Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “The success of a Christmas market or winterfete doesn’t always translate to money spent, it may simply increase foot traffic or visitor dwell time. Now, the Danish city of Aalborg is measuring exactly those quantities during its busy Christmas shopping period, using Bliptrack, the sensor system that detects devices that are using wifi.

We have already seen Bliptrack used in JFK airport to let passengers know their wait times. Now, Aalborg City Business Association has installed the system in the city centre to track visitor behavior.

The system consists of a number of sensors placed around the city, which detect nearby wifi devices such as smartphones and tablets. As a pedestrian or car moves around from point to point, they are detected by each sensor. Each device has a unique MAC address, meaning the system is able to track the user’s journey and how long they took to get from one sensor to the next. Aalborg can then use the data collected to understand the impact of events, as well as visitors’ shopping activities. The insights can help them improve business operations such as opening at optimum hours and providing the right amount of staff….(More)”

Lucy Kellaway in the Financial Times: ” At this time of year, my mind naturally turns to guff. Every December I open the cupboard in which I store the worst examples of the year’s jargon and begin the search for winners of my annual Golden Flannel awards.

This year, as ever, the cupboard is stuffed with ugly words and phrases that people have written or spoken in 2015. To pick a few at random, there is “passionpreneur”. There is delta (to mean gap). There is to solutionize, to mindshare and even to role-model. All are new. All reach new linguisticlows….

To this end we have created Guffipedia, a repository for the terms that I’verailed at over the years. You will find previous years’ Golden Flannel winners with chapter-and-verse from me on why they are so ghastly (in case you are too steeped in the stuff to be able to work it out for yourself)….The point of Guffipedia is not just for you to admire the extent of my guff collection, but to help me curate it going forward, as they say in

The point of Guffipedia is not just for you to admire the extent of my guff collection, but to help me curate it going forward, as they say in Guffish.

I am urging you to submit horrible new words or phrases, to have a stab at translating them into serviceable English, and to state where you found them. You don’t need to name the perpetrator (though it would be nice if you did). “Heard in a lift” is fine — so long as it actually was. And if you get your entries in before the end of the year, they may end up winning a prize in my 2015 Golden Flannel awards, announced the first week inJanuary….See Guffipedia”

Martin Hilbert in the Development Policy Review: “The article uses a conceptual framework to review empirical evidence and some 180 articles related to the opportunities and threats of Big Data Analytics for international development. The advent of Big Data delivers a cost-effective prospect for improved decision-making in critical development areas such as healthcare, economic productivity and security. At the same time, the well-known caveats of the Big Data debate, such as privacy concerns and human resource scarcity, are aggravated in developing countries by long-standing structural shortages in the areas of infrastructure, economic resources and institutions. The result is a new kind of digital divide: a divide in the use of data-based knowledge to inform intelligent decision-making. The article systematically reviews several available policy options in terms of fostering opportunities and minimising risks…..(More)”

New book edited by Gil-Garcia, J. Ramon, Pardo, Theresa A., Nam, Taewoo: “This book will provide one of the first comprehensive approaches to the study of smart city governments with theories and concepts for understanding and researching 21st century city governments innovative methodologies for the analysis and evaluation of smart city initiatives. The term “smart city” is now generally used to represent efforts that in different ways describe a comprehensive vision of a city for the present and future. A smarter city infuses information into its physical infrastructure to improve conveniences, facilitate mobility, add efficiencies, conserve energy, improve the quality of air and water, identify problems and fix them quickly, recover rapidly from disasters, collect data to make better decisions, deploy resources effectively and share data to enable collaboration across entities and domains. These and other similar efforts are expected to make cities more intelligent in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, transparency, and sustainability, among other important aspects. Given this changing social, institutional and technology environment, it seems feasible and likeable to attain smarter cities and by extension, smarter governments: virtually integrated, networked, interconnected, responsive, and efficient. This book will help build the bridge between sound research and practice expertise in the area of smarter cities and will be of interest to researchers and students in the e-government, public administration, political science, communication, information science, administrative sciences and management, sociology, computer science, and information technology. As well as government officials and public managers who will find practical recommendations based on rigorous studies that will contain insights and guidance for the development, management, and evaluation of complex smart cities and smart government initiatives….(More)”

