Ethics in data project design: It’s about planning

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anna Lauren Hoffmann at O’Reilly: “When I explain the value of ethics to students and professionals alike, I refer it as an “orientation.” As any good designer, scientist, or researcher knows, how you orient yourself toward a problem can have a big impact on the sort of solution you develop—and how you get there. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “perception is not whimsical, but fatal.” Your particular perspective, knowledge of, and approach to a problem shapes your solution, opening up certain paths forward and forestalling others.

Data-driven approaches to business help optimize measurable outcomes—but the early planning of a project needs to account for the ethical (and in many cases, the literal) landscape to avoid ethically treacherous territory. Several recent cases in the news illustrate this point and show the type of preparation that enables a way to move forward in both a data-driven and ethical fashion: Princeton Review’s ZIP-code-based pricing scheme, which turned out to unfairly target Asian-American families, and Amazon’s same-day-delivery areas, which neglect majority-Black neighborhoods.

You can approach a new project using a road trip analogy. The destination is straightforward—profit, revenue, or another measurable KPI. But the path you take to get there will need to be determined. If my wife and I, for example, want to drive from our apartment in Oakland (Point A) to visit my wife’s sister in Los Angeles (Point B), we have to figure out how we’d like to approach the trip. If we’re concerned primarily with efficiency, certain questions immediately come to the fore, namely: what’s the fastest route to LA? Determining the fastest route requires us to pay attention to certain features of the possible trip, such as traffic speeds, easily accessible gas stations, and traffic conditions.On the other hand, if my wife and I are interested in taking the most scenic route from Oakland to LA, a whole different set of concerns become salient. Gas stations are likely still relevant, but speed is less of a factor. We’ll also want to take into account things like notable landmarks and towns (and my tendency toward car sickness) along the way.

The destination is the same; the laws we have to abide by are the same, but how we get from Point A to Point B, then, is heavily determined by how we orient ourselves toward the trip in the first place.

The same goes for research or design projects: how you orient yourself or your team toward solving certain problems or achieving certain goals will fundamentally shape the journey you take. If you’re interested in reaching a goal as quickly as possible—if your only concern is speed or turnaround time—a particular set of concerns are going to be salient. But if you’re interested in reaching a goal not only efficiently but ethically, then a different set of concerns will pop up….(More)”

Next big thing: The ‘uberfication’ of crowdsourced news

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ken Doctor at Politico: “Get ready to hear a lot about the “uberfication” of user-generated content.

Yes, it’s a mouthful. But it’s also the next big thing. Fresco News, a two-year-old New York start-up, sees itself becoming a hot property as it cracks the code on local amateur content generation….Fresco News now enables local TV stations to assign, receive and quickly get on air and online lots of amateur-shot newsy videos in their metro area.

Its secret sauce: Uberizing the supply chain process from station assignment to Fresco “qualified” shooter to shooting smartphone video to uploading and optimizing its quality for quick delivery to consumers, online or on the air.

Meyer’s team of 40, which includes numerous part-timers, has assiduously worked through the many frictions. That’s one hallmark of successful Uberfication.

“We just did a tremendous amount of just non-stop testing,” he says. “I would say, even with simple things like user acquisition, which is a major part of our process and entering new markets. We’ve tested hundreds of different ad types, graphics that we’ve designed internally that effectively, and I would say cheaply, bring in prospective citizen journalists.”

Stations can assign easily. Would-be shooters can see assignments, geographically displayed, on a single screen. The upload works well and stations’ ability to quickly use the videos is a strong selling point. Fresco, then, handles the billing and payment processes, much as Uber does.

As with once-taxi rides, individual transaction amounts compute small. Shooters get $50 for each video used by a TV station or $20 for a still photo. Stations pay $75 for a video and $30 for a still. As a standalone business, Fresco News is a scale play.

It’s not a new idea.

UGC – or user-generated content – was supposed to be huge. The late ’90s notion: the Internet could make anyone and everyone a reporter, and make it easy for them to share their work widely and cheaply. Many newspaper chains bought into the idea, and tested it unevenly, hoping that UGC could provide what was, for awhile called, “local-local” content. Local-local meaning neighborhood plus, that kind of locally differentiating news coverage that publishers thought readers wanted, but coverage publishers believed cost too much if they had to pay professional reporters to do it.

Short story: It didn’t work for the chains. In part, the technology was immature. More importantly, it turns out that reporting – and writing – remains, even the Internet age, largely a professional skill. Publishers couldn’t find enough dependable local amateurs, and besides, they never really iterated a business model around the idea.

