Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Cynthia Savard Saucier and Jonathan Shariat: “Bad design is everywhere, and its cost is much higher than we think. In this thought-provoking book, authors Jonathan Shariat and Cynthia Savard Saucier explain how poorly designed products can anger, sadden, exclude, and even kill people who use them. The designers responsible certainly didn’t intend harm, so what can you do to avoid making similar mistakes?

Tragic Design examines real case studies that show how certain design choices adversely affected users, and includes in-depth interviews with authorities in the design industry. Pick up this book and learn how you can be an agent of change in the design community and at your company.

You’ll explore:

• Designs that can kill, including the bad interface that doomed a young cancer patient
• Designs that anger, through impolite technology and dark patterns
• How design can inadvertently cause emotional pain
• Designs that exclude people through lack of accessibility, diversity, and justice
• How to advocate for ethical design when it isn’t easy to do so
• Tools and techniques that can help you avoid harmful design decisions
• Inspiring professionals who use design to improve our world…(More)”.

Handbook edited by Morris Altman: “… a unique and original contribution of over thirty chapters on behavioural economics, examining and addressing an important stream of research where the starting assumption is that decision-makers are for the most part relatively smart or rational. This particular approach is in contrast to a theme running through much contemporary work where individuals’ behaviour is deemed irrational, biased, and error-prone, often due to how people are hardwired. In the smart people approach, where errors or biases occur and when social dilemmas arise, more often than not, improving the decision-making environment can repair these problems without hijacking or manipulating the preferences of decision-makers. This book covers a wide-range of themes from micro to macro, including various sub-disciplines within economics such as economic psychology, heuristics, fast and slow-thinking, neuroeconomics, experiments, the capabilities approach, institutional economics, methodology, nudging, ethics, and public policy….(More)”.

Maarit Kahila and Anna Broberg at FIG: “The need in urban planning to make knowledge-driven decisions has spurred the creation of new solutions to gather and utilize insight from residents. Participatory planning has often been realized through workshops and during face-to-face encounters, but little of the knowledge gathered in these situations is of use in further urban planning and city development. New technological innovations, such as map-based public participation tools, support gathering information that matters and makes cities wiser. Interaction with citizens not only creates information, but supports also learning and innovation building, and creates trusts.

Technological innovations like Maptionnaire help gather information that makes cities wiser. Maptionnaire is a leading solution for collecting, analyzing and discussing resident insight on a map. With the help of Maptionnaire, various cities have been able to change their modus operandi. Through these learning processes actors from different sectors of the city are brought together to create joint understanding of the possibilities of public participation. Cities have started to value and use resident input as an equally important part of its knowledge base for planning. There is a great potential for more efficient use of participatory tools to make processes smoother and to save money. Future development work is needed to further facilitate knowledge transfer from residents to the use of planners and other city officials.

In our presentation we will present different innovative case studies from Finland and abroad where Maptionnaire has been used to support two-way communication in different phases of planning processes. Based on our findings we will draft a new public participation model that assist the effective gathering of experiential knowledge from inhabitants, provide high quality place-based data for various analysis and informs participants about the stage and goals of the planning process more innovatively….(More)”.

Chapter by Christopher Pettit, Scott N. Lieske and Murad Jamal in Planning Support Science for Smarter Urban Futures: “In an increasingly urbanised world, there are pressures being placed on our cities, which planners, decision-makers, and communities need to be able to respond to. Data driven responses and tools that can support the communication of information, and indicators on a city’s performance are becoming increasingly available and have the potential to play a critical role in understanding and managing complex urban systems . In this research, we will review international efforts in the creation of city dashboards and introduce the City of Sydney Dashboard, known as CityDash. This chapter culminates in a number of recommendations for city dashboards’ implementation. The recommendations for city dashboards include: consolidated information on a single web page, live data feeds relevant to planners and decision-makers as well as citizens’ daily lives, and site analytics as a way of evaluating user interactions and preferences….(More)”.

GAO Technology Assessment: “The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the technologies and devices that sense information and communicate it to the Internet or other networks and, in some cases, act on that information. These “smart” devices are increasingly being used to communicate and process quantities and types of information that have never been captured before and respond automatically to improve industrial processes, public services, and the well-being of individual consumers. For example, a “connected” fitness tracker can monitor a user’s vital statistics, and store the information on a smartphone. A “smart” tractor can use GPS-based driving guidance to maximize crop planting or harvesting. Electronic processors and sensors have become smaller and less costly, which makes it easier to equip devices with IoT capabilities. This is fueling the global proliferation of connected devices, allowing new technologies to be embedded in millions of everyday products. The IoT’s rapid emergence brings the promise of important new benefits, but also presents potential challenges such as the following:

• Information security. The IoT brings the risks inherent in potentially unsecured information technology systems into homes, factories, and communities. IoT devices, networks, or the cloud servers where they store data can be compromised in a cyberattack. For example, in 2016, hundreds of thousands of weakly-secured IoT devices were accessed and hacked, disrupting traffic on the Internet.
• Privacy. Smart devices that monitor public spaces may collect information about individuals without their knowledge or consent. For example, fitness trackers link the data they collect to online user accounts, which generally include personally identifiable information, such as names, email addresses, and dates of birth. Such information could be used in ways that the consumer did not anticipate. For example, that data could be sold to companies to target consumers with advertising or to determine insurance rates.
• Safety. Researchers have demonstrated that IoT devices such as connected automobiles and medical devices can be hacked, potentially endangering the health and safety of their owners. For example, in 2015, hackers gained remote access to a car through its connected entertainment system and were able to cut the brakes and disable the transmission.
• Standards. IoT devices and systems must be able to communicate easily. Technical standards to enable this communication will need to be developed and implemented effectively.
• Economic issues. While impacts such as positive growth for industries that can use the IoT to reduce costs and provide better services to customers are likely, economic disruptions are also possible, such as reducing the need for certain types of businesses and jobs that rely on individual interventions, including assembly line work or commercial vehicle deliveries…(More)”

Press Release: “the ‘Dubai Data Economic Impact Report’…provides the Dubai Government with insights into the potential economic impacts of opening and sharing data and includes a methodology for more rigorous measurement of the economic impacts of open and shared data, to allow regular assessment of the actual impacts in the future.

