Big data helps Belfort, France, allocate buses on routes according to demand

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in Digital Trends: “As modern cities smarten up, the priority for many will be transportation. Belfort, a mid-sized French industrial city of 50,000, serves as proof of concept for improved urban transportation that does not require the time and expense of covering the city with sensors and cameras.

Working with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and GFI Informatique, the Board of Public Transportation of Belfort overhauled bus service management of the city’s 100-plus buses. The project entailed a combination of ID cards, GPS-equipped card readers on buses, and big data analysis. The collected data was used to measure bus speed from stop to stop, passenger flow to observe when and where people got on and off, and bus route density. From start to finish, the proof of concept project took four weeks.

Using the TCS Intelligent Urban Exchange system, operations managers were able to detect when and where about 20 percent of all bus passengers boarded and got off on each city bus route. Utilizing big data and artificial intelligence the city’s urban planners were able to use that data analysis to make cost-effective adjustments including the allocation of additional buses on routes and during times of greater passenger demand. They were also able to cut back on buses for minimally used routes and stops. In addition, the system provided feedback on the effect of city construction projects on bus service….

Going forward, continued data analysis will help the city budget wisely for infrastructure changes and new equipment purchases. The goal is to put the money where the needs are greatest rather than just spending and then waiting to see if usage justified the expense. The push for smarter cities has to be not just about improved services, but also smart resource allocation — in the Belfort project, the use of big data showed how to do both….(More)”

Mapatón CDMX

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

HBS Case Study by Mitchell Weiss and Maria Fernanda Miguel: “There were probably 30,000 public buses, minibuses, and vans in Mexico City. Though, in 2015, no one knew for certain since no comprehensive schedule existed. This was why el Laboratorio para la Ciudad (or LabCDMX) had spawned an effort to generate a map of the labyrinth system that provided an estimated 14 million rides a day. Gabriella Gómez-Mont, the Lab’s founder and director, had led her team in a project to crowd-source the routes from volunteer riders in what came to be known as Mapatón CDMX. After four pilots and a two-week “mapping marathon” later, she wondered exactly what to make of the lab’s fiftieth experiment? Was Mapatón successful?

Learning objective:

LabCDMX and their crowdsourced bus mapping project provides the setting to explore risk taking and experimentation in public settings. The case is designed to focus students most acutely on questions of can government take more risk and how? This is a key question for public entreprenuers. In class, students are encouraged to think both about the obstacles for risk taking and the tactics that elected leaders and innovation champions can take to surmount those obstacles. Students consider whether experimentation is one of those potential skills and, if so, how best and rigorously those experiments must be run. How willing must government be to admit failure if experiments don’t pan out? What can give them that leeway? How, tactically, can governments run these kinds of experiments? Is using off-the-shelf technology for quick, but imperfect beta services a productive strategy for securing buy-in and for learning? The case is adaptable for exploring big company settings, too. Mexico City’s municipal government is a giant organization, with 300,000 public workers. What is the role of an innovation office and it’s handful of employees in that context? How does it gain credibility with the rest of the organization? How do experiments help – or hurt – in that effort?…(More)”.

Closing the Loop

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A Conversation With Chris Anderson: “If we could measure the world, how would we manage it differently? This is a question we’ve been asking ourselves in the digital realm since the birth of the Internet. Our digital lives—clicks, histories, and cookies—can now be measured beautifully. The feedback loop is complete; it’s called closing the loop. As you know, we can only manage what we can measure. We’re now measuring on-screen activity beautifully, but most of the world is not on screens.

As we get better and better at measuring the world—wearables, Internet of Things, cars, satellites, drones, sensors—we are going to be able to close the loop in industry, agriculture, and the environment. We’re going to start to find out what the consequences of our actions are and, presumably, we’ll take smarter actions as a result. This journey with the Internet that we started more than twenty years ago is now extending to the physical world. Every industry is going to have to ask the same questions: What do we want to measure? What do we do with that data? How can we manage things differently once we have that data? This notion of closing the loop everywhere is perhaps the biggest endeavor of our age.

Closing the loop is a phrase used in robotics. Open-loop systems are when you take an action and you can’t measure the results—there’s no feedback. Closed-loop systems are when you take an action, you measure the results, and you change your action accordingly. Systems with closed loops have feedback loops; they self-adjust and quickly stabilize in optimal conditions. Systems with open loops overshoot; they miss it entirely…(More)”

Just Change: How to Collaborate for Lasting Impact

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Tynesia Boyea-Robinson: “… is a collection of stories and case studies to evolve the way we think about and approach systemic causes of inequities facing low-income communities, particularly communities of color. The book successfully addresses:

  • Cross-sector collaboration as a requirement for sustainable social change;
  • Moving away from siloed programs with single-focused solutions to building systems and infrastructures that improve inequities at the population-level; and
  • Reframing how to think about and measure success in order to achieve scale and impact.

