How Africa can benefit from the data revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Guardian: “….The modern information infrastructure is about movement of data. From data we derive information and knowledge, and that knowledge can be propagated rapidly across the country and throughout the world. Facebook and Google have both made massive investments in machine learning, the mainstay technology for converting data into knowledge. But the potential for these technologies in Africa is much larger: instead of simply advertising products to people, we can imagine modern distributed health systems, distributed markets, knowledge systems for disease intervention. The modern infrastructure should be data driven and deployed across the mobile network. A single good idea can then be rapidly implemented and distributed via the mobile phone app ecosystems.

The information infrastructure does not require large scale thinking and investment to deliver. In fact, it requires just the reverse. It requires agility and innovation. Larger companies cannot react quickly enough to exploit technological advances. Small companies with a good idea can grow quickly. From IBM to Microsoft, Google and now Facebook. All these companies now agree on one thing: data is where the value lies. Modern internet companies are data-driven from the ground up. Could the same thing happen in Africa’s economies? Can entire countries reformulate their infrastructures to be data-driven from the ground up?

Maybe, or maybe not, but it isn’t necessary to have a grand plan to give it a go. It is already natural to use data and communication to solve real world problems. In Silicon Valley these are the challenges of getting a taxi or reserving a restaurant. In Africa they are often more fundamental. John Quinn has been in Kampala, Uganda at Makerere University for eight years now targeting these challenges. In June this year, John and other researchers from across the region came together for Africa’s first workshop on data science at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology. The objective was to spread knowledge of technologies, ideas and solutions. For the modern information infrastructure to be successful software solutions need to be locally generated. African apps to solve African problems. With this in mind the workshop began with a three day summer school on data science which was then followed by two days of talks on challenges in African data science.

The ideas and solutions presented were cutting edge. The Umati project uses social media to understand the use of ethnic hate speech in Kenya (Sidney Ochieng, iHub, Nairobi). The use of social media for monitoring the evolution and effects of Ebola in west Africa (Nuri Pashwani, IBM Research Africa). The Kudusystem for market making in Ugandan farm produce distribution via SMS messages (Kenneth Bwire, Makerere University, Kampala). Telecommunications data for inferring the source and spread of a typhoid outbreak in Kampala (UN Pulse Lab, Kampala). The Punya system for prototyping and deployment of mobile phone apps to deal with emerging crises or market opportunities (Julius Adebayor, MIT) and large scale systems for collating and sharing data resources Open Data Kenya and UN OCHA Human Data Exchange….(More)”

Crowdsourced app helps the visually impaired cross the road

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Out of New York’s 12,000 intersections, less than 100 offer navigation tools to help visually impaired residents cross safely. Audible sign technology is available but the process of installing it across cities is slow — most only have it at about 10 percent of crossings. Offering an alternative,SeeLight is a crowdsourced app that makes all the necessary information about urban crossings available to blind and visually impaired users.

The app collates data from government agencies and uses crowdsourced information to fill in the existing gap. Users can help by timing the length of any walk signal and recording the direction of the crossing using the app, which will then store that information along with a GPS tag. They can also add a brief description, noting whether the intersection has tactile paving or a pedestrian crossing light. When a visually impaired person approaches a crossing, they can then use the app to assist them through voice navigation.

SeeLight is not the first app to crowdsource accessibility data — we recently wrote about AXS Map, which collects user reviews about how accessible places around the world are for users in wheelchairs. SeeLight is currently crowdfunding on Indiegogo to finance improvements to the current app, which is available now for free.  …(More)

Addressing Global Data Sharing Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Commentary by George C. Alter and Mary Vardigan: “This issue of the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics highlights the ethical issues that arise when researchers conducting projects in low- and middle-income countries seek to share the data they produce. Although sharing data is considered a best practice, the barriers to doing so are considerable and there is a need for guidance and examples. To that end, the authors of this article reviewed the articles in this special issue to identify challenges common to the five countries and to offer some practical advice to assist researchers in navigating this “uncharted territory,” as some termed it. Concerns around informed consent, data management, data dissemination, and validation of research contributions were cited frequently as particularly challenging areas, so the authors focused on these four topics with the goal of providing specific resources to consult as well as examples of successful projects attempting to solve many of the problems raised….(More)”

Meaningful Consent: The Economics of Privity in Networked Environments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jonathan Cave: “Recent work on privacy (e.g. WEIS 2013/4, Meaningful Consent in the Digital Economy project) recognises the unanticipated consequences of data-centred legal protections in a world of shifting relations between data and human actors. But the rules have not caught up with these changes, and the irreversible consequences of ‘make do and mend’ are not often taken into account when changing policy.

