Stefaan Verhulst

Apple Has Plans for Your DNA

Curated on May 6, 2015October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Antonio Regalado at MIT Technology Review: “…Apple is collaborating with U.S. researchers to launch apps that would offer some iPhone owners the chance to get their DNA tested, many of them for the first time, according to people familiar with the plans.

The apps are based on ResearchKit, a software platform Apple introduced in March that helps hospitals or scientists run medical studies on iPhones by collecting data from the devices’ sensors or through surveys.

The first five ResearchKit apps, including one called mPower that tracks symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, quickly recruited thousands of participants in a few days, demonstrating the reach of Apple’s platform.

“Apple launched ResearchKit and got a fantastic response. The obvious next thing is to collect DNA,” says Gholson Lyon, a geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who isn’t involved with the studies.

Nudging iPhone owners to submit DNA samples to researchers would thrust Apple’s devices into the center of a widening battle for genetic information. Universities, large technology companies like Google (see “Google Wants to Store Your Genome”), direct-to-consumer labs, and even the U.S. government (see “U.S. to Develop DNA Study of One Million People”) are all trying to amass mega-databases of gene information to uncover clues about the causes of disease (see “Internet of DNA”).

In two initial studies planned, Apple isn’t going to directly collect or test DNA itself. That will be done by academic partners. The data would be maintained by scientists in a computing cloud, but certain findings could appear directly on consumers’ iPhones as well. Eventually, it’s even possible consumers might swipe to share “my genes” as easily as they do their location….(More)”

The Incredible Jun: A Town that Runs on Social Media

Curated on May 5, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Deb Roy and William Powers in the Huffington Post: “For the last four years, a town in southern Spain has been conducting a remarkable experiment in civic life. Jun (pronounced “hoon”) has been using Twitter as its principal medium for citizen-government communication. Leading the effort is Jun’s Mayor, José Antonio Rodríguez Salas, a passionate believer in the power of technology to solve problems and move society forward.

Since launching the initiative in 2011, Rodríguez Salas has been recruiting his 3,500 townspeople to not only join the social network but have their Twitter accounts locally verified at town hall. This extra step isn’t necessary to participate in the conversation – Twitter is open to anyone – but it helps town employees know they’re dealing with actual residents.

In the most basic scenario, a citizen who has a question, request or complaint tweets it to the mayor or one of his staff, who work to resolve the matter. For instance, in the sequence of tweets shown below (which we pulled from the 2014 Twitter data and translated into English), at 10:48 pm a citizen tells the mayor that a street lamp is out on Maestro Antonio Linares Street. Nine minutes later, the mayor replies that he’ll have the town electrician fix it the next day. The mayor’s tweet includes the Twitter handle of the electrician, who is automatically notified that he’s been mentioned and sees the exchange. That tweet is a public promise that the town will indeed take action, and to underline this it ends with the hashtag #JunGetsMoving. The next day, the electrician tweets a photo of the repaired fixture, thanking the citizen for his help and repeating the hashtag.

A citizen alerts the mayor to a broken street lamp. Two tweets later, it’s fixed.

Governments have been responding to citizens for centuries. But digital networks have made it possible to build much faster, more efficient feedback loops. Each of the participants in the above transaction wrote a single text of less than 140 characters, and in less than 24 hours the problem was solved….(More)”

Global Diseases, Collective Solutions

Curated on May 5, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Ben Ramalingam: “Environmental disruption, mass urbanization and the runaway globalization of trade and transport have created ideal conditions for infectious diseases to emerge and spread around the world. Rapid spill-overs from local into regional and global crises reveal major gaps in the global system for dealing with infectious diseases.

A number of Global Solution Networks have emerged that address failures of systems, of institutions and of markets. At their most ambitious, they aim to change the rules of the global health game—opening up governance structures, sharing knowledge and science, developing new products, creating markets—all with the ultimate aim of preventing and treating diseases, and saving lives.

These networks have emerged in an ad-hoc and opportunistic fashion. More strategic thinking and investment is needed to build networking competencies and to identify opportunities for international institutions to best leverage new forms of collaboration and partnership. (Read the paper here).”

