Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Cass R. Sunstein: “Behavioral science is playing an increasing role in public policy, and it is raising new questions about fundamental issues – the role of government, freedom of choice, paternalism, and human welfare. In diverse nations, public officials are using behavioral findings to combat serious problems – poverty, air pollution, highway safety, COVID-19, discrimination, employment, climate change, and occupational health. Exploring theory and practice, this Element attempts to provide one-stop shopping for those who are new to the area and for those who are familiar with it. With reference to nudges, taxes, mandates, and bans, it offers concrete examples of behaviorally informed policies. It also engages the fundamental questions, include the proper analysis of human welfare in light of behavioral findings. It offers a plea for respecting freedom of choice – so long as people’s choices are adequately informed and free from behavioral biases….(More)”.

European Commission Press Release: “The set-up of the European Health Data Space will be an integral part of building a European Health Union, a process launched by the Commission today with a first set of proposals to reinforce preparedness and response during health crisis. This  is also a direct follow up of the Data strategy adopted by the Commission in February this year, where the Commission had already stressed the importance of creating European data spaces, including on health….

In this perspective, as part of the implementation of the Data strategy, a data governance act is set to be presented still this year, which will support the reuse of public sensitive data such as health data. A dedicated legislative proposal on a European health data space is planned for next year, as set out in the 2021 Commission work programme.

As first steps, the following activities starting in 2021 will pave the way for better data-driven health care in Europe:

• The Commission proposes a European Health Data Space in 2021;
• A Joint Action with 22 Member States to propose options on governance, infrastructure, data quality and data solidarity and empowering citizens with regards to secondary health data use in the EU;
• Investments to support the European Health Data Space under the EU4Health programme, as well as common data spaces and digital health related innovation under Horizon Europe and the Digital Europe programmes;
• Engagement with relevant actors to develop targeted Codes of Conduct for secondary health data use;
• A pilot project, to demonstrate the feasibility of cross border analysis for healthcare improvement, regulation and innovation;
• Other EU funding opportunities for digital transformation of health and care will be available for Member States as of 2021 under Recovery and Resilience Facility, European Regional Development Fund, European Social Fund+, InvestEU.

The set of proposals adopted by the Commission today to strengthen the EU’s crisis preparedness and response, taking the first steps towards a European Health Union, also pave the way for the participation of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in the future European Health Data Space infrastructure, along with research institutes, public health bodies, and data permit authorities in the Member States….(More)”.

Q&A with Stefaan G. Verhulst and Andrew Young …” working in collaboration with UNICEF on an initiative called Responsible Data for Children initiative (RD4C) . Its focus is on data – the risks it poses to children, as well as the opportunities it offers.

You have been working with UNICEF on the Responsible Data for Children initiative (RD4C). What is this and why do we need to be talking more about ‘responsible data’?

To date, the relationship between the datafication of everyday life and child welfare has been under-explored, both by researchers in data ethics and those who work to advance the rights of children. This neglect is a lost opportunity, and also poses a risk to children.

Today’s children are the first generation to grow up amid the rapid datafication of virtually every aspect of social, cultural, political and economic life. This alone calls for greater scrutiny of the role played by data. An entire generation is being datafied, often starting before birth. Every year the average child will have more data collected about them in their lifetime than would a similar child born any year prior. Ironically, humanitarian and development organizations working with children are themselves among the key actors contributing to the increased collection of data. These organizations rely on a wide range of technologies, including biometrics, digital identity systems, remote-sensing technologies, mobile and social media messaging apps, and administrative data systems. The data generated by these tools and platforms inevitably includes potentially sensitive PII data (personally identifiable information) and DII data (demographically identifiable information). All of this begs much closer scrutiny, and a more systematic framework to guide how child-related data is collected, stored, and used.

Towards this aim, we have also been working with the Data for Children Collaborative, based in Edinburgh in establishing innovative and ethical practices around the use of data to improve the lives of children worldwide….(More)”.

Daphne Leprince-Ringuet at ZDNet: “A crowdsourcing platform aims to provide better insight into health issues than is currently available….In the age of social media, blogs, and online forums, the most common practice when feeling slightly under the weather has undeniably become to resort to a quick Google search. Unfortunately, when they are not unnecessarily worrying, the answers found on the web are typically inconclusive. That observation is what prompted Israeli entrepreneur Yael Elish to launch StuffThatWorks, an AI-based online platform that collects crowdsourced data about a host of chronic conditions.

