Stefaan Verhulst

Talent Gap Is a Main Roadblock as Agencies Eye Emerging Tech

Curated on November 20, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Theo Douglas in GovTech: “U.S. public service agencies are closely eyeing emerging technologies, chiefly advanced analytics and predictive modeling, according to a new report from Accenture, but like their counterparts globally they must address talent and complexity issues before adoption rates will rise.

The report, Emerging Technologies in Public Service, compiled a nine-nation survey of IT officials across all levels of government in policing and justice, health and social services, revenue, border services, pension/Social Security and administration, and was released earlier this week.

It revealed a deep interest in emerging tech from the public sector, finding 70 percent of agencies are evaluating their potential — but a much lower adoption level, with just 25 percent going beyond piloting to implementation….

The revenue and tax industries have been early adopters of advanced analytics and predictive modeling, he said, while biometrics and video analytics are resonating with police agencies.

In Australia, the tax office found using voiceprint technology could save 75,000 work hours annually.

Closer to home, Utah Chief Technology Officer Dave Fletcher told Accenture that consolidating data centers into a virtualized infrastructure improved speed and flexibility, so some processes that once took weeks or months can now happen in minutes or hours.

Nationally, 70 percent of agencies have either piloted or implemented an advanced analytics or predictive modeling program. Biometrics and identity analytics were the next most popular technologies, with 29 percent piloting or implementing, followed by machine learning at 22 percent.

Those numbers contrast globally with Australia, where 68 percent of government agencies have charged into piloting and implementing biometric and identity analytics programs; and Germany and Singapore, where 27 percent and 57 percent of agencies respectively have piloted or adopted video analytic programs.

Overall, 78 percent of respondents said they were either underway or had implemented some machine-learning technologies.

The benefits of embracing emerging tech that were identified ranged from finding better ways of working through automation to innovating and developing new services and reducing costs.

Agencies told Accenture their No. 1 objective was increasing customer satisfaction. But 89 percent said they’d expect a return on implementing intelligent technology within two years. Four-fifths, or 80 percent, agreed intelligent tech would improve employees’ job satisfaction….(More).

Open Data Workspace for Analyzing Hate Crime Trends

Curated on November 20, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and data.world today announced the launch of a public, open data workspace to help understand and combat the rise of hate crimes. The new workspace offers instant access to ADL data alongside relevant data from the FBI and other authoritative sources, and provides citizens, journalists and lawmakers with tools to more effectively analyze, visualize and discuss hate crimes across the United States.

The new workspace was unveiled at ADL’s inaugural “Never Is Now” Summit on Anti-Semitism, a daylong event bringing together nearly 1,000 people in New York City to hear from an array of experts on developing innovative new ways to combat anti-Semitism and bigotry….

Hate Crime Reporting Gaps

The color scale depicts total reported hate crime incidents per 100,000 people in each state. States with darker shading have more reported incidents of hate crimes while states with lighter shading have fewer reported incidents. The green circles proportionally represent cities that either Did Not Report hate crime data or affirmatively reported 0 hate crimes for the year 2015. Note the lightly shaded states in which many cities either Do Not Report or affirmatively report 0 hate crimes….(More)”

Is Government Really Broken?

Curated on November 19, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Cary Coglianese: “The widespread public angst that surfaced in the 2016 presidential election revealed how many Americans believe their government has become badly broken. Given the serious problems that continue to persist in society — crime, illiteracy, unemployment, poverty, discrimination, to name a few — widespread beliefs in a governmental breakdown are understandable. Yet such a breakdown is actually far from self-evident. In this paper, I explain how diagnoses of governmental performance depend on the perspective from which current conditions in the country are viewed. Certainly when judged against a standard of perfection, America has a long way to go. But perfection is no meaningful basis upon which to conclude that government has broken down. I offer and assess three alternative, more realistic benchmarks of government’s performance: (1) reliance on a standard of acceptable imperfection; (2) comparisons with other countries or time periods; and (3) the use of counterfactual inferences. Viewed from these perspectives, the notion of an irreparable governmental failure in the United States becomes quite questionable. Although serious economic and social shortcomings certainly exist, the nation’s strong economy and steadily improving living conditions in recent decades simply could not have occurred if government were not functioning well. Rather than embracing despair and giving in to cynicism and resignation, citizens and their leaders would do better to treat the nation’s problems as conditions of disrepair needing continued democratic engagement. It remains possible to achieve greater justice and better economic and social conditions for all — but only if we, the people, do not give up on the pursuit of these goals….(More)”