The study estimates that the opening and sharing of government and private sector data will potentially add a total of 10.4 billion AED Gross Value Added (GVA) impact to Dubai’s economy annually by 2021. Opening government data alone will result in a GVA impact of 6.6 billion AED annually as of 2021. This is equivalent to approximately 0.8% to 1.2% of Dubai’s forecasted GDP for 2021. Transport, storage, and communications are set to be the highest contributor to this potential GVA of opening government data, accounting for (27.8% or AED1.85 bn) of the total amount, followed by public administration (23.6% or AED 1.57 bn); wholesale, retail, restaurants, and hotels (13.7% or AED 908 million); real estate (9.6% or AED 639 million); and professional services (8.9% or AED 588 million). Finance and insurance, meanwhile, is calculated to make up 6.5% (AED 433 million) of the GVA, while mining, manufacturing, and utilities (6% or AED 395 million); construction (3.5% or AED 230 million); and entertainment and arts (0.4% or AED27 million) account for the remaining proportion.

This economic impact will be realized through the publication, exchange, use and reuse of Dubai data. The Dubai Data Law of 2015 mandates that data providers publish open data and exchange shared data. It defines open data as any Dubai data which is published and can be downloaded, used and re-used without restrictions by all types of users, while shared data is the data that has been classified as either confidential, sensitive, or secret, and can only be accessed by other government entities or by other authorised persons. The law pertains to local government entities, federal government entities which have any data relating to the emirate, individuals and companies who produce, own, disseminate, or exchange any data relating to the emirate. It aims to realise Dubai’s vision of transforming itself into a smart city, manage Dubai Data in accordance with a clear and specific methodology that is consistent with international best practices, integrate the services provided by federal and local government entities, and optimise the use of the data available to data providers, among other objectives….

The study identifies several stakeholders  involved in the use and reuse of open and shared data. These stakeholders – some of whom are qualified as “data creators” – play an important role in the process of generating the economic impacts. They include: data enrichers, who combine open data with their own sources and/or knowledge; data enablers, who do not profit directly from the data, but do so via the platforms and technologies they are provided on; data developers, who design and build Application Programming Interfaces (APIs); and data aggregators, who collect and pool data, providing it to other stakeholders….(More)”

Courtney Kennedy at Pew Research Center: “… we are often asked about how we conduct our research. We work hard to make our methodologies transparent and understandable, but we also know that survey mode effects and data weighting aren’t on everyone’s short list of water-cooler conversation topics.

That’s why we’re launching Methods 101, a new occasional video series dedicated to explaining and educating the public about the basic methods we use to conduct our survey research. We hope this effort will make survey methods more accessible, even if you’re not a statistician or pollster. We also hope it will help give our audience the confidence to be savvy consumers of all polls.

Our first video is about random sampling, a concept that undergirds all probability-based survey research. The video explains what it means and why it’s important. We hope you’ll find it useful….(More)”

Paper by Matheus Araujo et al at ArXiv: “Every day, millions of users reveal their interests on Facebook, which are then monetized via targeted advertisement marketing campaigns. In this paper, we explore the use of demographically rich Facebook Ads audience estimates for tracking non-communicable diseases around the world. Across 47 countries, we compute the audiences of marker interests, and evaluate their potential in tracking health conditions associated with tobacco use, obesity, and diabetes, compared to the performance of placebo interests. Despite its huge potential, we €find that, for modeling prevalence of health conditions across countries, di‚fferences in these interest audiences are only weakly indicative of the corresponding prevalence rates. Within the countries, however, our approach provides interesting insights on trends of health awareness across demographic groups. Finally, we provide a temporal error analysis to expose the potential pitfalls of using Facebook’s Marketing API as a black box…(More)”.

Featured innovations for the second STI Forum: “…The theme of the 2017 High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) is “Eradicating poverty and promoting prosperity in a changing world“, and the Member States have decided that the HLPF 2017 shall focus on six SDGs (1, 2, 3, 5, 9 and 14) in addition to SDG 17 that will be considered at each HLPF. In this context, the following topic may be considered for the STI Forum 2017: “Science, Technology and Innovation for a Changing World – Focus on SDGs 1, 2, 3, 5, 9, and 14“….

The second Call for Innovations was launched for the sharing of innovations that provide solutions targeted to these six SDGs. Innovators from around the world were invited to submit their scientific and technological solutions to the challenges posed by the six SDGs.The Call for Innovations is now closed. More than 110 inspiring innovations from all the globe were submitted through the Global Innovations Exchange platform.The following outstanding innovators were selected to attend the STI Forum 2017 at UNHQ and showcase their solutions:

• Missing Maps: crowdsourcing digital map creation
• Babajob: Informal Sector Jobs Marketplace
• Virtual Farmers Market
• doctHERs
• Virtual Water Prospecting Program to locate naturally desalinated self-recharging & self-replenishing Water Sources
• Ignitia
• Farmer Query System
• OMOMI
• Mobilized Construction
• Paper Airplanes
• JokkoSante, pharmacy community
• CodePhil: Digital Literacy in Rural Philippines for Sustainable Livelihoods & Community Resilience…(More)”