Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Ava Ex Machina: “…Within the tech industry in particular, we work every day to build systems that ingest more and more of our personal information that while it might be used to sell us products, can also increasingly be used to index and endanger our most vulnerable communities. Software engineers are often unaware of how the systems they build and maintain can either help us live better lives, or be used to commit repeats of history’s most horrifying atrocities. But as Holocaust history also shows us, engineers and hackers can use their skills to take direct action too.

During that same Nazi-punching era of WWII, ordinary people used their abilities and access to proprietary systems, data, and information security knowledge to refuse to be complacent, and instead sabotage the Axis to save lives. It’s my hope that sharing some stories of those who “hacked” the systems that were meant to execute the atrocities of the Holocaust will help us remember that there are always more ways to resist.

René Carmille — was a punch card computer expert and comptroller general of the French Army, who later would head up the Demographics Department of the French National Statistics Service. As quickly as IBM worked with the Nazis to enable them to use their punch card computer systems to update census data to find and round up Jewish citizens, Rene and his team of double-agents worked just as fast to manipulate their data to undermine their efforts.

The IEEE newspaper, The Institute, describes Carmille as being an early ethical hacker: “Over the course of two years, Carmille and his group purposely delayed the process by mishandling the punch cards. He also hacked his own machines, reprogramming them so that they’d never punch information from Column 11 [which indicated religion] onto any census card.” His work to identify and build in this exploit saved thousands of Jews from being rounded up and deported to death camps….(More)”.

Amy Maxmen in Nature: “…Whenever war, hurricanes or other disasters ravage part of the globe, one of the biggest problems for aid organizations is a lack of reliable data. People die because front-line responders don’t have the information they need to act efficiently. Doctors and epidemiologists plod along with paper surveys and rigid databases in crisis situations, watching with envy as tech companies expertly mine big data for comparatively mundane purposes.

Three years ago, one frustrated first-responder decided to do something about it. The result is an innovative piece of software called the Dharma Platform, which almost anyone can use to rapidly collect information and share, analyse and visualize it so that they can act quickly. And although public-health veterans tend to be sceptical of technological fixes, Dharma is winning fans. MSF and other organizations now use it in 22 countries. And so far, the Rise Fund, a ‘global impact fund’ whose board boasts U2 lead singer Bono, has invested US$14.3 million in the company behind it.

“I think Dharma is special because it has been developed by people who have worked in these chaotic situations,” says Jeremy Farrar, director of biomedical-funding charity the Wellcome Trust in London, “and it’s been road-tested and improved in the midst of reality.”

Now, the ultimate trial is in Syria: Salim, whose name has been changed in this story to protect him, started entering patient records into the Dharma Platform in March, and he is looking at health trends even as he shares his data securely with MSF staff in Amman.

It’s too soon to say that Dharma has transformed his hospital. And some aid organizations and governments may be reluctant to adopt it. But Aziz, who has deployed Dharma in Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Turkey, is confident that it will usher in a wave of platforms that accelerate evidence-based responses in emergencies, or even in health care generally. “This is like the first version of the iPhone or Yahoo! Messenger,” he says. “Maybe something better will come along, but this is the direction we’re going in.”…(More)”

Steve Crawshaw at LSE Impact Blog: “…If it is possible for peaceful crowds to force the collapse of the Berlin Wall or to unseat a Mubarak, how easy it should it be for protesters to persuade a democratically elected leader to retreat from “mere” bad policy? In truth, not easy at all. Two million marched in the UK against the Iraq War in 2003 – and it made not a blind bit of difference with Tony Blair’s determination to proceed with a war that the UN Secretary-General described as illegal. Blair was re-elected, two years later.

After the inauguration of Donald Trump in January 2017, millions took part in the series of Women’s Marches in the United States and around the world. It seemed – it was – a powerful defining moment. And yet, at least in the short-term, those remarkable protests were water off the presidential duck’s back. His response was mockery. In some respects, Trump could afford to mock. A man who has received 63 million votes is in a stronger position than the unelected leader who has to threaten or use violence to stay in power.

And yet.

One thing that protest in an authoritarian and a democratic context have in common is that the impact of protest – including delayed impact – remains uncertain, both for those who protest and those who are protested against.

Vaclav Havel argued that it was worth “living in truth” – speaking truth to power – even without any certainty of outcome. “Those that say individuals are not capable of changing anything are only looking for excuses.” In that context, what is perhaps most unacceptable is to mock those who take risks, and seek change. Lord Charles Powell, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, for example explained to the umbrella protesters in Hong Kong in 2013 that they were foolish and naive. They should, he told them, learn to live with the “small black cloud” of anti-democratic pressures from Beijing. The protesters failed to heed Powell’s complacent message. In the words of Joshua Wong, on his way back to jail earlier in 2017: “You can lock up our bodies, but not our minds.”

