Stefaan Verhulst

Seth Reynolds at NPC: “Never has the interdependence of our world been experienced by so many, so directly, so rapidly and so simultaneously. Our response to one threat, Covid-19, has unleashed a deluge of secondary and tertiary consequences that have swept across the globe faster than the virus itself. The butterfly effect has taken on new dimensions, as the reality of system interdependence at multiple levels has been brought directly into our homes and news feeds:

• Individually, an innocuous bus journey sends a stranger to intensive care in a fortnight
• Societally, health charities are warning that actions taken in response to one health crisis – Covid-19 – could lead to up to 11,000 deaths of women in childbirth around the world because of another – namely, 9.5m women not getting access to family planning intervention.
• Governmentally, some systemic consequences of decision-making are there for all to see, while others are less immediately apparent – for example, Trump’s false proclamation of testing availability “for anyone that wants one”  ended up actually reducing the availability of tests by immediately increasing demand.  It even reduced the already scarce supply of protective masks, which must be disposed of after testing.

Students will be studying coronavirus for years. A systems lens can help us learn essential lessons. Covid-19 has provided many clear examples of effective systemic action, and stark lessons in the consequences of non-systemic thinking. Leaders and decision-makers everywhere are being compelled to think broader and deeper about causation and consequence. Decisions taken, even words spoken, without systemic awareness can have – indeed have had – profoundly damaging effects.

Systemic thinking, planning, action and leadership must now be mainstreamed – individually, organisationally, societally, across public, private and charity sectors. As one American diplomat recently reflected: “from climate change to the coronavirus, complex adaptive systems thinking is key to handling crises”. In fact, some epidemiologists, suddenly the world’s most valuable profession, have been calling for more systemic ways of working for years. However, we currently do not think and act in accordance with how our complex systems function and this has been part of the Covid-19 problem…(More)”.

Congressional Research Service: “In common parlance, the terms propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation are often used interchangeably, often with connotations of deliberate untruths of nefarious origin. In a national security context, however, these terms refer to categories of information that are created and disseminated with different intent and serve different strategic purposes. This primer examines these categories to create a framework for understanding the national security implications of information related to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic….(More)”.

Blog by Walter J. Radermacher at Data & Policy: “It is rightly pointed out that in the midst of a crisis of enormous dimensions we needed high quality statistics with utmost urgency, but that instead we are in danger of drowning in an ocean of data and information. The pandemic is accompanied and exacerbated by an infodemic. At this moment, and in this confusion and search for solutions, it seems appropriate to take advice from previous initiatives and draw lessons for the current situation. More than 20 years ago in the United Kingdom, the report “Statistics — A Matter of Trust” laid the foundations for overcoming the previously spreading crisis of confidence through a solidly structured statistical system. This report does not stand alone in international comparison. Rather, it is one of a series of global, European and national measures and agreements which, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, have strengthened official statistics as the backbone of policy in democratic societies, with the UN Fundamental Statistical Principles and the EU Statistics Code of Practice being prominent representatives. So, if we want to deal with our current difficulties, we should address precisely those points that have emerged as determining factors for the quality of statistics, with the following three questions: What (statistical products, quality profile)? How (methods)? Who (institutions)? The aim must be to ensure that statistical information is suitable for facilitating the resolution of conflicts by eliminating the need to argue about the facts and only about the conclusions to be drawn from them.

In the past, this task would have led relatively quickly to a situation where the need for information would have been directed to official statistics as the preferred provider; this has changed recently for many reasons. On the one hand, there is the danger that the much-cited data revolution and learning algorithms (so-called AI) are presented as an alternative to official statistics (which are perceived as too slow, too inflexible and too expensive), instead of emphasizing possible commonalities and cross-fertilization possibilities. On the other hand, after decades of austerity policies, official statistics are in a similarly defensive situation to that of the public health system in many respects and in many countries: There is a lack of financial reserves, personnel and know-how for the new and innovative work now so urgently needed.

It is therefore required, as in the 1990s, to ask the fundamental question again, namely, do we (still and again) really deserve official statistics as the backbone of democratic decision-making, and if so, what should their tasks be, how should they be financed and anchored in the political system?…(More)”.

Andrej Zwitter & Oskar J. Gstrein at the Journal of International Humanitarian Action: “The use of location data to control the coronavirus pandemic can be fruitful and might improve the ability of governments and research institutions to combat the threat more quickly. It is important to note that location data is not the only useful data that can be used to curb the current crisis. Genetic data can be relevant for AI enhanced searches for vaccines and monitoring online communication on social media might be helpful to keep an eye on peace and security (Taulli n.d.). However, the use of such large amounts of data comes at a price for individual freedom and collective autonomy. The risks of the use of such data should ideally be mitigated through dedicated legal frameworks which describe the purpose and objectives of data use, its collection, analysis, storage and sharing, as well as the erasure of ‘raw’ data once insights have been extracted. In the absence of such clear and democratically legitimized norms, one can only resort to fundamental rights provisions such as Article 8 paragraph 2 of the ECHR that reminds us that any infringement of rights such as privacy need to be in accordance with law, necessary in a democratic society, pursuing a legitimate objective and proportionate in their application.