Moving Cities Beyond Performance Measurement

Curated on May 5, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Pew Charitable Trust: “The recent explosion in the availability of data is changing the way Americans make decisions and do business in fields as diverse as sports, public health, shopping, and politics. The business of government is no exception. At the local level, new methods of collecting and analyzing information have varied and far-reaching effects on the ability of leaders to understand and work within their fiscal constraints and meet residents’ needs.

Local governments have used performance measurement—collecting and studying data with the aim of improving operating efficiency and effectiveness—for decades, but today’s cities have access to a wealth of other data. Those on the cutting edge are using these data with new analytical tools in innovative ways that often reach beyond the conventional definition of performance measurement. For example, theNew York City Fire Department compiles information from various city departments about building characteristics—such as construction material, fireproofing, height, date of construction, and last inspection date—to prioritize buildings for inspections.Boston uses a cellphone app, called Street Bump, to help detect potholes using the accelerometers built into cellphones.

What’s new, beyond the sheer volume of data, to help governments improve?

Local governments previously examined statistics only within individual departments. Today, they are gleaning new insights by combining data across agencies.
Government officials typically reviewed performance statistics only periodically—annually, semiannually, or quarterly. Now they often have access to usable data in real time, allowing them to be more responsive and efficient.
In the past, cities primarily used analytics to understand past events. Today, some are exploring predictive analytics, using data to anticipate occurrences and outcomes….(More)”

European Policy: A Nudge in the Right Direction

Curated on May 5, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Snyder, Madeleine in the Harvard International Review: “A man in the UK opens his email after receiving his monthly energy bill. Along with a smorgasbord of information about energy conservation and his current spending on energy, he sees how much he could potentially save by doing small things, like insulating doors and windows and using more efficient light bulbs. The next day at the supermarket he passes an aisle filled with draft blockers and LED lights. Remembering the email and that potential 200 pound saving, he purchases three energy efficient light bulbs and schedules to have his door reinsulated. This is one example of a new technique the UK government is using to encourage citizens to be ecofriendly, while avoiding the pitfalls of expensive public policy.

In 2010, the UK partnered with an intelligence and consulting company to give its more ineffective and expensive policies a nudge in the right direction. The aptly named Nudge Unit, or more formally, the Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) is co-directed by the UK Cabinet Office and Nesta, the leading UK charity for innovation. The BIT uses ‘nudging’, or’behavioral insights’, at the intersection of psychology, political theory, behavioral economics, and social anthropology, to engineer more effective and efficient policy to influence social behavior. Policy goals range from getting more people to save for a pension or actively look for a job if they become unemployed, to encouraging people to recycle or donate to charity.

But what exactly counts as a ‘nudge’? According to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, authors of the book Nudge, it is “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. “Thus including more footage of actors recycling in popular TV shows counts as nudging, but limiting trash collection to once a month and expanding recycling pickup to twice a week does not. Nudging is all about using incentives, responses, and psychology to design effective policy.

Beyond working closely with the UK government, the BIT helps other companies, small businesses, and charities use behavioral insights to improve internal affairs and productivity. …

The key to BIT policy and the bulk of step three is the Easy, Attractive, Social, and Timely (EAST) set of insights. Study results from the BIT indicate that the most effective policies incorporate all four of these….(More)”.

Five Headlines from a Big Month for the Data Revolution

Curated on May 4, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah T. Lucas at Post2015.org: “If the history of the data revolution were written today, it would include three major dates. May 2013, when theHigh Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda first coined the phrase “data revolution.” November 2014, when the UN Secretary-General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group (IEAG) set a vision for it. And April 2015, when five headliner stories pushed the data revolution from great idea to a concrete roadmap for action.

The April 2015 Data Revolution Headlines

1. The African Data Consensus puts Africa in the lead on bringing the data revolution to the regional level. TheAfrica Data Consensus (ADC) envisions “a profound shift in the way that data is harnessed to impact on development decision-making, with a particular emphasis on building a culture of usage.” The ADC finds consensus across 15 “data communities”—ranging from open data to official statistics to geospatial data, and is endorsed by Africa’s ministers of finance. The ADC gets top billing in my book, as the first contribution that truly reflects a large diversity of voices and creates a political hook for action. (Stay tuned for a blog from my colleague Rachel Quint on the ADC).