Then, there were the national start-up efforts. NowPublic, one memorable one partnered with the Associated Press, launched in 2005 …but never found traction. Today, several other companies ply the territory, with Storyful a standard of quality. Importantly, Storyful focuses on national and global content. Fresco News aims squarely at local – first across the 3,000-mile breadth of the U.S.

The dots tell the story

Take a look at the many dots on the Philly map above. Each blue dot represents an active, signed-up Fresco video shooter in the area. Each yellow dot shows current assignments. In this August visualization, visually, you get a sense of quickly and energetically local TV station Fox 29, WTXF, has deployed – and uses – Fresco News.as earned “preferred” status at Fresco, has been around journalistic operations for a long time and looks forward to contributing news tips as Fresco might expand what its tech can do for local stations…(More)”

App gamifies safe street design, gets kids involved

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “It’s unlikely that cars will ever completely disappear, so cities are finding ways to help two wheels and four wheels safely co-exist. In-ground LED lights warn cars when a cyclist is approaching, and this app provides a driver’s safety performance report after each journey. In Norway, as part of a project to get more citizens walking and cycling, Oslo’s Traffic Agent app gives young school children a way to report street safety.

Initially focusing on home-to-school routes, the app assigns each child an agent number. The agents then log safe or unsafe conditions they come across in their travel to school. The app was developed by the Agency of Urban Environment, the Norwegian Centre for Transport Research and the Oslo City Teaching Agency, in consultation with children. And the Traffic Agent team is working closely with parent-teacher associations to get as many schools and children as possible involved in the project.

In the near future, Oslo’s city planners plan to ban cars from the city center but an urban environment that is safe for pedestrians and cyclists is an important first step…(More)”

Leveraging Mixed Expertise in Crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dissertation by David Merritt: “Crowdsourcing systems promise to leverage the “wisdom of crowds” to help solve many kinds of problems that are difficult to solve using only computers. Although a crowd of people inherently represents a diversity of skill levels, knowledge, and opinions, crowdsourcing system designers typically view this diversity as noise and effectively cancel it out by aggregating responses. However, we believe that by embracing crowd workers’ diverse expertise levels, system designers can better leverage that knowledge to increase the wisdom of crowds. In this thesis, we propose solutions to a limitation of current crowdsourcing approaches: not accounting for a range of expertise levels in the crowd. The current body of work in crowdsourcing does not systematically examine this, suggesting that researchers may not believe the benefits of using mixed expertise warrants the complexities of supporting it. This thesis presents two systems, Escalier and Kurator, to show that leveraging mixed expertise is a worthwhile endeavor because it materially benefits system performance, at scale, for various types of problems. We also demonstrate an effective technique, called expertise layering, to incorporate mixed expertise into crowdsourcing systems. Finally, we show that leveraging mixed expertise enables researchers to use crowdsourcing to address new types of problems….(More)”

Social Machines: The Coming Collision of Artificial Intelligence, Social Networking, and Humanity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by James Hendler and Alice Mulvehill: “Will your next doctor be a human being—or a machine? Will you have a choice? If you do, what should you know before making it?

This book introduces the reader to the pitfalls and promises of artificial intelligence in its modern incarnation and the growing trend of systems to “reach off the Web” into the real world. The convergence of AI, social networking, and modern computing is creating an historic inflection point in the partnership between human beings and machines with potentially profound impacts on the future not only of computing but of our world.

AI experts and researchers James Hendler and Alice Mulvehill explore the social implications of AI systems in the context of a close examination of the technologies that make them possible. The authors critically evaluate the utopian claims and dystopian counterclaims of prognosticators. Social Machines: The Coming Collision of Artificial Intelligence, Social Networking, and Humanity is your richly illustrated field guide to the future of your machine-mediated relationships with other human beings and with increasingly intelligent machines.