However as shown above, legal frameworks including human rights standards are currently not capable of effectively ensuring data protection, since they focus too much on the individual as the point of departure. Hence, we submit that currently applicable guidelines and standards for responsible data use in the humanitarian sector should also be fully applicable to corporate, academic and state efforts which are currently enacted to curb the COVID-19 crisis globally. Instead of ‘re-calibrating’ the expectations of individuals on their own privacy and collective autonomy, the requirements for the use of data should be broader and more comprehensive. Applicable principles and standards as developed by OCHA, the 510 project of the Dutch Red Cross, or by academic initiatives such as the Signal Code are valid minimum standards during a humanitarian crisis. Hence, they are also applicable minimum standards during the current pandemic.

Core findings that can be extracted from these guidelines and standards for the practical implementation into data driven responses to COVIC-19 are:

• data sensitivity is highly contextual; one and the same data can be sensitive in different contexts. Location data during the current pandemic might be very useful for epidemiological analysis. However, if (ab-)used to re-calibrate political power relations, data can be open for misuse. Hence, any party supplying data and data analysis needs to check whether data and insights can be misused in the context they are presented.
• privacy and data protection are important values; they do not disappear during a crisis. Nevertheless, they have to be weighed against respective benefits and risks.
• data-breaches are inevitable; with time (t) approaching infinity, the chance of any system being hacked or becoming insecure approaches 100%. Hence, it is not a question of whether, but when. Therefore, organisations have to prepare sound data retention and deletion policies.
• data ethics is an obligation to provide high quality analysis; using machine learning and big data might be appealing for the moment, but the quality of source data might be low, and results might be unreliable, or even harmful. Biases in incomplete datasets, algorithms and human users are abundant and widely discussed. We must not forget that in times of crisis, the risk of bias is more pronounced, and more problematic due to the vulnerability of data subjects and groups. Therefore, working to the highest standards of data processing and analysis is an ethical obligation.

The adherence to these principles is particularly relevant in times of crisis such as now, where they mark the difference between societies that focus on control and repression on the one hand, and those who believe in freedom and autonomy on the other. Eventually, we will need to think of including data policies into legal frameworks for state of emergency regulations, and coordinate with corporate stakeholders as well as private organisations on how to best deal with such crises. Data-driven practices have to be used in a responsible manner. Furthermore, it will be important to observe whether data practices and surveillance assemblages introduced under current circumstances will be rolled back to status quo ante when returning to normalcy. If not, our rights will become hollowed out, just waiting for the next crisis to eventually become irrelevant….(More)”.

Ville Aula at LSE Blogs: “Read the front page of any major newspaper and I guarantee that the latest number of patients who have tested positive for COVID-19 and the number of mortalities will feature heavily. Open your social media accounts and you will quickly encounter graphs that show the mounting numbers of cases in different countries, complemented by modelling projections. These numbers and graphs feed the popular imagination of how well countries are “flattening the curve”, a concept that has brought epidemiological modelling inspired language to everyone’s lips. 

Numbers, graphs, and data are thus playing an essential part in how we experience the pandemic. The endless flows of numbers from different countries are meticulously compared with those from others. These comparisons then form the basis to how individual countries are portrayed and ranked in the global pandemic drama. 

But, there is also doubt in the air. We distrust the existing numbers and call for ever-more accurate information. For example, there has been a lively debate on how widespread the pandemic has been in China, an issue that connects directly to how tests are administered and cases reported. Equally, numbers from Europe do not provide indisputable or uniform information on the pandemic either, because their collection is subject to vastly different policies, practices, and contexts that make comparisons difficult. We also lack the scientific consensus that would allow us to link the number of mortalities to the prevalence of the virus, yet mortalities are still often taken as the most solid form of information on the pandemic.  These doubts have fuelled demands to do systematic population level testing of the virus prevalence, which is just a different way of saying that we need more numbers. 

Numbers are thus both the problem and the solution, and we want more of them. However, what makes numbers useful for developing better treatments and policies, does not necessarily lead to the same outcomes when applied to public debate. In the broader sphere of public debate, such tendencies reveal a longing for the veracity of data during times of uncertainty. Even when such calls are founded on demands for transparency in the name of democracy or healthy skepticism of existing data, they are entangled in a faulty logic of data itself eventually providing a solid standing for public debate….(More)”.