Scepticism and failure are linked, as the Egyptian activist Asmaa Mahfouz made clear in a powerful video which helped trigger the uprising in 2011. The 26-year-old declared: ‘”Whoever says it is not worth it because there will only be a handful or people, I want to tell him, “You are the reason for this.” Sitting at home and just watching us on the news or Facebook leads to our humiliation.’ The video went viral. Millions went out. The rest was history.

Even in a democracy, that same it-can’t-be-done logic sucks us in more often, perhaps, than we realize….(More)”.

Eliza Mik at Law, Innovation and Technology: “If one is to believe the popular press and many “technical writings,” blockchains create not only a perfect transactional environment but also obviate the need for banks, lawyers and courts. The latter will soon be replaced by smart contracts: unbiased and infallible computer programs that form, perform and enforce agreements. Predictions of future revolutions must, however, be distinguished from the harsh reality of the commercial marketplace and the technical limitations of blockchains. The fact that a technological solution is innovative and elegant need not imply that it is commercially useful or legally viable. Apart from attempting a terminological “clean-up” surrounding the term smart contract, this paper presents some technological and legal constraints on their use. It confronts the popular claims concerning their ability to automate transactions and to ensure perfect performance. It also examines the possibility of reducing contractual relationships to code and the ability to integrate smart contracts with the complexities of the real world. A closer analysis reveals that smart contracts can hardly be regarded as a semi-mythical technology liberating the contracting parties from the shackles of traditional legal and financial institutions….(More)”.

Paper by Wiebke Loosen, Julius Reimer and Fenja De Silva-Schmidt: “Data-driven journalism can be considered as journalism’s response to the datafication of society. To better understand the key components and development of this still young and fast evolving genre, we investigate what the field itself defines as its ‘gold-standard’: projects that were nominated for the Data Journalism Awards from 2013 to 2016 (n = 225). Using a content analysis, we examine, among other aspects, the data sources and types, visualisations, interactive features, topics and producers. Our results demonstrate, for instance, only a few consistent developments over the years and a predominance of political pieces, of projects by newspapers and by investigative journalism organisations, of public data from official institutions as well as a glut of simple visualisations, which in sum echoes a range of general tendencies in data journalism. On the basis of our findings, we evaluate data-driven journalism’s potential for improvement with regard to journalism’s societal functions….(More)”.

Summary from an independent review, carried out by Professor Dame Wendy Hall and Jérôme Pesenti: “Increased use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bring major social and economic benefits to the UK. With AI, computers can analyse and learn from information at higher accuracy and speed than humans can. AI offers massive gains in efficiency and performance to most or all industry sectors, from drug discovery to logistics. AI is software that can be integrated into existing processes, improving them, scaling them, and reducing their costs, by making or suggesting more accurate decisions through better use of information.

It has been estimated that AI could add an additional USD $814 billion (£630bn) to the UK economy by 2035, increasing the annual growth rate of GVA from 2.5 to 3.9%.

Our vision is for the UK to become the best place in the world for businesses developing and deploying AI to start, grow and thrive, to realise all the benefits the technology offers….

Key factors have combined to increase the capability of AI in recent years, in particular:

• New and larger volumes of data
• Supply of experts with the specific high level skills
• Availability of increasingly powerful computing capacity. The barriers to achieving performance have fallen significantly, and continue to fall.

To continue developing and applying AI, the UK will need to increase ease of access to data in a wider range of sectors. This Review recommends:

• Development of data trusts, to improve trust and ease around sharing data
• Making more research data machine readable
• Supporting text and data mining as a standard and essential tool for research.

Skilled experts are needed to develop AI, and they are in short supply. To develop more AI, the UK will need a larger workforce with deep AI expertise, and more development of lower level skills to work with AI. …

Increasing uptake of AI means increasing demand as well as supply through a better understanding of what AI can do and where it could be applied. This review recommends:

• An AI Council to promote growth and coordination in the sector
• Guidance on how to explain decisions and processes enabled by AI
• Support for export and inward investment
• Guidance on successfully applying AI to drive improvements in industry
• A programme to support public sector use of AI
• Funded challenges around data held by public organisations.

Our work has indicated that action in these areas could deliver a step-change improvement in growth of UK AI. This report makes the 18 recommendations listed in full below, which describe how Government, industry and academia should work together to keep the UK among the world leaders in AI…(More)”

About Colony: “We believe that the most successful organizations of the future will be open.