The idea being that, unlike Facebook groups or Reddit threads, the information shared by patients is centralized and assessed for quality to readily provide informed data to other users who are enquiring about their own symptoms. Healthline cuts through the confusion with straightforward, expert-reviewed, person-first experiences — all designed to help you make the best decisions. Elish is a former member of the founding team for crowdsourced navigation app Waze, but this time instead of tapping user-generated content to come up with traffic predictions and accident warnings, StuffThatWorks is intended to give users better insights into illness…(More)”.

Paper by Małgorzata Śmietanka, Hirsh Pithadia and Philip Treleaven: “Federated learning is a pioneering privacy-preserving data technology and also a new machine learning model trained on distributed data sets.

Companies collect huge amounts of historic and real-time data to drive their business and collaborate with other organisations. However, data privacy is becoming increasingly important because of regulations (e.g. EU GDPR) and the need to protect their sensitive and personal data. Companies need to manage data access: firstly within their organizations (so they can control staff access), and secondly protecting raw data when collaborating with third parties. What is more, companies are increasingly looking to ‘monetize’ the data they’ve collected. However, under new legislations, utilising data by different organization is becoming increasingly difficult (Yu, 2016).

Federated learning pioneered by Google is the emerging privacy- preserving data technology and also a new class of distributed machine learning models. This paper discusses federated learning as a solution for privacy-preserving data access and distributed machine learning applied to distributed data sets. It also presents a privacy-preserving federated learning infrastructure….(More)”.

About: “The criminal legal system is a maze of laws, language, and unwritten rules that lawyers are trained to maneuver to represent defendants.

However, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, only 27% of county public defender’s offices meet national caseload recommendations for cases per attorney, meaning that most public defenders are overworked, leaving their clients underrepresented.

Defendants must complete an estimated 200 discrete tasks during their legal proceeding. This leaves them overwhelmed, lost, and profoundly disadvantaged while attempting to navigate the system….

We have… created a product that acts as the trusted advisor for defendants and their families as they navigate the criminal legal system. We aim to deliver valuable and relevant legal information (but not legal advice) to the user in plain language, empowering them to advocate for themselves and proactively plan for the future and access social services if necessary. The user is also encouraged to give feedback on their experience at each step of the process in the hope that this can be used to improve the system….(More)”

Report by David Autor, David Mindell and Elisabeth Reynolds for the MIT Future of Work Task Force: “The world now stands on the cusp of a technological revolution in artificial intelligence and robotics that may prove as transformative for economic growth and human potential as were electrification, mass production, and electronic telecommunications in their eras. New and emerging technologies will raise aggregate economic output and boost the wealth of nations. Will these developments enable people to attain higher living standards, better working conditions, greater economic security, and improved health and longevity? The answers to these questions are not predetermined. They depend upon the institutions, investments, and policies that we deploy to harness the opportunities and confront the challenges posed by this new era.

How can we move beyond unhelpful prognostications about the supposed end of work and toward insights that will enable policymakers, businesses, and people to better navigate the disruptions that are coming and underway? What lessons should we take from previous epochs of rapid technological change? How is it different this time? And how can we strengthen institutions, make investments, and forge policies to ensure that the labor market of the 21st century enables workers to contribute and succeed?

To help answer these questions, and to provide a framework for the Task Force’s efforts over the next year, this report examines several aspects of the interaction between work and technology….(More)”.

Louise Guillot and Elisa Braun at Politico: “Emmanuel Macron asked 150 ordinary people to help figure out France’s green policies — and now this citizens’ convention is turning into a political problem for the French president.

The Citizens’ Convention on Climate was aimed at calming tensions in the wake of the Yellow Jackets protest movement — which was sparked by a climate tax on fuel — and showing that Macron wasn’t an out-of-touch elitist.

After nine months of deliberations, the convention came up with 149 proposals to slash greenhouse gas emissions this summer. The government has to put some of these measures before the parliament for them to become binding, and a bill is due to be presented in December.

But that’s too slow for many of the convention’s members, who feel the government is back-pedalling on some of the ideas and that Macron has poked fun at them.

Muriel Raulic, a member of the convention, accused Macron of using the body to greenwash his administration.

