

Review by James Gleick: “It’s hard to remember—impossible, if you’re under thirty—but there was an Internet before there was a World Wide Web. Experts at their computer keyboards (phones were something else entirely) chatted and emailed and used Unix protocols called “finger” and “gopher” to probe the darkness for pearls of information. Around 1992 people started talking about an “Information Superhighway,” in part because of a national program championed by then senator Al Gore to link computer networks in universities, government, and industry. A highway was different from a web, though. It took time for everyone to catch on.

The Internet was a messy joint effort, but the web had a single inventor: Tim Berners-Lee, a computer programmer at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva. His big idea boiled down to a single word: links. He thought he could organize a free-form world of information by prioritizing interconnections between documents—which could be text, pictures, sound, or anything at all. Suddenly it seemed everyone was talking about webpages and web browsers; people turned away from their television sets and discovered the thrills of surfing the web.

It’s also hard to remember the idealism and ebullience of those days. The world online promised to empower individuals and unleash a wave of creativity. Excitement came in two main varieties. One was a sense of new riches—an abundance, a cornucopia of information goodies. The Library of Congress was “going online” and so was the Louvre. “Click the mouse,” urged the New York Times technology reporter John Markoff:

There’s a NASA weather movie taken from a satellite high over the Pacific Ocean. A few more clicks, and one is reading a speech by President Clinton, as digitally stored at the University of Missouri. Click-click: a sampler of digital music recordings as compiled by MTV. Click again, et voila: a small digital snapshot reveals whether a certain coffee pot in a computer science laboratory at Cambridge University in England is empty or full…(More)”

The Economist: “A good cover letter marries an applicant’s CV to the demands of the job. It helps employers identify promising candidates, particularly those with an employment history that is orthogonal to their career ambitions. And it serves as a form of signalling, demonstrating that the applicant cares enough about the position to go through a laborious process, rather than simply scrawling their desired salary at the top of a résumé and mass-mailing it to every business in the area.

Or, at least, it used to. The rise of large language models has changed the dynamic. Jobseekers can now produce a perfectly targeted cover letter, touching on all an advertisement’s stated requirements, at the touch of a button. Anyone and everyone can present themselves as a careful, diligent applicant, and do so hundreds of times a day. A new paper by Anaïs Galdin of Dartmouth College and Jesse Silbert of Princeton University uses data from Freelancer.com, a jobs-listing site, to work out what this means for the labour market.

Comparing pre- and post-ChatGPT activity, two results stand out. The first is that cover letters have lengthened. In the pre-LLM era, the median one was 79 words long. (Since Freelancer.com attracts workers for one-off tasks, such letters are more to-the-point than those for full-time roles.) A few years later, post-ChatGPT, the median had risen to 104 words. In 2023 the site introduced its own AI tool, allowing users to craft a proposal without even having to leave the platform. The subset of applications written using the tool—the only ones that can be definitively labelled as AI-generated—are longer still, with a median length of 159 words, more than twice the human-written baseline…(More)”.