Openness is not about open plan offices or ‘20% time’. It’s about how decisions get made, how labor is divided, and who controls the purse strings.

In an open organization, you’re empowered to do the work you care about, not just what you’re told to do. Decisions are made openly and transparently. Influence is earned by consistently demonstrating just how damn good you are. It means everyone’s incentives are aligned, because ownership is open to all.

And that means opportunity is open to all, and a new world of possibility opens up.

Colony is infrastructure for the future of work: self-organizing companies that run via software, not paperwork….

Pew Global: “A deepening anxiety about the future of democracy around the world has spread over the past few years. Emboldened autocrats and rising populists have shaken assumptions about the future trajectory of liberal democracy, both in nations where it has yet to flourish and countries where it seemed strongly entrenched. Scholars have documented a global “democratic recession,” and some now warn that even long-established “consolidated” democracies could lose their commitment to freedom and slip toward more authoritarian politics.

A 38-nation Pew Research Center survey finds there are reasons for calm as well as concern when it comes to democracy’s future. More than half in each of the nations polled consider representative democracy a very or somewhat good way to govern their country. Yet, in all countries, pro-democracy attitudes coexist, to varying degrees, with openness to nondemocratic forms of governance, including rule by experts, a strong leader or the military.

A number of factors affect the depth of the public’s commitment to representative democracy over nondemocratic options. People in wealthier nations and in those that have more fully democratic systems tend to be more committed to representative democracy. And in many nations, people with less education, those who are on the ideological right and those who are dissatisfied with the way democracy is currently working in their country are more willing to consider nondemocratic alternatives.

At the same time, majorities in nearly all nations also embrace another form of democracy that places less emphasis on elected representatives. A global median of 66% say direct democracy – in which citizens, rather than elected officials, vote on major issues – would be a good way to govern. This idea is especially popular among Western European populists….(More)”

James Kynge in the Financial Times: “…Over the period of “reform and opening” since the late 1970s, China has generally sought to “bide its time and hide its strength”. But no longer. At the congress, Xi Jinping, the president, presented “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as a “a new choice” for developing nations to follow. But what lends heft to this globalist intent are technological advances that are already invigorating the Chinese economy and may also help to address some of the historic failings of the country’s polity.

The data revolution is fusing with China’s party-state to create a potential “techno-tatorship”; a hybrid strain in which rigid political control can coexist with ample free-market flexibility….

First of all, he said, the big ecommerce companies, such as Alibaba, Tencent and JD.com, are obliged to share their data with central authorities such as the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the central bank. Then the PBoC shares the data with about 50 state-owned banks, creating a database that covers about 400m people, detailing their payment history, creditworthiness and even networks of social contacts, the official said.

“We have already seen that the number of bad debts being built up by households has come down sharply since we launched this system,” said the official. “People really care about their credit scores because those with bad scores have reduced access to financial services.”…
To be sure, data-centric approaches to governance can have shortcomings. The data can be ignored or manipulated by humans, or privileged institutions can lobby for special treatment using old fashioned political leverage. But some Chinese see a big opportunity. Economists Wang Binbin and Li Xiaoyan argue in a paper that the marriage of big data and central planning creates a potent new hybrid….(More)”.

Eunyoung Ha and Nicholas L.Cain in The Social Science Journal: “This paper examines the effects of regime type, government ideology and economic globalization on poverty in low- and middle-income countries around the world. We use panel regression to estimate the effect of these explanatory variables on two different response variables: national poverty gap (104 countries from 1981 to 2005) and child mortality rate (132 countries from 1976 to 2005). We find consistent and significant results for the interactive effect of democracy and government ideology: strong leftist power under a democratic regime is associated with a reduction in both the poverty gap and the child mortality rate. Democracy, on its own, is associated with a lower child mortality rate, but has no effect on the poverty gap. Leftist power under a non-democratic regime is associated with an increase in both poverty measures. Trade reduces both measures of poverty. Foreign direct investment has a weak and positive effect on the poverty gap. From examining factors that influence the welfare of poor people in less developed countries, we conclude that who governs is as important as how they govern….

• Our paper uses a unique dataset to study the impact of regime type, ideology and globalization on two measures of poverty.
• We find that higher levels of democracy are associated with lower child mortality rates, but do not impact poverty gap.
• The interaction of regime type and ideology has a strong effect: leftist power in a democracy reduces poverty and child mortality.
• We find that trade significantly reduces both the poverty gap and the child mortality rate.
• Overall, we find strong evidence that who governs is as important as how they govern…(More)”