Stefaan Verhulst

Citizen scientists aid Ecuador earthquake relief

Curated on May 4, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Zastrow at Nature: “After a magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck Ecuador’s Pacific coast on 16 April, a new ally joined the international relief effort: a citizen-science network called Zooniverse.

On 25 April, Zooniverse launched a website that asks volunteers to analyse rapidly-snapped satellite imagery of the disaster, which led to more than 650 reported deaths and 16,000 injuries. The aim is to help relief workers on the ground to find the most heavily damaged regions and identify which roads are passable.

Several crisis-mapping programmes with thousands of volunteers already exist — but it can take days to train satellites on the damaged region and to transmit data to humanitarian organizations, and results have not always proven useful. The Ecuador quake marked the first live public test for an effort dubbed the Planetary Response Network (PRN), which promises to be both more nimble than previous efforts, and to use more rigorous machine-learning algorithms to evaluate the quality of crowd-sourced analyses.

The network relies on imagery from the satellite company Planet Labs in San Francisco, California, which uses an array of shoebox-sized satellites to map the planet. In order to speed up the crowd-sourced process, it uses the Zooniverse platform to distribute the tasks of spotting features in satellite images. Machine-learning algorithms employed by a team at the University of Oxford, UK, then classify the reliability of each volunteer’s analysis and weight their contributions accordingly.

Rapid-fire data

Within 2 hours of the Ecuador test project going live with a first set of 1,300 images, each photo had been checked at least 20 times. “It was one of the fastest responses I’ve seen,” says Brooke Simmons, an astronomer at the University of California, San Diego, who leads the image processing. Steven Reece, who heads the Oxford team’s machine-learning effort, says that results — a “heat map” of damage with possible road blockages — were ready in another two hours.

In all, more than 2,800 Zooniverse users contributed to analysing roughly 25,000 square kilometres of imagery centred around the coastal cities of Pedernales and Bahia de Caraquez. That is where the London-based relief organization Rescue Global — which requested the analysis the day after the earthquake — currently has relief teams on the ground, including search dogs and medical units….(More)”

Four Steps to Enhanced Crowdsourcing

Curated on May 3, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kendra L. Smith and Lindsey Collins at Planetizen: “Over the past decade, crowdsourcing has grown to significance through crowdfunding, crowd collaboration, crowd voting, and crowd labor. The idea behind crowdsourcing is simple: decentralize decision-making by utilizing large groups of people to assist with solving problems, generating ideas, funding, generating data, and making decisions. We have seen crowdsourcing used in both the private and public sectors. In a previous article, “Empowered Design, By ‘the Crowd,'” we discuss the significant role crowdsourcing can play in urban planning through citizen engagement.

Crowdsourcing in the public sector represents a more inclusive form of governance that incorporates a multi-stakeholder approach; it goes beyond regular forms of community engagement and allows citizens to participate in decision-making. When citizens help inform decision-making, new opportunities are created for cities—opportunities that are beginning to unfold for planners. However, despite its obvious utility, planners underutilize crowdsourcing. A key reason for its underuse can be attributed to a lack of credibility and accountability in crowdsourcing endeavors.

Crowdsourcing credibility speaks to the capacity to trust a source and discern whether information is, indeed, true. While it can be difficult to know if any information is definitively true, indicators of fact or truth include where information was collected, how information was collected, and how rigorously it was fact-checking or peer reviewed. However, in the digital universe of today, individuals can make a habit of posting inaccurate, salacious, malicious, and flat-out false information. The realities of contemporary media make it more difficult to trust crowdsourced information for decision-making, especially for the public sector, where the use of inaccurate information can impact the lives of many and the trajectory of a city. As a result, there is a need to establish accountability measures to enhance crowdsourcing in urban planning.

Establishing Accountability Measures

For urban planners considering crowdsourcing, establishing a system of accountability measures might seem like more effort than it is worth. However, that is simply not true. Recent evidence has proven traditional community engagement (e.g., town halls, forums, city council meetings) is lower than ever. Current engagement also tends to focus on problems in the community rather than the development of the community. Crowdsourcing offers new opportunities for ongoing and sustainable engagement with the community. It can be simple as well.

The following four methods can be used separately or together (we hope they are used together) to help establish accountability and credibility in the crowdsourcing process:

Agenda setting
Growing a crowdsourcing community
Facilitators/subject matter experts (SME)
Microtasking

In addition to boosting credibility, building a framework of accountability measures can help planners and crowdsourcing communities clearly define their work, engage the community, sustain community engagement, acquire help with tasks, obtain diverse opinions, and become more inclusive….(More)”

Can An Online Game Help Create A Better Test For TB?

