Stefaan Verhulst

About: “The Public Interest Technology Universities Network is a partnership that fosters collaboration between 21 universities and colleges committed to building the nascent field of public interest technology and growing a new generation of civic-minded technologists. Through the development of curricula, research agendas, and experiential learning programs in the public interest technology space, these universities are trying innovative tactics to produce graduates with multiple fluencies at the intersection of technology and policy. By joining PIT-UN, members commit to field building on campus. Members may choose to focus on some or all of these elements, in addition to other initiatives they deem relevant to establishing public interest technology on campus:

1. Support curriculum and faculty development to enable interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary education of students, so they can critically assess the ethical, political, and societal implications of new technologies, and design technologies in service of the public good.
2. Develop experiential learning opportunities such as clinics, fellowships, apprenticeships, and internship, with public and private sector partners in the public interest technology space.
3. Find ways to support graduates who pursue careers working in public interest technology, recognizing that financial considerations may make careers in this area unaffordable to many.
4. Create mechanisms for faculty to receive recognition for the research, curriculum development, teaching, and service work needed to build public interest technology as an arena of inquiry.
5. Provide institutional data that will allow us to measure the effectiveness of our interventions in helping to develop the field of public interest technology….(More)”.

Book by Eric Topol: “Medicine has become inhuman, to disastrous effect. The doctor-patient relationship–the heart of medicine–is broken: doctors are too distracted and overwhelmed to truly connect with their patients, and medical errors and misdiagnoses abound. In Deep Medicine, leading physician Eric Topol reveals how artificial intelligence can help. AI has the potential to transform everything doctors do, from notetaking and medical scans to diagnosis and treatment, greatly cutting down the cost of medicine and reducing human mortality. By freeing physicians from the tasks that interfere with human connection, AI will create space for the real healing that takes place between a doctor who can listen and a patient who needs to be heard. Innovative, provocative, and hopeful, Deep Medicine shows us how the awesome power of AI can make medicine better, for all the humans involved….(More)”.

Introduction by A.F. Winfield, K. Michael, J. Pitt, V. Evers of Special Issue of Proceedings of the IEEE: “…The primary focus of this special issue is machine ethics, that is the question of how autonomous systems can be imbued with ethical values. Ethical autonomous systems are needed because, inevitably, near future systems are moral agents; consider driverless cars, or medical diagnosis AIs, both of which will need to make choices with ethical consequences. This special issue includes papers that describe both implicit ethical agents, that is machines designed to avoid unethical outcomes, and explicit ethical agents: machines which either encode or learn ethics and determine actions based on those ethics. Of course ethical machines are socio-technical systems thus, as a secondary focus, this issue includes papers that explore the societal and regulatory implications of machine ethics, including the question of ethical governance. Ethical governance is needed in order to develop standards and processes that allow us to transparently and robustly assure the safety of ethical autonomous systems and hence build public trust and confidence….(More)?

Presentation by Constance Carr and Markus Hesse: “We want to address a discrepancy; that is, the discrepancy between processes and practices of technological development on one hand and/or production processes of urban change and urban problems on the other. There’s a gap here, that we can illustrate with the case of the so called“Google City”.

The scholarly literature on digital cities is quite clear that there are externalities, uncertainties and risks associated with the hype around, and the rash introduction of, ‘smartness’. To us, an old saying comes to mind: Don’t put the wagon before the horse.

Obviously, digitization and technology have revolutionized geography in many ways. And, this is nothing new. Roughly twenty years ago, with the rise of the Internet, some, such as MIT’s Bill Mitchell (1995), speculated that it and other ITs would eradicate space into the ‘City of Bits’. However, even back then statements like these didn’t go uncriticised by those who pointed at the inherent technological determinism and exposed that there is a complex relationship between urban development, urban planning, and technological innovation; that the relationship was neither new, nor trivial such that tech, itself, would automatically and necessarily be productive, beneficial, and central to cities.

What has changed is the proliferation of digital technologies and their applications. We agree with Ash et al. (2016) that geography has experienced a ‘digital turn’ where urban geography now produced by, through and of digitization. And, while digitalization of urbanity has provided benefits, it has also come sidelong a number of unsolved problems.

