What To Do With The Urban Spaces Technology Makes Obsolete

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Peter Madden at the Huffington Post: “Digital tech will make many city spaces redundant: artificial intelligence doesn’t care where it works; autonomous vehicles don’t care they where they park. These spaces must be repurposed for cities to thrive in the future….

This is an opportunity to ask what people want from their cities and how redundant spaces can meet these needs.

There have been multiple academic studies and marketing surveys on this, and they boil down to two main things. Citizens first want the basics: employment opportunities, affordable housing, good transport, and safe streets. Further up the hierarchy of needs, they also care about the physical appearance of the city, including the availability of parks and green spaces, the feel of the city in terms of openness, diversity and social interaction, and the experience in the city whether that’s tasting new foods, buying an unexpected gift, or discovering a new band.

Re-Greening

The places that were once reserved for cars can be spaces for pedestrians and bike lanes, with walkable and cycle-friendly cities offering cheaper transit, healthier citizens, and stronger communities. Greenery could flourish, with new parks, trees and allotments providing access to nature, sponges to absorb flood-water and urban cooling in a warming world.

Flexible Working

Who really wants a lengthy commute to a regimented workplace? Future office spaces will harness new technology to help people work flexibly, collaboratively and from multiple locations. When they do travel into the city centre office, this will be oriented around the experience of the individual employee, beautifully designed, technologically responsive, with different spaces for how they work best at different times of the day and on different tasks.

Making in Cities

The 4th industrial revolution allows manufacturing to return to urban centres for just-in-time, on demand and hyper-personalised production. Some ‘on-shoring’ is already happening, with McLaren car chassis, Clarks boots and Frog bikes being made again in British towns again. Data analytics, virtual reality, new materials, robotics and 3D printing will make it possible to produce or customise things on the high-street, right where the consumer wants them.

Affordable Housing

Unused buildings and empty land will be filled by new types of housing. In my home city, Bristol, a redundant building in a parade of shops is being turned into living space for the homeless, AEOB will ‘buy and convert empty offices into homes for people’, and ‘We Can Make’ is offering affordable prefabricated houses for empty urban plots. Housing innovations like this are springing up in cities across the world….(More)”.

Data in the EU: Commission steps up efforts to increase availability and boost healthcare data sharing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PressRelease: “Today, the European Commission is putting forward a set of measures to increase the availability of data in the EU, building on previous initiatives to boost the free flow of non-personal data in the Digital Single Market.

Data-driven innovation is a key enabler of market growth, job creation, particularly for SMEs and startups, and the development of new technologies. It allows citizens to easily access and manage their health data, and allows public authorities to use data better in research, prevention and health system reforms….

Today’s proposals build on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will enter into application as of 25 May 2018. They will ensure:

  • Better access to and reusability of public sector data: A revised law on Public Sector Information covers data held by public undertakings in transport and utilities sectors. The new rules limit the exceptions that allow public bodies to charge more than the marginal costs of data dissemination for the reuse of their data. They also facilitate the reusability of open research data resulting from public funding, and oblige Member States to develop open access policies. Finally, the new rules require – where applicable – technical solutions like Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to provide real-time access to data.
  • Scientific data sharing in 2018: A new set of recommendations address the policy and technological changes since the last Commission proposal on access to and preservation of scientific information. They offer guidance on implementing open access policies in line with open science objectives, research data and data management, the creation of a European Open Science Cloud, and text and data-mining. They also highlight the importance of incentives, rewards, skills and metrics appropriate for the new era of networked research.
  • Private sector data sharing in business-to-business and business-to-governments contexts: A new Communication entitled “Towards a common European data space” provides guidance for businesses operating in the EU on the legal and technical principles that should govern data sharing collaboration in the private sector.
  • Securing citizens’ healthcare data while fostering European cooperation: The Commission is today setting out a plan of action that puts citizens first when it comes to data on citizens’ health: by securing citizens’ access to their health data and introducing the possibility to share their data across borders; by using larger data sets to enable more personalised diagnoses and medical treatment, and better anticipate epidemics; and by promoting appropriate digital tools, allowing public authorities to better use health data for research and for health system reforms. Today’s proposal also covers the interoperability of electronic health records as well as a mechanism for voluntary coordination in sharing data – including genomic data – for disease prevention and research….(More)”.

What Is Human-Centric Design?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zack Quaintance at GovTech: “…Government services, like all services, have historically used some form of design to deploy user-facing components. The design portion of this equation is nothing new. What Olesund says is new, however, is the human-centric component.