Paper by Ugo Pagallo: “The paper examines the legal and political impact of the Covid-19 crisis, drawing the attention to fundamental questions on authority and political legitimacy, coercion and obligation, power and cooperation. National states and sovereign governments have had and still will have a crucial role in re-establishing the public health sector and addressing the colossal challenges of economic re-construction. Scholars have accordingly discussed the set of legal means displayed during this crisis: emergency decrees, lockdowns, travel bans, and generally speaking, powers of the state of exception.

The aim of this paper is to stress the limits of such perspectives on powers of national governments and sovereigns, in order to illustrate what goes beyond such powers. Focus should be on the ontological, epistemic and normative constraints that affect today’s rights and duties of national states. Such constraints correspond to a class of problems that is complex, often transnational, and increasingly data-driven. In addition, we should not overlook the lessons learnt from such fields, as environmental law and internet governance, anti-terrorism and transnational business law, up to the regulation of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Such fields show that legal co-regulation and mechanisms of coordination and cooperation complement the traditional powers of national governments even in the times of the mother of all pandemics. The Covid-19 crisis has been often interpreted as if this were the last chapter of an on-going history about the Leviathan and its bio-powers. It is not. The crisis regards the end of the first chapter on the history of today’s information societies….(More)”.

Jen Kirby at Vox: “The green benches in the United Kingdom’s House of Commons were mostly empty, just Prime Minister Boris Johnson and a few members of Parliament, sitting spread out.

Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, wearing black robes, still commanded the room. But when it was time for a member of Parliament to ask a question, Hoyle glanced upward at a television screen mounted on the wood-paneled walls of the chamber.

On that screen appeared a member of Parliament — maybe with headphones, maybe just a tad too close to the camera, maybe framed with carefully curated bookshelf — ready to speak.

This is the so-called “Zoom” Parliament, which the UK first convened on April 22, turning the centuries-old democratic process into something that can be done, at least partially, from home.

The coronavirus pandemic has upended normalcy, and that includes the day-to-day functions of government. The social distancing measures and stay-at-home orders required to manage the virus’s spread has forced some governments to abruptly adopt new technologies and ways of working that would have been unimaginable just a few months ago.

From Brazil to Canada to the European Union, legislatures and parliaments have adopted some form of virtual government, whether for hearings and other official business, or even for voting. Several US states have also shifted to doing legislative work remotely, from New Jersey to Kentucky. And with the coronavirus making travel risky, diplomacy has also gone online, with everyone from the United Nations to the leaders of the G-7 meeting via computer screen.

Not every country or legislature has followed suit, most notably the US Congress, although advocates and some lawmakers are pushing to change this now. Even the US Supreme Court, long resistant to change, began hearing oral arguments this week via conference call, and livestreamed the audio with just a few, er, glitches.

This rapid shift to remote governance has largely done what it’s supposed to do: keep parliaments working during a crisis.In the UK, there have been a few technical difficulties, but it’s mostly succeeding.

“I think it does really well,” Chi Onwurah, a Labour MP and shadow minister for digital, science, and technology, who advocated for this move, told me. “Obviously, sometimes the technology doesn’t work or the audio is not very good or the broadband goes down.

“But, by and large,” she said, “we have MPs across the country putting questions to government and making democracy visible again.”

Governments may be Zooming or Google Hanging right now out of necessity, but once they get used to doing things this way (and get the mute button figured out), some elements of remote governance could end up outlasting this crisis. It won’t be a replacement for the real thing, and it probably shouldn’t be. But legislatures could certainly adopt at least some of these tools more permanently to help make democracy more accessible and transparent.

The holding-government-officials-accountable type of transparency, that is. Not the politician-accidentally-appearing-at-a-virtual-city-council-meeting, dusting-their-bookshelves-in-their-undies kind….

On Wednesday, Brazil’s Senate voted remotely again, approving an emergency transfer of resources to states to fight the coronavirus. It underscores a bizarre split in Brazil: Its Congress is using technology to try to govern aggressively during the pandemic. Its president, when asked last week about the country’s rising coronavirus death toll, replied, “So what? I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”….

Beth Simone Noveck, director of New York University’s Governance Lab, told me that Brazil, along with some other countries, is ahead of the curve on this because it’s considered remote voting before.

But legislatures don’t necessarily need fancy apps to make this work. “Other places are doing voting in a very simple way — you’re on a Zoom, they turn on the camera and you put up your hand and you say ‘aye’ or ‘nay,’” Noveck said.

Brazil isn’t the only Latin American country that has quickly adapted to the constraints of the pandemic. On Tuesday, Argentina’s legislature held its first remote session. The Chamber of Deputies was transformed, with panels installed around the chamber to broadcast the faces of the 220 members of Congress, all dialing in from home….(More)”.