Curated on May 3, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Esther Landhuis at NPR: “Though it’s the world’s top infectious killer, tuberculosis is surprisingly tricky to diagnose. Scientists think that video gamers can help them create a better diagnostic test.

An online puzzle released Monday will see whether the researchers are right. Players of a Web-based game called EteRNA will try to design a sensor molecule that could potentially make diagnosing TB as easy as taking a home pregnancy test. The TB puzzle marks the launch of “EteRNA Medicine.”

The idea of rallying gamers to fight TB arose as two young Stanford University professors chatted over dinner at a conference last May. Rhiju Das, a biochemist who helped create EteRNA, told bioinformatician Purvesh Khatri about the game, which challenges nonexperts to design RNA molecules that fold into target shapes.

RNA molecules play key roles in biology and disease. Some brain disorders can be traced to problems with RNA folding. Viruses such as H1N1 flu and HIV depend on RNA elements to replicate and infect cells.

Das wants to “fight fire with fire” — that is, to disrupt the RNA involved in a disease or virus by crafting new tools that are themselves made of RNA molecules. EteRNA players learn RNA design principles with each puzzle they solve.

Khatri was intrigued by the notion of engaging the public to solve problems. His lab develops novel diagnostics using publicly available data sets. The team had just published a paper on a set of genes that could help diagnose sepsis and had other papers under review on influenza and TB.

In an “Aha!” moment during their dinner chat, Khatri says, he and Das realized “how awesome it would be to sequentially merge our two approaches — to use public data to find a diagnostic marker for a disease, and then use the public’s help to develop the test.”

TB seemed opportune as it has a simple diagnostic signature — a set of three human genes that turn up or down predictably after TB infection. When checked across gene data on thousands of blood samples from 14 groups of people around the globe, the behavior of the three-gene set readily identified people with active TB, distinguishing them from individuals who had latent TB or other diseases.

Those findings, published in February, have gotten serious attention — not only from curious patients and doctors but also from humanitarian groups eager to help bring a better TB test to market. It can currently take several tests to tell whether a person has active TB, including a chest X-ray and sputum test. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has started sending data to help the Stanford team validate a test based on the newly identified TB gene signature, says study leader Khatri, who works at the university’s Center for Biomedical Informatics Research….(More)”

Opening up census data for research

Curated on May 3, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Economic and Social Research Council (UK): “InFuse, an online search facility for census data, is enabling tailored search and investigation of UK census statistics – opening new opportunities for aggregating and comparing population counts.

Impacts

InFuse data were used for the ‘Smarter Travel’ research project studying how ‘smart choices’ for sustainable travel could be implemented and supported in transport planning. The research directly influenced UK climate-change agendas and policy, including:
- the UK Committee on Climate Change recommendations on cost-effective-emission reductions
- the Scottish Government’s targets and household advice for smarter travel
- the UK Government’s Local Sustainable Transport Fund supporting 96 projects across England
- evaluations for numerous Local Authority Transport Plans across the UK.
The Integration Hub, a web resource that was launched by Demos in 2015 to provide data about ethnic integration in England and Wales, uses data from InFuse to populate its interactive maps of the UK.
Census data downloaded from InFuse informed the Welsh Government for policies to engage Gypsy and Traveller families in education, showing that over 60 per cent aged over 16 from these communities had no qualifications.
Executive recruitment firm Sapphire Partners used census data from InFuse in a report on female representation on boards, revealing that 77 per cent of FTSE board members are men, and 70 per cent of new board appointments go to men.
A study by the Marie Curie charity into the differing needs of Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups in Scotland for end-of-life care used InFuse to determine that the minority ethnic population in Scotland has doubled since 2001 from 100,000 to 200,000 – highlighting the need for greater and more appropriate provision.
A Knowledge Transfer Partnership between homelessness charity Llamau and Cardiff University used InFuse data to show that Welsh young homeless people participating in the study were over twice as likely to have left school with no qualifications compared to UK-wide figures for their age group and gender….(More)”

Beyond the Digital Divide: Towards a Situated Approach to Open Data

Curated on May 3, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Bezuidenhout, L, Rappert, B, Kelly, A and Leonelli, S: “Poor provision of information and communication technologies in low/middle-income countries represents a concern for promoting Open Data. This is often framed as a “digital divide” and addressed through initiatives that increase the availability of information and communication technologies to researchers based in low-resourced environments, as well as the amount of resources freely accessible online, including data themselves. Using empirical data from a qualitative study of lab-based research in Africa we highlight the limitations of such framing and emphasize the range of additional factors necessary to effectively utilize data available online. We adopt the ‘Capabilities Approach’ proposed by Sen to highlight the distinction between simply making resources available, and doing so while fostering researchers’ ability to use them. This provides an alternative orientation that highlights the persistence of deep inequalities within the seemingly egalitarian-inspired Open Data landscape. The extent and manner of future data sharing, we propose, will hinge on the ability to respond to the heterogeneity of research environments…(More)“