“In the past, government services were often designed from the perspective and need of the government institution, not necessarily with the needs or desires of residents or constituents in mind,” said Olesund. “This might lead, for example, to an accumulation of stats and requirements for residents, or utilization of outdated technology because the government institution is locked into a contract.”

Basically, government has never set out to design its services to be clunky or hard to use. These qualities have, however, grown out of the legally complex frameworks that governments must adhere to, which can subsequently result in a failure to prioritize the needs of the people using the services rather than the institution.

Change, however, is underway. Human-centric design is one of the main priorities of the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) and 18F, a pair of organizations created under the Obama administration with missions that largely involve making government services more accessible to the citizenry through efficient use of tech.

Although the needs of state and municipal governments are more localized, the gov tech work done at the federal level by the USDS and 18F has at times served as a benchmark or guidepost for smaller government agencies.

“They both redesign services to make them digital and user-friendly,” Olesund said. “But they also do a lot of work creating frameworks and best practices for other government agencies to adopt in order to achieve some of the broader systemic change.”

One of the most tangible examples of human-centered design at the state or local level can be found at Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services, which recently worked with the Detroit-based design studio Civillato reduce its paper services application from 40 pages, 18,000-some words and 1,000 questions, down to 18 pages, 3,904 words and 213 questions. Currently, Civilla is working with the nonprofit civic tech group Code for America to help bring the same massive level of human-centered design progress to the state’s digital services.

Other work is underway in San Francisco’s City Hall and within the state of California. A number of cities also have iTeams funded through Bloomberg Philanthropies, and their missions are to innovate in ways that solve ongoing municipal problems, a mission that often requires use of human-centric design….(More)”.

The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can’t Do

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Edward Tenner: “A bold challenge to our obsession with efficiency–and a new understanding of how to benefit from the powerful potential of serendipity

Algorithms, multitasking, the sharing economy, life hacks: our culture can’t get enough of efficiency. One of the great promises of the Internet and big data revolutions is the idea that we can improve the processes and routines of our work and personal lives to get more done in less time than we ever have before. There is no doubt that we’re performing at higher levels and moving at unprecedented speed, but what if we’re headed in the wrong direction?

Melding the long-term history of technology with the latest headlines and findings of computer science and social science, The Efficiency Paradox questions our ingrained assumptions about efficiency, persuasively showing how relying on the algorithms of digital platforms can in fact lead to wasted efforts, missed opportunities, and above all an inability to break out of established patterns. Edward Tenner offers a smarter way of thinking about efficiency, revealing what we and our institutions, when equipped with an astute combination of artificial intelligence and trained intuition, can learn from the random and unexpected….(More)”

How Artificial Intelligence Could Increase the Risk of Nuclear War

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rand Corporation: “The fear that computers, by mistake or malice, might lead humanity to the brink of nuclear annihilation has haunted imaginations since the earliest days of the Cold War.

The danger might soon be more science than fiction. Stunning advances in AI have created machines that can learn and think, provoking a new arms race among the world’s major nuclear powers. It’s not the killer robots of Hollywood blockbusters that we need to worry about; it’s how computers might challenge the basic rules of nuclear deterrence and lead humans into making devastating decisions.

That’s the premise behind a new paper from RAND Corporation, How Might Artificial Intelligence Affect the Risk of Nuclear War? It’s part of a special project within RAND, known as Security 2040, to look over the horizon and anticipate coming threats.

“This isn’t just a movie scenario,” said Andrew Lohn, an engineer at RAND who coauthored the paper and whose experience with AI includes using it to route drones, identify whale calls, and predict the outcomes of NBA games. “Things that are relatively simple can raise tensions and lead us to some dangerous places if we are not careful.”…(More)”.

Towards a new generation of public services: Designers Italia’s design kits

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matteo DeSanti: “Our lives are becoming more and more digital and we expect the public services we use every day to be digital as well: booking a medical examination, receiving a pension, paying the waste tax, obtaining an authorization or a document. Moreover, we would like for all digital public services to have standards of quality comparable to the best private services we use to inform ourselves, make purchases or reservations. When using a digital public service, we would like to have concrete advantages, in particular: higher quality and ease of use, better accessibility, more flexibility and speed.

As the Three-Year Plan for Digital Transformation explains, this is a unique opportunity to design a new generation of public services making citizens and businesses the starting point rather than simply complying with rules and ordinances. We need the right professionalism, the right skills and the right tools: this is why we created Designers Italia and it is also why today we are launching the new design system.