2. The Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) gets our minds (and wallets) around the data needed to measure the SDGs. The SDSN Needs Assessment for SDG Monitoring and Statistical Capacity Development maps the investments needed to improve official statistics. My favorite parts are the clear typology of data (see pg. 12), and that the authors are very open about the methods, assumptions, and leaps of faith they had to take in the costing exercise. They also start an important discussion about how advances in information and communications technology, satellite imagery, and other new technologies have the potential to expand coverage, increase analytic capacity, and reduce the cost of data systems.

3. The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) calls on us to find the “missing millions.” ODI’s The Data Revolution: Finding the Missing Millions presents the stark reality of data gaps and what they mean for understanding and addressing development challenges. The authors highlight that even that most fundamental of measures—of poverty levels—could be understated by as much as a quarter. And that’s just the beginning. The report also pushes us to think beyond the costs of data, and focus on how much good data can save. With examples of data lowering the cost of doing government business, the authors remind us to think about data as an investment with real economic and social returns.

4. Paris21 offers a roadmap for putting national statistic offices (NSOs) at the heart of the data revolution.Paris21’s Roadmap for a Country-Led Data Revolution does not mince words. It calls on the data revolution to “turn a vicious cycle of [NSO] underperformance and inadequate resources into a virtuous one where increased demand leads to improved performance and an increase in resources and capacity.” It makes the case for why NSOs are central and need more support, while also pushing them to modernize, innovate, and open up. The roadmap gets my vote for best design. This ain’t your grandfather’s statistics report!

5. The Cartagena Data Festival features real-live data heroes and fosters new partnerships. The Festival featured data innovators (such as terra-i using satellite data to track deforestation), NSOs on the leading edge of modernization and reform (such as Colombia and the Philippines), traditional actors using old data in new ways (such as the Inter-American Development Bank’s fantastic energy database), groups focused on citizen-generated data (such as The Data Shift and UN My World), private firms working with big data for social good (such asTelefónica), and many others—all reminding us that the data revolution is well underway and will not be stopped. Most importantly, it brought these actors together in one place. You could see the sparks flying as folks learned from each other and hatched plans together. The Festival gets my vote for best conference of a lifetime, with the perfect blend of substantive sessions, intense debate, learning, inspiration, new connections, and a lot of fun. (Stay tuned for a post from my colleague Kristen Stelljes and me for more on Cartagena).

This month full of headlines leaves no room for doubt—momentum is building fast on the data revolution. And just in time.

With the Financing for Development (FFD) conference in Addis Ababa in July, the agreement of Sustainable Development Goals in New York in September, and the Climate Summit in Paris in December, this is a big political year for global development. Data revolutionaries must seize this moment to push past vision, past roadmaps, to actual action and results…..(More)”

Monithon

Curated on May 4, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“Moni-thon” comes from “monitor” and “marathon”, and this is precisely what this platform seeks to help with: anintensive activity of observing and reporting of public policies in Italy.

What’s there to monitor? Monithon was born as an independently developed initiative to promote the citizen monitoring of development projects funded both by the Italian government and the EU through the Cohesion (aka. Regional) Policy. Projects include a wide range of interventions such as large transport, digital, research or environmental infrastructures (railroads, highways, broadband networks, waste management systems…), aids to enterprises to support innovation and competitiveness, and other funding for energy efficiency, social inclusion, education and training, occupation and workers mobility, tourism, etc.

Citizen monitoring of these projects is possible thanks to a combination of open government data and citizens’ collaboration, joined by the goal of controlling how the projects are progressing, and whether they deliver actual results.

The Italian government releases the information on all the 800k+ projects funded (worth almost 100 billion Euros), the beneficiaries of the subsidies and all the actors involved as open data, including the location and the timing of the intervention. All the data is integrated with interactive visualizations on the national portal OpenCoesione, where people can play with the data and find the most interesting projects to follow.

The Monithon initiative takes this transparency further: it asks citizens to actively engage with open government data and to produce valuable information through it.

How does it work? Monithon means active involvement of communities and a shared methodology. Citizens, journalist, experts, researchers, students – or all combined – collect information on a specific project chosen from the OpenCoesione database. Then this information can be uploaded on the Monithon platform (based on Ushahidi) by selecting the projects from a list and it can be geo-referenced and enriched with interviews, quantitative data, pictures, videos. The result is a form of civic, bottom-down, collective data storytelling. All the “wannabe monithoners” can download this simple toolkit, a 10-page document that describes the initiative and explains how to pick a project to monitor and get things started. ….