Read about leaders across the country who have successfully created sustainable, long-lasting solutions to address key root causes of inequities in their communities:

  • How the Detroit Corridor Initiative, Cincinnati, and Minneapolis-St Paul used shared results for successful cross-sector partnerships
  • How Nexus Community Partners in Minneapolis changed how they collaborate with the community they’re serving towards a more authentic community engagement
  • How Best Start for Kids in Seattle/King County effectively used cross-sector partnerships
  • How Camden City in New Jersey partnered with Campbell’s Soup for better health outcomes

Discover tested tools and strategies to implement change in your own communities, such as:

  • How the Model Behavior, Align Resources, Catalyze Change (MAC) framework harnesses intrinsic motivation for behavior change
  • How the Data Inventory helps you figure out what data needs to be collected and how to get it
  • Four components of creating effective shared results that will drive your cross-sector partnership towards success…(More)”.

Data and the City: New report on how public data is fostering civic engagement in urban regions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Jonathan Gray and Danny Lämmerhirt: “…demonstrates how public data infrastructures create new kinds of relationships and public spaces between public institutions, civil society groups, and citizens.

In contrast to more supply-oriented ideas around opening (government) data, we argue that data infrastructures are not a mere “raw” resource that can be exploited. Instead they are best conceived as a lively network or ecosystem in which publics creatively use city data to engage with urban institutions.

We intend to spark imagination and conversation about the role that public data infrastructures may play in civic life – not just as neutral instruments for creating knowledge, but also as devices to organise publics and evidence around urban issues; creating shared spaces for public participation and deliberation around official processes and institutions; and securing progress around major social, economic and environmental challenges that cities face.

Our report describes six case studies from cities around the world to demonstrate civil society’s vast action repertoire to engage with urban data infrastructures. One case study demonstrates how a British civil society organisation gathered budget data through freedom of information requests from municipal government. This information was fed into an open database and made accessible to finance experts and scholars in order to allow them to run a “public debt audit”. This audit enabled government officials and the larger public to debate the extent of public debt in British cities and to uncover how a lack of public scrutiny increased profits of financial institutes while putting a strain on the public purse….

In detail, civic actors can engage with data infrastructures to:

  • Identify spaces for intervention. Having cadastral data at hand helped civic actors to identify vacant publicly-owned land, to highlight possibilities for re-using it and to foster community building in neighbourhoods around its re-use.
  • Open spaces for accountability. Using government’s own accounting measurements may provide civil society with evaluation criteria for the effectiveness of public sector programs. Civil society actors may develop a ‘common ground’ or ‘common language’ for engaging with institutions around the issues that they care about.
  • Enable scrutiny of official processes, institutional mechanisms and their effects. By opening public loan data, civil society was able to identify how decentralised fiscal audit mechanisms may have negative effects on public debt.
  • Change the way an issue is framed or perceived. By using aggregated, anonymized data about home addresses of inmates, scholars could shift focus from crime location to the origin of an offender – which helped to address social re-entry programs more effectively.
  • Mobilise community engagement and civic activism. Including facilitating the assembly and organisation of publics around issues….

You can find the full report here.”

How disaster relief efforts could be improved with game theory

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Conversation: “The number of disasters has doubled globally since the 1980s, with the damage and losses estimated at an average US$100 billion a year since the new millennium, and the number of people affected also growing.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the costliest natural disaster in the U.S., with estimates between $100 billion and $125 billion. The death toll of Katrina is still being debated, but we know that at least 2,000 were killed, and thousands were left homeless.

Worldwide, the toll is staggering. The triple disaster of an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown that started March 11, 2011 in Fukushima, Japan killed thousands, as did the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

The challenges to disaster relief organizations, including nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), are immense. The majority operate under a single, common, humanitarian principle of protecting the vulnerable, reducing suffering and supporting the quality of life. At the same time, they need to compete for financial funds from donors to ensure their own sustainability.

This competition is intense. The number of registered U.S. nonprofit organizations increased from 12,000 in 1940 to more than 1.5 million in 2012. Approximately $300 billion are donated to charities in the United States each year.

At the same time, many stakeholders believe that humanitarian aid has not been as successful in delivering on its goals due to a lack of coordination among NGOs, which results in duplication of services.

My team and I have been looking at a novel way to improve how we respond to natural disasters. One solution might be game theory.