Many of the most-protected ‘personal’ data are not personal at all, but are created to facilitate the operation of larger (e.g. administrative, economic, transport) systems or inadvertently generated by using such systems. The protection given to such data typically rests on notions of informed consent even in circumstances where such consent may be difficult to define, harder to give and nearly impossible to certify in meaningful ways. Such protections typically involve a mix of data collection, access and processing rules that are either imposed on behalf of individuals or are to be exercised by them. This approach adequately protects some personal interests, but not all – and is definitely not future-proof. Boundaries between allowing individuals to discover and pursue their interests on one side and behavioural manipulation on the other are often blurred. The costs (psychological and behavioural as well as economic and practical) of exercising control over one’s data are rarely taken into account as some instances of the Right to be Forgotten illustrate. The purposes for which privacy rights were constructed are often forgotten, or have not been reinterpreted in a world of ubiquitous monitoring data, multi-person ‘private exchanges,’ and multiple pathways through which data can be used to create and to capture value. Moreover, the parties who should be involved in making decisions – those connected by a network of informational relationships – are often not in contractual, practical or legal contact. These developments, associated with e.g. the Internet of Things, Cloud computing and big data analytics, should be recognised as challenging privacy rules and, more fundamentally, the adequacy of informed consent (e.g. to access specified data for specified purposes) as a means of managing innovative, flexible, and complex informational architectures.

This paper presents a framework for organising these challenges using them to evaluate proposed policies, specifically in relation to complex, automated, automatic or autonomous data collection, processing and use. It argues for a movement away from a system of property rights based on individual consent to a values-based ‘privity’ regime – a collection of differentiated (relational as well as property) rights and consents that may be better able to accommodate innovations. Privity regimes (see deFillipis 2006) bundle together rights regarding e.g. confidential disclosure with ‘standing’ or voice options in relation to informational linkages.

The impacts are examined through a game-theoretic comparison between the proposed privity regime and existing privacy rights in personal data markets that include: conventional ‘behavioural profiling’ and search; situations where third parties may have complementary roles conflicting interests in such data and where data have value in relation both to specific individuals and to larger groups (e.g. ‘real-world’ health data); n-sided markets on data platforms (including social and crowd-sourcing platforms with long and short memories); and the use of ‘privity-like’ rights inherited by data objects and by autonomous systems whose ownership may be shared among many people….(More)”

Outcome-driven open innovation at NASA

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Jennifer L. Gustetic et al in Space Policy: “In an increasingly connected and networked world, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recognizes the value of the public as a strategic partner in addressing some of our most pressing challenges. The agency is working to more effectively harness the expertise, ingenuity, and creativity of individual members of the public by enabling, accelerating, and scaling the use of open innovation approaches including prizes, challenges, and crowdsourcing. As NASA’s use of open innovation tools to solve a variety of types of problems and advance of number of outcomes continues to grow, challenge design is also becoming more sophisticated as our expertise and capacity (personnel, platforms, and partners) grows and develops. NASA has recently pivoted from talking about the benefits of challenge-driven approaches, to the outcomes these types of activities yield. Challenge design should be informed by desired outcomes that align with NASA’s mission. This paper provides several case studies of NASA open innovation activities and maps the outcomes of those activities to a successful set of outcomes that challenges can help drive alongside traditional tools such as contracts, grants and partnerships….(More)”

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind: “This book predicts the decline of today’s professions and describes the people and systems that will replace them. In an Internet society, according to Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, we will neither need nor want doctors, teachers, accountants, architects, the clergy, consultants, lawyers, and many others, to work as they did in the 20th century.

The Future of the Professions explains how ‘increasingly capable systems’ – from telepresence to artificial intelligence – will bring fundamental change in the way that the ‘practical expertise’ of specialists is made available in society.