Paper by Johnny Nhan et al: “This paper explores the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing incident and how members of the general public, through the online community Reddit, attempted to provide assistance to law enforcement through conducting their own parallel investigations. As we document through an analysis of user posts, Reddit members shared information about the investigation, searched for information that would identify the perpetrators and, in some cases, drew on their own expert knowledge to uncover clues concerning key aspects of the attack. Although it is the case that the Reddit cyber-sleuths’ did not ultimately solve this case, or provide significant assistance to the police investigation, their actions suggest the potential role the public could play within security networks….(More)”

Neil Lawrence at the Guardian: “There is a common misconception about what drives the digital-intelligence revolution. People seem to have the idea that artificial intelligence researchers are directly programming an intelligence; telling it what to do and how to react. There is also the belief that when we interact with this intelligence we are processed by an “algorithm” – one that is subject to the whims of the designer and encodes his or her prejudices.

OpenAI, a new non-profit artificial intelligence company that was founded on Friday, wants to develop digital intelligence that will benefit humanity. By sharing its sentient algorithms with all, the venture, backed by a host of Silicon Valley billionaires, including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, wants to avoid theexistential risks associated with the technology.

OpenAI’s launch announcement was timed to coincide with this year’s Neural Information Processing Systems conference: the main academic outlet for scientific advances in machine learning, which I chaired. Machine learning is the technology that underpins the new generation of AI breakthroughs.

One of OpenAI’s main ideas is to collaborate openly, publishing code and papers. This is admirable and the wider community is already excited by what the company could achieve.

OpenAI is not the first company to target digital intelligence, and certainly not the first to publish code and papers. Both Facebook and Google have already shared code. They were also present at the same conference. All three companies hosted parties with open bars, aiming to entice the latest and brightest minds.

However, the way machine learning works means that making algorithms available isn’t necessarily as useful as one might think. A machine- learning algorithm is subtly different from popular perception.

Just as in baking we don’t have control over how the cake will emerge from the oven, in machine learning we don’t control every decision that the computer will make. In machine learning the quality of the ingredients, the quality of the data provided, has a massive impact on the intelligence that is produced.

For intelligent decision-making the recipe needs to be carefully applied to the data: this is the process we refer to as learning. The result is the combination of our data and the recipe. We need both to make predictions.

By sharing their algorithms, Facebook and Google are merely sharing the recipe. Someone has to provide the eggs and flour and provide the baking facilities (which in Google and Facebook’s case are vast data-computation facilities, often located near hydroelectric power stations for cheaper electricity).

So even before they start, an open question for OpenAI is how will it ensure it has access to the data on the necessary scale to make progress?…(More)”

Kaveh Waddell at the Atlantic: “Computer scientists and cryptographers occupy some of the ivory tower’s highest floors. Among academics, their work is prestigious and celebrated. To the average observer, much of it is too technical to comprehend. The field’s problems can sometimes seem remote from reality.

But computer science has quite a bit to do with reality. Its practitioners devise the surveillance systems that watch over nearly every space, public or otherwise—and they design the tools that allow for privacy in the digital realm. Computer science is political, by its very nature.

That’s at least according to Phillip Rogaway, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, who has helped create some of the most important tools that secure the Internet today. Last week, Rogaway took his case directly to a roomful of cryptographers at a conference in Auckland, New Zealand. He accused them of a moral failure: By allowing the government to construct a massive surveillance apparatus, the field had abused the public trust. Rogaway said the scientists had a duty to pursue social good in their work.
He likened the danger posed by modern governments’ growing surveillance capabilities to the threat of nuclear warfare in the 1950s, and called upon scientists to step up and speak out today, as they did then.