She supports a moratorium on 5G high-speed mobile technology, which has created some health and environmental fears. Macron has dismissed proponents of the ban as “Amish” — a Christian sect suspicious of technology.

The 150 members wrote an open letter to Macron in mid-October, complaining about a lack of “clear and defined support from the executive, whose positions sometimes appear contradictory,” and to “openly hostile communications” from “certain professional actors.”

Some gathered late last month before the National Assembly to complain they felt used and treated like “guinea pigs” by politicians. In June, they created an association to oversee what the government is doing with their proposals. 

…The government denied it is using the convention to greenwash itself….(More)”.

Blog by the Annie E. Casey Foundation: “Advanced data analytics are deeply embedded in the operations of public and private institutions and shape the opportunities available to youth and families. Whether these tools benefit or harm communities depends on their design, use and oversight, according to a report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Four Principles to Make Advanced Data Analytics Work for Children and Families examines the growing field of advanced data analytics and offers guidance to steer the use of big data in social programs and policy….

The Foundation report identifies four principles — complete with examples and recommendations — to help steer the growing field of data science in the right direction.

Four Principles for Data Tools

1. Expand opportunity for children and families. Most established uses of advanced analytics in education, social services and criminal justice focus on problems facing youth and families. Promising uses of advanced analytics go beyond mitigating harm and help to identify so-called odds beaters and new opportunities for youth.
   • Example: The Children’s Data Network at the University of Southern California is helping the state’s departments of education and social services explore why some students succeed despite negative experiences and what protective factors merit more investment.
   • Recommendation: Government and its philanthropic partners need to test if novel data science applications can create new insights and when it’s best to apply them.
      
2. Provide transparency and evidence. Advanced analytical tools must earn and maintain a social license to operate. The public has a right to know what decisions these tools are informing or automating, how they have been independently validated, and who is accountable for answering and addressing concerns about how they work.
   • Recommendations: Local and state task forces can be excellent laboratories for testing how to engage youth and communities in discussions about advanced analytics applications and the policy frameworks needed to regulate their use. In addition, public and private funders should avoid supporting private algorithms whose design and performance are shielded by trade secrecy claims. Instead, they should fund and promote efforts to develop, evaluate and adapt transparent and effective models.
      
3. Empower communities. The field of advanced data analytics often treats children and families as clients, patients and consumers. Put to better use, these same tools can help elucidate and reform the systems acting upon children and families. For this shift to occur, institutions must focus analyses and risk assessments on structural barriers to opportunity rather than individual profiles.
   • Recommendation: In debates about the use of data science, greater investment is needed to amplify the voices of youth and their communities.
      
4. Promote equitable outcomes. Useful advanced analytics tools should promote more equitable outcomes for historically disadvantaged groups. New investments in advanced analytics are only worthwhile if they aim to correct the well-documented bias embedded in existing models.
   • Recommendations: Advanced analytical tools should only be introduced when they reduce the opportunity deficit for disadvantaged groups — a move that will take organizing and advocacy to establish and new policy development to institutionalize. Philanthropy and government also have roles to play in helping communities test and improve tools and examples that already exist….(More)”.

Book by Juan Enriquez: “Most people have a strong sense of right and wrong, and they aren’t shy about expressing their opinions. But when we take a polarizing stand on something we regard as an eternal truth, we often forget that ethics evolve over time. Many shifts in the right versus wrong pendulum are driven by advances in technology. Our great-grandparents might be shocked by in vitro fertilization; our great-grandchildren might be shocked by the messiness of pregnancy, childbirth, and unedited genes. In Right/Wrong, Juan Enriquez reflects on what happens to our ethics as technology makes the once unimaginable a commonplace occurrence.

Evolving technology changes ethics. Enriquez points out that, contrary to common wisdom, technology often enables more ethical behaviors. Technology challenges old beliefs and upends institutions that do not grow and change. With wit and compassion, Enriquez takes on a series of technology-influenced ethical dilemmas, from sexual liberation to climate change to the “immortality” of mistakes on social media. (“Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google are electronic tattoos.”) He cautions us to judge those who “should have known better,” given today’s vantage point, with less fury and more compassion. We need a quality often absent in today’s charged debates: humility. Judge those in the past as we hope to be judged in the future….(More)”.