The authors challenge the ‘grand bargain’ – the arrangement that grants various monopolies to today’s professionals. They argue that our current professions are antiquated, opaque and no longer affordable, and that the expertise of the best is enjoyed only by a few. In their place, they propose six new models for producing and distributing expertise in society.

The book raises important practical and moral questions. In an era when machines can out-perform human beings at most tasks, what are the prospects for employment, who should own and control online expertise, and what tasks should be reserved exclusively for people?

Based on the authors’ in-depth research of more than ten professions, and illustrated by numerous examples from each, this is the first book to assess and question the relevance of the professions in the 21st century. (Chapter 1)”

The Fundamentals of Policy Crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by John Prpić, Araz Taeihagh and James Melton at Policy and Internet: “What is the state of the research on crowdsourcing for policymaking? This article begins to answer this question by collecting, categorizing, and situating an extensive body of the extant research investigating policy crowdsourcing, within a new framework built on fundamental typologies from each field. We first define seven universal characteristics of the three general crowdsourcing techniques (virtual labor markets, tournament crowdsourcing, open collaboration), to examine the relative trade-offs of each modality. We then compare these three types of crowdsourcing to the different stages of the policy cycle, in order to situate the literature spanning both domains. We finally discuss research trends in crowdsourcing for public policy and highlight the research gaps and overlaps in the literature….(More)”

Citizen Urban Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New report by Anthony Townsend and Alissa Chisholm at the Cities of Data Project: “Over the coming decades, the world will continue to urbanize rapidly amidst an historic migration of computing power off the desktop, unleashing new opportunities for data collection that reveal how cities function. In a recent report, Making Sense of the Science of Cities (bit.ly/sciencecities) we described an emerging global research movement that seeks establish a new urban science built atop this new infrastructure of instruments. But will this new intellectual venture be an inclusive endeavor? What role is 1 there for the growing ranks of increasingly well-equipped and well-informed citizen volunteers and amateur investigators to work alongside professional scientists? How are researchers, activists and city governments exploring that potential today? Finally, what can be done to encourage and accelerate experimentation?

This report examines three case studies that provide insight into emerging models of citizen science, highlighting the possibilities of citizen-university-government collaborative research, and the important role of open data platforms to enable these partnerships….(More)”

A New Kind of Media Using Government Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Newburger at the Department of Commerce: “MSNBC has published a data-heavy story collection that takes advantage of the internet’s power to communicate not only faster, but in different and meaningful ways.  “The Geography of Poverty” combines narrative, data graphics, and photo-essay content through an interface so seamless as to be almost invisible.

So far they have released three of what will eventually be five parts, but already they have tapped datasets from BLS, Census, the Department of Agriculture, and EPA.  They combined these federal sources with private data: factory data from Randy Peterson and Chemplants.com; displacement information from news sources; Mary Sternberg’s “Along the River Road”; and Steve Lerner’s Diamond and Kate Orff’s research in “Petrochemical America.”

These layers of data feed visualizations which provide a deeper understanding of the highly personal stories the photos tell; the text weaves the elements into a cohesive whole.  Today’s web tools make this kind of reporting not only possible, but fairly simple to assemble.

The result is a new kind of media that mixes the personal and the societal, the social and the environmental, fitting small scale stories of individuals and local communities into the broader context of our whole nation….(More)”

Journal of Technology Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Technology Science is an open access forum for any original material dealing primarily with a social, political, personal, or organizational benefit or adverse consequence of technology. Studies that characterize a technology-society clash or present an approach to better harmonize technology and society are especially welcomed. Papers can come from anywhere in the world.

Technology Science is interested in reviews of research, experiments, surveys, tutorials, and analyses. Writings may propose solutions or describe unsolved problems. Technology Science may also publish letters, short communications, and relevant news items. All submissions are peer-reviewed.

The scientific study of technology-society clashes is a cross-disciplinary pursuit, so papers in Technology Science may come from any of many possible disciplinary traditions, including but not limited to social science, computer science, political science, law, economics, policy, or statistics.

The Data Privacy Lab at Harvard University publishes Technology Science and its affiliated subset of papers called the Journal of Technology Science and maintains them online at techscience.org and at jots.pub. Technology Science is available free of charge over the Internet. While it is possible that bound paper copies of Technology Science content may be produced for a fee, all content will continue to be offered online at no charge….(More)”