Getting the right supplies to those in need is daunting

The need for improvement is strong.

Within three weeks following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, 1,000 NGOs were operating in Haiti. News media attention of insufficient water supplies resulted in immense donations to the Dominican Red Cross to assist its island neighbor. As a result, Port-au-Prince was saturated with cargo and gifts-in-kind, so that shipments from the Dominican Republic had to be halted for multiple days. After the Fukushima disaster, there were too many blankets and items of clothing shipped and even broken bicycles.

In fact, about 60 percent of the items that arrive at a disaster site are nonpriority items. Rescue workers then waste precious time dealing with these nonpriority supplies, whereas victims suffer because they do not receive the critical needs supplies in a timely manner.

The delivery and processing of wrong supplies also adds to the congestion at transportation and distribution nodes, overwhelms storage capabilities and results in further delays of necessary items. The flood of donated inappropriate materiel in response to a disaster is often referred to as the second disaster.

The economics of disaster relief, on the supply side, is challenged as people need to secure donations and ensure the financial sustainability of their organizations. On the demand side, the victims’ needs must be fulfilled in a timely manner while avoiding wasteful duplication and congestion in terms of logistics.

Game theory in disasters

Game theory is a powerful tool for the modeling and analysis of complex behaviors of competing decision-makers. It received a tremendous boost from the contributions of the Nobel laureate John Nash.

Game theory has been used in numerous disciplines, from economics, operations research and management science, to even political science.

In the context of disaster relief, however, there has been little work done in harnessing the scope of game theory. It is, nevertheless, clear that disaster relief organizations compete for financial funds and donors respond to the visibility of the organizations in the delivery of relief supplies to victims through media coverage of disasters….(More)”

The Crowd & the Cloud

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The Crowd & the Cloud (TV series): “Are you interested in birds, fish, the oceans or streams in your community? Are you concerned about fracking, air quality, extreme weather, asthma, Alzheimer’s disease, Zika or other epidemics? Now you can do more than read about these issues. You can be part of the solution.

Smartphones, computers and mobile technology are enabling regular citizens to become part of a 21st century way of doing science. By observing their environments, monitoring neighborhoods, collecting information about the world and the things they care about, so-called “citizen scientists” are helping professional scientists to advance knowledge while speeding up new discoveries and innovations.

The results are improving health and welfare, assisting in wildlife conservation, and giving communities the power to create needed change and help themselves.

Citizen science has amazing promise, but also raises questions about data quality and privacy. Its potential and challenges are explored in THE CROWD & THE CLOUD, a 4-part public television series premiering in April 2017. Hosted by former NASA Chief Scientist Waleed Abdalati, each episode takes viewers on a global tour of the projects and people on the front lines of this disruptive transformation in how science is done, and shows how anyone, anywhere can participate….(More)”

 

Migration tracking is a mess

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Huub Dijstelbloem in Nature: “As debates over migration, refugees and freedom of movement intensify, technologies are increasingly monitoring the movements of people. Biometric passports and databases containing iris scans or fingerprints are being used to check a person’s right to travel through or stay within a territory. India, for example, is establishing biometric identification for its 1.3 billion citizens.

But technologies are spreading beyond borders. Security policies and humanitarian considerations have broadened the landscape. Drones and satellite images inform policies and direct aid to refugees. For instance, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), maps refugee camps in Jordan and elsewhere with its Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT; see www.unitar.org/unosat/map/1928).

Three areas are in need of research, in my view: the difficulties of joining up disparate monitoring systems; privacy issues and concerns over the inviolability of the human body; and ‘counter-surveillance’ deployed by non-state actors to highlight emergencies or contest claims that governments make.

Ideally, state monitoring of human mobility would be bound by ethical principles, solid legislation, periodical evaluations and the checks and balances of experts and political and public debates. In reality, it is ad hoc. Responses are arbitrary, fuelled by the crisis management of governments that have failed to anticipate global and regional migration patterns. Too often, this results in what the late sociologist Ulrich Beck called organized irresponsibility: situations of inadequacy in which it is hard to blame a single actor.

Non-governmental organizations, activists and migrant groups are using technologies to register incidents and to blame and shame states. For example, the Forensic Architecture research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London, has used satellite imagery and other evidence to reconstruct the journey of a boat that left Tripoli on 27 March 2011 with 72 passengers. A fortnight later, it returned to the Libyan coast with just 9 survivors. Although the boat had been spotted by several aircraft and vessels, no rescue operation had been mounted (go.nature.com/2mbwvxi). Whether the states involved can be held accountable is still being considered.

In the end, technologies to monitor mobility are political tools. Their aims, design, use, costs and consequences should be developed and evaluated accordingly….(More)”.