The Public Service Design Kits introduce a method of work based on user research, the rapid exploration of solutions and the development of effective and sustainable products. Also, the Public Service Design Kits also strongly push towards higher standards, providing interface components and codeso that the country’s thousands of administrations don’t have to waste time “inventing the wheel every time.”

The fourteen kits we provide cover all aspects of a service design process, from research to user interface, from prototyping to development and each kit offers different advantages….(More)”.

How artificial intelligence is transforming the world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Darrell West and John Allen at Brookings: “Most people are not very familiar with the concept of artificial intelligence (AI). As an illustration, when 1,500 senior business leaders in the United States in 2017 were asked about AI, only 17 percent said they were familiar with it. A number of them were not sure what it was or how it would affect their particular companies. They understood there was considerable potential for altering business processes, but were not clear how AI could be deployed within their own organizations.

Despite its widespread lack of familiarity, AI is a technology that is transforming every walk of life. It is a wide-ranging tool that enables people to rethink how we integrate information, analyze data, and use the resulting insights to improve decisionmaking. Our hope through this comprehensive overview is to explain AI to an audience of policymakers, opinion leaders, and interested observers, and demonstrate how AI already is altering the world and raising important questions for society, the economy, and governance.

In this paper, we discuss novel applications in finance, national security, health care, criminal justice, transportation, and smart cities, and address issues such as data access problems, algorithmic bias, AI ethics and transparency, and legal liability for AI decisions. We contrast the regulatory approaches of the U.S. and European Union, and close by making a number of recommendations for getting the most out of AI while still protecting important human values.

In order to maximize AI benefits, we recommend nine steps for going forward:

  • Encourage greater data access for researchers without compromising users’ personal privacy,
  • invest more government funding in unclassified AI research,
  • promote new models of digital education and AI workforce development so employees have the skills needed in the 21st-century economy,
  • create a federal AI advisory committee to make policy recommendations,
  • engage with state and local officials so they enact effective policies,
  • regulate broad AI principles rather than specific algorithms,
  • take bias complaints seriously so AI does not replicate historic injustice, unfairness, or discrimination in data or algorithms,
  • maintain mechanisms for human oversight and control, and
  • penalize malicious AI behavior and promote cybersecurity….(More)

Table of Contents
I. Qualities of artificial intelligence
II. Applications in diverse sectors
III. Policy, regulatory, and ethical issues
IV. Recommendations
V. Conclusion

Artificial Unintelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Meredith Broussard: “A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right.

In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right.

Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it’s just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can’t pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone…(More)”.

Using Data to Inform the Science of Broadening Participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Donna K. Ginther at the American Behavioral Scientist: “In this article, I describe how data and econometric methods can be used to study the science of broadening participation. I start by showing that theory can be used to structure the approach to using data to investigate gender and race/ethnicity differences in career outcomes. I also illustrate this process by examining whether women of color who apply for National Institutes of Health research funding are confronted with a double bind where race and gender compound their disadvantage relative to Whites. Although high-quality data are needed for understanding the barriers to broadening participation in science careers, it cannot fully explain why women and underrepresented minorities are less likely to be scientists or have less productive science careers. As researchers, it is important to use all forms of data—quantitative, experimental, and qualitative—to deepen our understanding of the barriers to broadening participation….(More)”.

A survey of incentive engineering for crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Conor Muldoon, Michael J. O’Grady and Gregory M. P. O’Hare in the Knowledge Engineering Review: “With the growth of the Internet, crowdsourcing has become a popular way to perform intelligence tasks that hitherto would be either performed internally within an organization or not undertaken due to prohibitive costs and the lack of an appropriate communications infrastructure.

In crowdsourcing systems, whereby multiple agents are not under the direct control of a system designer, it cannot be assumed that agents will act in a manner that is consistent with the objectives of the system designer or principal agent. In situations whereby agents’ goals are to maximize their return in crowdsourcing systems that offer financial or other rewards, strategies will be adopted by agents to game the system if appropriate mitigating measures are not put in place.

The motivational and incentivization research space is quite large; it incorporates diverse techniques from a variety of different disciplines including behavioural economics, incentive theory, and game theory. This paper specifically focusses on game theoretic approaches to the problem in the crowdsourcing domain and places it in the context of the wider research landscape. It provides a survey of incentive engineering techniques that enable the creation of apt incentive structures in a range of different scenarios….(More)”.