First, behind the production of big data, algorithms, and digital design, there are certain epistemologies – ways of knowing. Data is not value-free. Rather, data is an end product of political and associated methods of framing that structure the production of data. So, now that we “live in a present characterized by a […] diverse array of spatially-enabled digital devices, platforms, applications and services,” (Ash et al. 2016: 28), we can interrogate how these processes and algorithms are informed by socio-economic inequalities, because the risk is that new technologies will simply reproduce them.

Second, the circulation of data around the globe invokes questions about who owns and regulates them when stored and processed in remote geographic locations….(More)”.

Paper by Löfgren, Åsa & Nordblom, Katarina: “…we develop a theoretical model to clarify the underlying mechanisms that drive individual decision making and responses to behavioral interventions, such as nudges. The contribution of the paper is three-fold: First, the model provides a theoretical framework that comprehensively structures the individual decision-making process applicable to a wide range of choice situations. Second, we reduce the confusion regarding what should be called a nudge by offering a clear classification of behavioral interventions. We distinguish among what we label as pure nudges, preference nudges, and other behavioral interventions. Third, we identify the mechanisms behind the effectiveness of behavioral interventions based on the structured decision-making process. Hence, the model can be used to predict under which circumstances, and in which choice situations, a nudge is likely to be effective….(More)”

Introduction to Special Issue of Business and Society by Dirk Matten, Ronald Deibert & Mikkel Flyverbom: “The importance of digital technologies for social and economic developments and a growing focus on data collection and privacy concerns have made the Internet a salient and visible issue in global politics. Recent developments have increased the awareness that the current approach of governments and business to the governance of the Internet and the adjacent technological spaces raises a host of ethical issues. The significance and challenges of the digital age have been further accentuated by a string of highly exposed cases of surveillance and a growing concern about issues of privacy and the power of this new industry. This special issue explores what some have referred to as the “Internet-industrial complex”—the intersections between business, states, and other actors in the shaping, development, and governance of the Internet…(More)”.

Book by Alfredo M. Ronchi: “…This book explores a society currently being transformed by the influence of advanced information technology, and provides insights into the main technological and human issues and a holistic approach to inclusion, security, safety and, last but not least, privacy and freedom of expression. Its main aim is to bridge the gap between technological solutions, their successful implementation, and the fruitful utilization of the main set of e-Services offered by governments, private institutions, and commercial companies.
Today, various parameters actively influence e-Services’ success or failure: cultural aspects, organisational issues, bureaucracy and workflow, infrastructure and technology in general, user habits, literacy, capacity or merely interaction design. The purpose of this book is to help in outlining and understanding a realistic scenario of what we can term e-Citizenry. It identifies today’s citizen, who is surrounded by an abundance of digital services, as an “e-Citizen” and explores the transition from their traditional role and behaviour to new ones. The respective chapters presented here will lay the foundation of the technological and social environment in which this societal transition takes place…(More)”.

Book edited by Sarah B. Macfarlane and Carla AbouZahr: “This handbook compiles methods for gathering, organizing and disseminating data to inform policy and manage health systems worldwide. Contributing authors describe national and international structures for generating data and explain the relevance of ethics, policy, epidemiology, health economics, demography, statistics, geography and qualitative methods to describing population health. The reader, whether a student of global health, public health practitioner, programme manager, data analyst or policymaker, will appreciate the methods, context and importance of collecting and using global health data….(More)”.

Book by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski: “For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us?

An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before….(More)”.

(Open Access) Book by Roxana Radu: “… provides an incisive analysis of the emergence and evolution of global Internet governance, revealing its mechanisms, key actors and dominant community practices. Based on extensive empirical analysis covering more than four decades, it presents the evolution of Internet regulation from the early days of networking to more recent debates on algorithms and artificial intelligence, putting into perspective its politically-mediated system of rules built on technical features and power differentials. 

For anyone interested in understanding contemporary global developments, this book is a primer on how norms of behaviour online and Internet regulation are renegotiated in numerous fora by a variety of actors – including governments, businesses, international organisations, civil society, technical and academic experts – and what that means for everyday users….(More)”.