Embracing Digital Democracy: A Call for Building an Online Civic Commons

Curated on November 19, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

John Gastil and Robert C. Richards Jr. in Political Science & Politics (Forthcoming): “Recent advances in online civic engagement tools have created a digital civic space replete with opportunities to craft and critique laws and rules or evaluate candidates, ballot measures, and policy ideas. These civic spaces, however, remain largely disconnected from one another, such that tremendous energy dissipates from each civic portal. Long-term feedback loops also remain rare. We propose addressing these limitations by building an integrative online commons that links together the best existing tools by making them components in a larger “Democracy Machine.” Drawing on gamification principles, this integrative platform would provide incentives for drawing new people into the civic sphere, encouraging more sustained and deliberative engagement, and feedback back to government and citizen alike to improve how the public interfaces with the public sector. After describing this proposed platform, we consider the most challenging problems it faces and how to address them….(More)”

Crowdjury

Curated on November 19, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“Crowdjury is an online platform that crowdsources judicial proceedings: filing of complaints, evaluation of evidence, trial and jury verdict.

Fast, affordable, transparent justice

Crowdjury algorithms are optimized to reach a true verdict for each case, quickly and at minimal cost.

Do well by doing good

Jurors and Researchers from the crowd are rewarded in Bitcoin. You help do good, you earn money….

Want to know more? Read the White Paper “

Who Is Doing Computational Social Science?

Curated on November 19, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Trends in Big Data Research, a Sage Whitepaper: “Information of all kinds is now being produced, collected, and analyzed at unprecedented speed, breadth, depth, and scale. The capacity to collect and analyze massive data sets has already transformed fields such as biology, astronomy, and physics, but the social sciences have been comparatively slower to adapt, and the path forward is less certain. For many, the big data revolution promises to ask, and answer, fundamental questions about individuals and collectives, but large data sets alone will not solve major social or scientific problems. New paradigms being developed by the emerging field of “computational social science” will be needed not only for research methodology, but also for study design and interpretation, cross-disciplinary collaboration, data curation and dissemination, visualization, replication, and research ethics (Lazer et al., 2009). SAGE Publishing conducted a survey with social scientists around the world to learn more about researchers engaged in big data research and the challenges they face, as well as the barriers to entry for those looking to engage in this kind of research in the future. We were also interested in the challenges of teaching computational social science methods to students. The survey was fully completed by 9412 respondents, indicating strong interest in this topic among our social science contacts. Of respondents, 33 percent had been involved in big data research of some kind and, of those who have not yet engaged in big data research, 49 percent (3057 respondents) said that they are either “definitely planning on doing so in the future” or “might do so in the future.”…(More)”

The ethical impact of data science

Curated on November 19, 2016July 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Theme issue of Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A compiled and edited by Mariarosaria Taddeo and Luciano Floridi: “This theme issue has the founding ambition of landscaping data ethics as a new branch of ethics that studies and evaluates moral problems related to data (including generation, recording, curation, processing, dissemination, sharing and use), algorithms (including artificial intelligence, artificial agents, machine learning and robots) and corresponding practices (including responsible innovation, programming, hacking and professional codes), in order to formulate and support morally good solutions (e.g. right conducts or right values). Data ethics builds on the foundation provided by computer and information ethics but, at the same time, it refines the approach endorsed so far in this research field, by shifting the level of abstraction of ethical enquiries, from being information-centric to being data-centric. This shift brings into focus the different moral dimensions of all kinds of data, even data that never translate directly into information but can be used to support actions or generate behaviours, for example. It highlights the need for ethical analyses to concentrate on the content and nature of computational operations—the interactions among hardware, software and data—rather than on the variety of digital technologies that enable them. And it emphasizes the complexity of the ethical challenges posed by data science. Because of such complexity, data ethics should be developed from the start as a macroethics, that is, as an overall framework that avoids narrow, ad hoc approaches and addresses the ethical impact and implications of data science and its applications within a consistent, holistic and inclusive framework. Only as a macroethics will data ethics provide solutions that can maximize the value of data science for our societies, for all of us and for our environments….(More)”

Table of Contents:

The dynamics of big data and human rights: the case of scientific research; Effy Vayena, John Tasioulas
Facilitating the ethical use of health data for the benefit of society: electronic health records, consent and the duty of easy rescue; Sebastian Porsdam Mann, Julian Savulescu, Barbara J. Sahakian
Faultless responsibility: on the nature and allocation of moral responsibility for distributed moral actions; Luciano Floridi
Compelling truth: legal protection of the infosphere against big data spills; Burkhard Schafer
Locating ethics in data science: responsibility and accountability in global and distributed knowledge production systems; Sabina Leonelli
Privacy is an essentially contested concept: a multi-dimensional analytic for mapping privacy; Deirdre K. Mulligan, Colin Koopman, Nick Doty
Beyond privacy and exposure: ethical issues within citizen-facing analytics; Peter Grindrod
The ethics of smart cities and urban science; Rob Kitchin
The ethics of big data as a public good: which public? Whose good? Linnet Taylor
Data philanthropy and the design of the infraethics for information societies; Mariarosaria Taddeo
The opportunities and ethics of big data: practical priorities for a national Council of Data Ethics; Olivia Varley-Winter, Hetan Shah
Data science ethics in government; Cat Drew
The ethics of data and of data science: an economist’s perspective; Jonathan Cave
What’s the good of a science platform? John Gallacher