What you’ll learn

• What the concept of a social machine is and how the activities of non-programmers are contributing to machine intelligence• How modern artificial intelligence technologies, such as Watson, are evolving and how they process knowledge from both carefully produced information (such as Wikipedia or journal articles) and from big data collections

• The fundamentals of neuromorphic computing

• The fundamentals of knowledge graph search and linked data as well as the basic technology concepts that underlie networking applications such as Facebook and Twitter

• How the change in attitudes towards cooperative work on the Web, especially in the younger demographic, is critical to the future of Web applications…(More)”

Informed Choice? Motivations and methods of data usage among public officials in India

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Rwitwika Bhattacharya and Mohitkumar Daga: “The importance of data in informing the policy-making process is being increasingly realized across the world. With India facing significant developmental challenges, use of data offers an important opportunity to improve the quality of public services. However, lack of formal structures to internalize a data-informed decision-making process impedes the path to robust policy formation. This paper seeks to highlight these challenges through a case study of data dashboard implementation in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The study suggests the importance of capacity building, improvement of data collection and engagement of non-governmental players as measures to address issues….(More)”

Designing the Next Generation of Open Data Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst at the Open Data Charter Blog: “The international Open Data Charter has emerged from the global open data community as a galvanizing document to place open government data directly in the hands of citizens and organizations. To drive this process forward, and ensure that the outcomes are both systemic and transformational, new open data policy needs to be based on evidence of how and when open data works in practice. To support this work, the GovLab, in collaboration with Omidyar Network, has recently completed research which provides vital evidence of open data projects around the world, including an analysis of 19 in-depth, impact-focused case studies and a key findings paper. All of the research is now available in an eBook published by O’Reilly Media.

The research found that open data is making an impact in four core ways, including:…(More)”

Entrepreneurial and Innovative Practices in Public Institutions: A Quality of Life Approach

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Leitão, João and Alves, Helena: This volume discusses the importance of adopting entrepreneurial and innovation practices in the public sector, as mechanisms for detecting, dealing with and including citizens’ social needs, with a reflection on positive determination of their quality of life. It focuses on critical reflection and rethinking the articulation between the dimensions of transformation – entrepreneurship and innovation – of New Public Management (NPM). In this way the book contributes to deepening knowledge about the implications of this change in the organizational paradigm of the public sector for citizens’ quality of life, which is treated multi-dimensionally here, including citizens’ well-being, purchasing power, happiness, trust, safety, experience and satisfaction.
The volume constitutes a reference guide for decision makers, managers and policy makers engaged in the public sector who want to differentiate their performance by fostering entrepreneurial and innovative practices in the scope of public administration that can enhance citizens’ quality of life. This volume is also a reference guide for scholars, policy makers and practitioners interested on public innovation….(More)”

Behavioral Economics and Fed Policymaking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Mark A. Calabria in Cato Journal: “Behavioral economics has continued to gain momentum in challenging the standard rational actor model in economics. With a few exceptions, the emphasis has been on the cognitive failure of individuals outside of government. Niclas Berggren (2013: 200) estimates that 95.5 percent of behavioral economics articles in the leading economics journals do not contain an analysis of the cognitive ability of policymakers. In this article, I offer a preliminary analysis of potential cognitive failures in the Federal Reserve’s conduct of monetary policy. Proposals to “debias” monetary policymaking are offered, along with a discussion of how the Fed’s existing institutional structure ameliorates or exasperates potential biases…(More)”

Twitter, UN Global Pulse announce data partnership

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PressRelease: “Twitter and UN Global Pulse today announced a partnership that will provide the United Nations with access to Twitter’s data tools to support efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted by world leaders last year.

Every day, people around the world send hundreds of millions of Tweets in dozens of languages. This public data contains real-time information on many issues including the cost of food, availability of jobs, access to health care, quality of education, and reports of natural disasters. This partnership will allow the development and humanitarian agencies of the UN to turn these social conversations into actionable information to aid communities around the globe.

“The Sustainable Development Goals are first and foremost about people, and Twitter’s unique data stream can help us truly take a real-time pulse on priorities and concerns — particularly in regions where social media use is common — to strengthen decision-making. Strong public-private partnerships like this show the vast potential of big data to serve the public good,” said Robert Kirkpatrick, Director of UN Global Pulse.

“We are incredibly proud to partner with the UN in support of the Sustainable Development Goals,” said Chris Moody, Twitter’s VP of Data Services. “Twitter data provides a live window into the public conversations that communities around the world are having, and we believe that the increased potential for research and innovation through this partnership will further the UN’s efforts to reach the Sustainable Development Goals.”

Organizations and business around the world currently use Twitter data in many meaningful ways, and this unique data source enables them to leverage public information at scale to better inform their policies and decisions. These partnerships enable innovative uses of Twitter data, while protecting the privacy and safety of Twitter users.

UN Global Pulse’s new collaboration with Twitter builds on existing R&D that has shown the power of social media for social impact, like measuring the impact of public health campaigns, tracking reports of rising food prices, or prioritizing needs after natural disasters….(More)”