I spoke to Rogaway about why cryptographers fail to see their work in moral terms, and the emerging link between encryption and terrorism in the national conversation. A transcript of our conversation appears below, lightly edited for concision and clarity….(More)”

Faith Kearns at the Conversation: “…some environmental challenges are increasingly taking on characteristics of intractable conflicts, which may remain unresolved despite good faith efforts.

In the case of climate change, conflicts ranging from debates over how to lower emissions to denialism are obvious and ongoing -– the science community has often approached them as something to be defeated or ignored.

While some people love it and others hate it, conflict is often an indicator that something important is happening; we generally don’t fight about things we don’t care about.

Working with conflict is a challenging proposition, in part because while it manifests in interactions with others, much of the real effort comes in dealing with our own internal conflicts.

However, beginning to accept and even value conflict as a necessary part of large-scale societal transformation has the potential to generate new approaches to climate change engagement. For example, understanding that in some cases denial by another person is protective may lead to new approaches to engagement.

As we connect more deeply with conflict, we may come to see it not as a flame to be fanned or put out, but as a resource.

A relational approach to climate change

Indeed, because of the emotion and conflict involved, the concept of a relational approach is one that offers a great deal of promise in the climate change arena. It is, however, vastly underexplored.

Relationship-centered approaches have been taken up in law, medicine, and psychology.

A common thread among these fields is a shift from expert-driven to more collaborative modes of working together. Navigating the personal and emotional elements of this kind of work asks quite a bit more of practitioners than subject-matter expertise.

In medicine, for example, relationship-centered care is a framework examining how relationships – between patients and clinicians, among clinicians, and even with broader communities – impact health care. It recognizes that care may go well beyond technical competency.

This kind of framework can demonstrate how a relational approach is different from more colloquial understandings of relationships; it can be a way to intentionally and transparently attend to conflict and power dynamics as they arise.

Although this is a simplified view of relational work, many would argue that an emphasis on emergent and transformative properties of relationships has been revolutionary. And one of the key challenges, and opportunities, of a relationship-centered approach to climate work is that we truly have no idea what the outcomes will be.

We have long tried to motivate action around climate change by decreasing scientific uncertainty, so introducing social uncertainty feels risky. At the same time it can be a relief because, in working together, nobody has to have the answer.

Learning to be comfortable with discomfort

A relational approach to climate change may sound basic to some, and complicated to others. In either case, it can be useful to know there is evidence that skillful relational capacity can be taught and learned.

The medical and legal communities have been developing relationship-centered training for years.

It is clear that relational skills and capacities like conflict resolution, empathy, and compassion can be enhanced through practices including active listening and self-reflection. Although it may seem an odd fit, climate change invites ability to work together in new ways that include acknowledging and working with the strong emotions involved.

With a relationship-centered approach, climate change issues become less about particular solutions, and more about transforming how we work together. It is both risky and revolutionary in that it asks us to take a giant leap into trusting not just scientific information, but each other….(More)”

Bloomberg News: “Besides facing hefty fines, criminal punishments and the possibility of closing, the worst emitters in China risk additional public anger as new smartphone applications and lower-cost monitoring devices widen access to data on pollution sources.

The Blue Map app, developed by the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs with support from the SEE Foundation and the Alibaba Foundation, provides pollution data from more than 3,000 large coal-power, steel, cement and petrochemical production plants. Origins Technology Ltd. in July began sale of the Laser Egg, a palm-sized air quality monitor used to track indoor and outdoor air quality by measuring fine particulate matter in the air.

“Letting people know the sources of regional pollution will help the push for control over emissions of every chimney,” said Ma Jun, the founder and director of the Beijing-based IPE.

The phone map and Laser Egg are the latest levers in prying control over information on air quality from the hands of the few to the many, and they’re beginning to weigh on how officials respond to the issue. Numerous smartphone applications, including those developed by SINA Corp. and Moji Fengyun (Beijing) Software Technology Development Co., now provide people in China with real-time access to air quality readings, essentially democratizing what was once an information pipeline available only to the government.