Does digital democracy improve democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Thamy Pogrebinschi at Open Democracy: “The advancement of tools of information and communications technology (ICT) has the potential to impact democracy nearly as much as any other area, such as science or education. The effects of the digital world on politics and society are still difficult to measure, and the speed with which these new technological tools evolve is often faster than a scholar’s ability to assess them, or a policymaker’s capacity to make them fit into existing institutional designs.

Since their early inception, digital tools and widespread access to the internet have been changing the traditional means of participation in politics, making them more effective. Electoral processes have become more transparent and effective in several countries where the paper ballot has been substituted for electronic voting machines. Petition-signing became a widespread and powerful tool as individual citizens no longer needed to be bothered out in the streets to sign a sheet of paper, but could instead be simultaneously reached by the millions via e-mail and have their names added to virtual petition lists in seconds. Protests and demonstrations have also been immensely revitalized in the internet era. In the last few years, social networks like Facebook and WhatsApp have proved to be a driving-force behind democratic uprisings, by mobilizing the masses, invoking large gatherings, and raising awareness, as was the case of the Arab Spring.

While traditional means of political participation can become more effective by reducing the costs of participation with the use of ICT tools, one cannot yet assure that it would become less subject to distortion and manipulation. In the most recent United States’ elections, computer scientists claimed that electronic voting machines may have been hacked, altering the results in the counties that relied on them. E-petitions can also be easily manipulated, if safe identification procedures are not put in place. And in these times of post-facts and post-truths, protests and demonstrations can result from strategic partisan manipulation of social media, leading to democratic instability as has recently occurred in Brazil. Nevertheless, the distortion and manipulation of these traditional forms of participation were also present before the rise of ICT tools, and regardless, even if the latter do not solve these preceding problems, they may manage to make political processes more effective anyway.

The game-changer for democracy, however, is not the revitalization of the traditional means of political participation like elections, petition-signing and protests through digital tools. Rather, the real change on how democracy works, governments rule, and representation is delivered comes from entirely new means of e-participation, or the so-called digital democratic innovations. While the internet may boost traditional forms of political participation by increasing the quantity of citizens engaged, democratic innovations that rely on ICT tools may change the very quality of participation, thus in the long-run changing the nature of democracy and its institutions….(More)”

Bit By Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Review of Book by Matthew J. Salganik: “In the summer of 2009, mobile phones were ringing all across Rwanda. In addition to the millions of calls between family, friends, and business associates, about 1,000 Rwandans received a call from Joshua Blumenstock and his colleagues. The researchers were studying wealth and poverty by conducting a survey of people who had been randomly sampled from a database of 1.5 million customers from Rwanda’s largest mobile phone provider. Blumenstock and colleagues asked the participants if they wanted to participate in a survey, explained the nature of the research to them, and then asked a series of questions about their demographic, social, and economic characteristics.

Everything I have said up until now makes this sound like a traditional social science survey. But, what comes next is not traditional, at least not yet. They used the survey data to train a machine learning model to predict someone’s wealth from their call data, and then they used this model to estimate the wealth of all 1.5 million customers. Next, they estimated the place of residence of all 1.5 million customers by using the geographic information embedded in the call logs. Putting these two estimates together—the estimated wealth and the estimated place of residence—Blumenstock and colleagues were able to produce high-resolution estimates of the geographic distribution of wealth across Rwanda. In particular, they could produce an estimated wealth for each of Rwanda’s 2,148 cells, the smallest administrative unit in the country.

It was impossible to validate these estimates because no one had ever produced estimates for such small geographic areas in Rwanda. But, when Blumenstock and colleagues aggregated their estimates to Rwanda’s 30 districts, they found that their estimates were similar to estimates from the Demographic and Health Survey, the gold standard of surveys in developing countries. Although these two approaches produced similar estimates in this case, the approach of Blumenstock and colleagues was about 10 times faster and 50 times cheaper than the traditional Demographic and Health Surveys. These dramatically faster and lower cost estimates create new possibilities for researchers, governments, and companies (Blumenstock, Cadamuro, and On 2015).

In addition to developing a new methodology, this study is kind of like a Rorschach inkblot test; what people see depends on their background. Many social scientists see a new measurement tool that can be used to test theories about economic development. Many data scientists see a cool new machine learning problem. Many business people see a powerful approach for unlocking value in the digital trace data that they have already collected. Many privacy advocates see a scary reminder that we live in a time of mass surveillance. Many policy makers see a way that new technology can help create a better world. In fact, this study is all of those things, and that is why it is a window into the future of social research….(More)”