Army looks to outsmart soldiers’ bad habits

Curated on May 3, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kyle Jahner at the Army Times: “You wouldn’t think that moving the salad bar to the front of the chow hall and moving the dessert bar back 10 feet would make the Army healthier. But at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, that bumped up salad sales about 24 percent and dessert sales down 10 percent, a nudge toward goals of soldiers eating, exercising and sleeping healthier.

That’s just an example of the kind of change Army Medical Command hopes to inspire and successes it hopes to share across installations through its first annual Health of the Force report.

“I’m pretty proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish with this inaugural report,” said Col. Deydre Teyhen during a recent roundtable at Defense Health Agency headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia. “I think we can’t get to a better state of health unless we inform people of what’s working out there in the field.”

The Army hopes to reduce the figure of 17 percent of soldiers not medically deployable within 72 hours. …The overarching philosophy of these recent MEDCOM efforts is to improve overall health rather than play whack-a-mole with problems as they arise. Teyhen pointed out that the average soldier is a patient at a health care facility for about 100 minutes per year, and the trick is to influence soldier health choices over the other 525,500 minutes, extending influence outside of brick-and-mortar health facilities.It dovetails with the Army’s Performance Triad, the plan to improve readiness through sleep, nutrition and exercise….(More)”

mySidewalk

Curated on May 3, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “With vast amounts of data now publicly available, the answers to many questions lie buried in the numbers, and we already saw a publishing platform helping entrepreneurs visualize government data. For an organization as passionate about civic engagement asmySidewalk, this open data is a treasure trove of compelling stories.

mySidewalk was founded by city planners who recognized the potential force for change contained in local communities. Yet without a compelling reason to get involved, many individuals remain ‘interested bystanders’ — something mySidewalk is determined to change.

Using the latest available data, mySidewalk creates dashboards that are customized for every project to help local public officials make the most informed decisions possible. The dashboards present visualizations of a wide range of socioeconomic and demographic datasets, as well as provide local, regional and national comparisons, all of which help to tell the stories behind the numbers.

It is those stories that mySidewalk believes will provide enough motivation for the ‘interested bystanders’ to get involved. As it says on the mySidewalk website, “Share your ideas. Shape your community.” Organizations of all types have taken notice of the power of data, with businesses using geo-tagging to analyze social media content, and real-time information sharing helping humanitarians in crises….(More)”

Calling Dunbar’s Numbers

Curated on May 3, 2016October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Pádraig MacCarron, Kimmo Kaski, and Robin Dunbar at arXiv: “The social brain hypothesis predicts that humans have an average of about 150 relationships at any given time. Within this 150, there are layers of friends of an ego, where the number of friends in a layer increases as the emotional closeness decreases. Here we analyse a mobile phone dataset, firstly, to ascertain whether layers of friends can be identified based on call frequency. We then apply different clustering algorithms to break the call frequency of egos into clusters and compare the number of alters in each cluster with the layer size predicted by the social brain hypothesis. In this dataset we find strong evidence for the existence of a layered structure. The clustering yields results that match well with previous studies for the innermost and outermost layers, but for layers in between we observe large variability….(More)”

Supply and demand of open data in Mexico: A diagnostic report on the government’s new open data portal

Curated on May 3, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Juan Ortiz Freuler: “Following a promising and already well-established trend, in February 2014 the Oﬃce of the President of Mexico launched its open data portal (datos.gob.mx). This diagnostic –carried out between July and September of 2015- is designed to brief international donors and stakeholders such as members of the Open Government Partnership Steering Committee, provides the reader with contextual information to understand the state of supply and demand for open data from the portal, and the speciﬁc challenges the mexican government is facing in its quest to implement the policy. The insights oﬀered through data processing and interviews with key stakeholders indicate the need to promote: i) A sense of ownership of datos.gob.mx by the user community, but particularly by the oﬃcials in charge of implementing the policy within each government unit; ii) The development of tools and mechanisms to increase the quality of the data provided through the portal; and iii) Civic hacking of the portal to promote innovation, and a sense of appropriation that would increase the policy’s long-term resilience to partisan and leadership change….(More)”