How to achieve actual impact? The Monithon platform is method and a model whereby citizen monitoring may be initiated and a tool for civic partners to press forward, to report on malpractice, but also to collaborate in making all these projects work, in accelerating their completion and understanding whether they actually respond to local demand. ….

Monithon has rapidly evolved from being an innovative new platform into a transferable civic engagement format. Since its launch in September 2013, Monithon has drawn dozens of national and local communities (some formed on purpose, other based on existing associations) and around 500 people into civic monitoring activities, mostly in Southern Italy, where cohesion funds are more concentrated. Specific activities are carried out by established citizen groups, like Libera, a national anti-Mafia association, which became Monithon partner, focusing their monitoring on the rehabilitation of Mafia-seized properties. Action Aid is now partnering with Monithon to promote citizen empowerment. Existing, local groups of activists are using the Monithon methodology to test local transportation systems that benefited from EU funding, while new groups have formed to begin monitoring social innovation and cultural heritage projects.

Now more than 50 “citizen monitoring reports”, which take the form of collective investigations on project development and results, are publicly available on the Monithon website, many of which spurred further dialogue with public administrations….(More)“

Data Fusion Heralds City Attractiveness Ranking

Curated on May 4, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “The ability of any city to attract visitors is an important metric for town planners, businesses based on tourism, traffic planners, residents, and so on. And there are increasingly varied ways of measuring this thanks to the growing volumes of city-related data generated by with social media, and location-based data.

So it’s only natural that researchers would like to draw these data sets together to see what kind of insight they can get from this form of data fusion.

And so it has turned out thanks to the work of Stanislav Sobolevsky at MIT and a few buddies. These guys have fused three wildly different data sets related to the attractiveness of a city that allows them to rank these places and to understand why people visit them and what they do when they get there.

The work focuses exclusively on cities in Spain using data that is relatively straightforward to gather. The first data set consists of the number of credit and debit card transactions carried out by visitors to cities throughout Spain during 2011. This includes each card’s country of origin, which allows Sobolevsky and co to count only those transactions made by foreign visitors—a total of 17 million anonymized transactions from 8.6 million foreign visitors from 175 different countries.

The second data set consists of over 3.5 million photos and videos taken in Spain and posted to Flickr by people living in other countries. These pictures were taken between 2005 and 2014 by 16,000 visitors from 112 countries.

The last data set consists of around 700,000 geotagged tweets posted in Spain during 2012. These were posted by 16,000 foreign visitors from 112 countries.

Finally, the team defined a city’s attractiveness, at least for the purposes of this study, as the total number of pictures, tweets and card transactions that took place within it……

That’s interesting work that shows how the fusion of big data sets can provide insights into the way people use cities. It has its limitations of course. The study does not address the reasons why people find cities attractive and what draws them there in the first place. For example, are they there for tourism, for business, or for some other reason. That would require more specialized data.

But it does provide a general picture of attractiveness that could be a start for more detailed analyses. As such, this work is just a small part of a new science of cities based on big data, but one that shows how much is becoming possible with just a little number crunching.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1504.06003 : Scaling of city attractiveness for foreign visitors through big data of human economic and social media activity”

Urban Data Games: creating smart citizens for smart cities

Curated on May 1, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Wolff, Annika; Kortuem, Gerd and Cavero, Jose: “A bottom-up approach to smart cities places citizens in an active role of contributing, analysing and interpreting data in pursuit of tackling local urban challenges and building a more sustainable future city. This vision can only be realised if citizens have sufficient data literacy skills and experience of large, complex, messy, ever expanding data sets. Schools typically focus on teaching data handling skills using small, personally collected data sets obtained through scientific experimentation, leading to a gap between what is being taught and what will be needed as big data and analytics become more prevalent. This paper proposes an approach to teaching data literacy in the context of urban innovation tasks, using an idea of Urban Data Games. These are supported by a set of training data and resources that will be used in school trials for exploring the problems people have when dealing with large data and trialling novel approaches for teaching data literacy….(More)”