Edd Gent at the BBC: “…There are already promising examples of how AI can help us better pool our unique capabilities. San Francisco start-up Unanimous AI has built an online platform that helps guide group decisions. They’ve looked to an unlikely place to guide their AI: the way honeybees make collective decisions.

“We went back to basics and said, ‘How does nature amplify the intelligence of groups?’,” says CEO Louis Rosenberg. “What nature does is form real-time systems, where the groups are interacting all at once together with feedback loops. So, they’re pushing and pulling on each other as a system, and converging on the best possible combination of their knowledge, wisdom, insight and intuition.”

Their Swarm AI platform presents groups with a question and places potential answers in different corners of their screen. Users control a virtual magnet with their mouse and engage in a tug of war to drag an ice hockey puck to the answer they think is correct. The system’s algorithm analyses how each user interacts with the puck – for instance, how much conviction they drag it with or how quickly they waver when they’re in the minority – and  uses this information to determine where the puck moves. That creates feedback loops in which each user is influenced by the choice and conviction of the others allowing the puck to end up at the answer best reflecting the collective wisdom of the group.

Several academic papers and high-profile clients who use the product back up the effectiveness of the Swarm AI platform. In one recent study, a group of traders were asked to forecast the weekly movement of several key stock market indices by trying to drag the puck to one of four answers — up or down by more than 4%, or up and down by less than 4%. With the tool, they boosted their accuracy by 36%.

Credit Suisse has used the platform to help investors forecast the performance of Asian markets; Disney has used it to predict the success of TV shows; and Unanimous has even partnered with Stanford Medical School to boost doctors’ ability to diagnose pneumonia from chest X-rays by 33%….(More)”

See also: Where and when AI and CI meet: exploring the intersection of artificial and collective intelligence towards the goal of innovating how we govern and Identifying Citizens’ Needs by Combining Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Collective Intelligence (CI).

Paper by Anja Lambrecht and Catherine E. Tucker: “It is worrying to think that algorithms might discriminate against minority groups and reinforce existing inequality. Typically, such concerns have focused on the idea that the algorithm’s code could reflect bias, or the data that feeds the algorithm might lead the algorithm to produce uneven outcomes.

In this paper, we highlight another reason for why algorithms might appear biased against minority groups which is the length of time algorithms need to learn: if an algorithm has access to less data for particular groups, or accesses this data at differential speeds, it will produce differential outcomes, potentially disadvantaging minority groups.

Specifically, we revisit a classic study which documents that searches on Google for black names were more likely to return ads that highlighted the need for a criminal background check than searches for white names. We show that at least a partial explanation for this finding is that if consumer demand for a piece of information is low, an algorithm accumulates information at a lesser speed and thus takes longer to learn about consumer preferences. Since black names are less common, the algorithm learns about the quality of the underlying ad more slowly, and as a result an ad is more likely to persist for searches next to black names even if the algorithm judges the ad to be of low-quality. Therefore, the algorithm may be likely to show an ad — including an undesirable ad — in the context of searches for a disadvantaged group for a longer period of time.

We replicate this result using the context of religious affiliations and present evidence that ads targeted towards searches for religious groups persists for longer for groups that are less searched for. This suggests that the process of algorithmic learning can lead to differential outcomes across those whose characteristics are more common and those who are rarer in society….(More)”.

Paper by Brigham Daniels, Mark Buntaine and Tanner Bangerter: “In modern democracies, governmental transparency is thought to have great value. When it comes to addressing administrative corruption and mismanagement, many would agree with Justice Brandeis’s observation that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Beyond this, many credit transparency with enabling meaningful citizen participation.

But even though transparency appears highly correlated with successful governance in developed democracies, assumptions about administrative transparency have remained empirically untested. Testing effects of transparency would prove particularly helpful in developing democracies where transparency norms have not taken hold or only have done so slowly. In these contexts, does administrative transparency really create the sorts of benefits attributed to it? Transparency might grease the gears of developed democracies, but what good is grease when many of the gears seem to be broken or missing entirely?

This Article presents empirical results from a first-of-its-kind field study that tested two major promises of administrative transparency in a developing democracy: that transparency increases public participation in government affairs and that it increases government accountability. To test these hypotheses, we used two randomized controlled trials.

Surprisingly, we found transparency had no significant effect in almost any of our quantitative measurements, although our qualitative results suggested that when transparency interventions exposed corruption, some limited oversight could result. Our findings are particularly significant for developing democracies and show, at least in this context, that Justice Brandeis may have oversold the cleansing effects of transparency. A few rays of transparency shining light on government action do not disinfect the system and cure government corruption and mismanagement. Once corruption and mismanagement are identified, it takes effective government institutions and action from civil society to successfully act as a disinfectant….(More)”.