“China’s continuing struggle to control and reduce air pollution exemplifies the government’s fear that lifestyle issues will mutate into demands for political change,” said Mary Gallagher, an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan.

Even the government is getting in on the act. The Ministry of Environmental Protection rolled out a smartphone application called “Nationwide Air Quality” with the help ofWuhan Juzheng Environmental Science & Technology Co. at the end of 2013.

“As citizens know more about air pollution, more pressure will be put on the government,” said Xu Qinxiang, a technology manager at Wuhan Juzheng. “This will urge the government to control pollutant sources and upgrade heavy industries.”

Sources of air quality data come from the China National Environment Monitoring Center, local environmental protection bureaus and non-Chinese sources such as the U.S. Embassy’s website in Beijing, Xu said.

Air quality is a controversial subject in China. Since 2012, the public has pushed the government to move more quickly than planned to begin releasing data measuring pollution levels — especially of PM2.5, the particulates most harmful to human health.

The reading was 267 micrograms per cubic meter at 10 a.m. Monday near Tiananmen Square, according to the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center. The World Health Organization cautions against 24-hour exposure to concentrations higher than 25.

The availability of data appears to be filling a need, especially with the arrival of colder temperatures and the associated smog that blanketed Beijing and northern Chinarecently….

“With more disclosure of the data, everyone becomes more sensitive, hoping the government can do something,” Li Yajuan, a 27-year-old office secretary, said in an interview in Beijing’s Fuchengmen area. “It’s our own living environment after all.”

Efforts to make products linked to air data continue. IBM has been developing artificial intelligence to help fight Beijing’s toxic air pollution, and plans to work with other municipalities in China and India on similar projects to manage air quality….(More)”

Shannon McHarg at User Experience: “Twenty years ago, Robert Putnam wrote about the rise of “bowling alone,” a metaphor for people participating in activities as individuals instead of groups that can lead to community. This led to the decline in social capital in America. The problem of individual participation as opposed to community building has become an even bigger problem since the invention of smartphones, the Internet as the source of all information, social networking, and asynchronous entertainment. We never need to talk to anyone anymore and it often feels like an imposition when we ask for an answer we know we could find online.

Putnam posited that the decline in social capital is a cause for decline in civic engagement and participation in democracy. If we aren’t engaged socially with the people around us, we don’t have as much incentive to care about what is going on that might affect them. Local elections have low voter turnout in part because people aren’t aware of or engaged in local issues.

In an attempt to chip away at this problem, platforms that attempt to encourage people to engage in civic life with government and local communities have been popping up. But how well do they actually engage people? These platforms are often criticized for producing “slacktivists” who are applying the minimum amount of effort possible and not really effecting change. Several of these platforms were evaluated to see how they work and to determine how well they actually promote civic engagement.

Measuring Civic Engagement

Code for America is an organization that works to increase engagement with local governments by putting together “brigades” of local volunteers to solve local problems using technology. They have developed an Engagement Standard that attempts to measure how well a government enables citizens to engage in civic life.

Elements of Code for America’s Engagement Standard include:

• Reach: Defining the constituency you are trying to reach, with an emphasis on identifying those whose voices aren’t already represented.
• Channels: Making use of a diversity of spaces, both online and off, that meet people where they are.
• Information: Providing relevant information that is easy to find and understand, and speak with an authentic voice.
• Productive Actions: Identifying clear, concrete, and meaningful actions residents can take to reach desired outcomes.
• Feedback Loops: Making sure the public understands the productive impact of their participation and that their actions have value.

These elements form a funnel, shown in Figure 1, which starts with reaching the right audience and ends with providing feedback to that audience on the effects of their actions. Platforms that have low engagement tend to get stuck at the top of the funnel and platforms that foster more engagement meet all the standards in the funnel.

Eight Approaches to Civic Engagement

Each of the platforms described below attempts to engage citizens in civic actions. However, each platform has a different approach….(More)”