From Tech-Driven to Human-Centred: Opengov has a Bright Future Ahead

Curated on November 17, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Martin Tisné: ” The anti-corruption and transparency field ten years ago was in pre-iPhone mode. Few if any of us spoke of the impact or relevance of technology to what would become known as the open government movement. When the wave of smart phone and other technology hit from the late 2000s onwards, it hit hard, and scaled fast. The ability of technology to create ‘impact at scale’ became the obvious truism of our sector, so much so that pointing out the failures of techno-utopianism became a favorite pastime for pundits and academics. The technological developments of the next ten years will be more human-centered — less ‘build it and they will come’ — and more aware of the un-intended consequences of technology (e.g. the fairness of Artifical Intelligence decision making) whilst still being deeply steeped in the technology itself.

By 2010, two major open data initiatives had launched and were already seen as successful in the US and UK, one of President Obama’s first memorandums was on openness and transparency, and an international research project had tracked 63 different instances of uses of technology for transparency around the world (from Reclamos in Chile, to I Paid a Bribe in India, via Maji Matone in Tanzania). Open data projects numbered over 200 world-wide within barely a year of data.gov.uk launching and to everyone’s surprise topped the list of Open Government Partnership commitments a few years hence.

The technology genie won’t go back into the bottle: the field will continue to grow alongside technological developments. But it would take a bold or foolish pundit to guess which of blockchain or other developments will have radically changed the field by 2025.

What is clearer is that the sector is more questioning towards technology, more human-centered both in the design of those technologies and in seeking to understand and pre-empt their impact….

We’ve moved from cyber-utopianism less than ten years ago to born-digital organisations taking a much more critical look at the deployment of technology. The evangelical phase of the open data movement is coming to an end. The movement no longer needs to preach the virtues of unfettered openness to get a foot in the door. It seeks to frame the debate as to whether, when and how data might legitimately be shared or closed, and what impacts those releases may have on privacy, surveillance, discrimination. An open government movement that is more human-centered and aware of the un-intended consequences of technology, has a bright and impactful future ahead….(More)”

Council on Community Solutions

Curated on November 17, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Fact Sheet by The White House on “Establishing a Council on Community Solutions to Align Federal Efforts with Local Priorities and Citizens’ Needs”: “Today, building on the Administration’s efforts to modernize the way the Federal Government works with cities, counties, and communities — rural, tribal, urban, and sub-urban – the President signed an Executive Order establishing a Community Solutions Council. The Council will provide a lasting structure for Federal agencies to strengthen partnerships with communities and improve coordination across the Federal Government in order to more efficiently deliver assistance and maximize impact.

Across the country, citizens and local leaders need a Federal Government that is more effective, responsive, and collaborative in addressing their needs and challenges. Far too often, the Federal Government has taken a “one-size-fits-all” approach to working with communities and left local leaders on their own to find Federal resources and navigate disparate programs. Responding to the call for change from local officials and leaders nationwide, and grounded in the belief that the best solutions come from the bottom up, not from the top down, Federal agencies have increasingly taken on a different approach to working with communities to deliver better outcomes in more than 1,800 cities, towns, regions, and tribal communities nationwide.

As a part of this new way of working, Federal agencies are partnering with local officials to support local plans and visions. They are crossing agency and program silos to support cities, towns, counties and tribes in implementing locally-developed plans for improvement – from re-lighting city streets to breathing new life into half-empty rural main streets. And by using data to measure success and harnessing technology, Federal agencies are focusing on community-driven solutions and what works, while monitoring progress to make investments that have a strong base of evidence behind them.

Building on this success, the President today signed an Executive Order (EO) that will continue to make government work better for the American people. The EO establishes a Council for Community Solutions to streamline and improve the way the Federal Government works with cities, counties, and communities – rural, tribal, urban and sub-urban – to improve outcomes. The Council includes leadership from agencies, departments and offices across the Federal Government and the White House, who together will develop and implement policy that puts local priorities first, highlights successful solutions based on best practices, and streamlines Federal support for communities. Further, the Council, where appropriate, will engage with representatives and leaders of organizations, businesses and communities to expand and improve partnerships that address the most pressing challenges communities face….

Harnessing Data and Technology to Improve Outcomes for Communities: The Federal government is working to foster collaborations between communities and the tech sector, non-profits and citizens to help communities develop new ways to use both Federal and local data to address challenges with greater precision and innovation. As a result, new digital tools are helping citizens find affordable housing near jobs and transportation, matching unemployed Americans with jobs that meet their skills, enabling local leaders to use data to better target investments, and more…(More)”