Mobility Data Sharing: Challenges and Policy Recommendations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mollie D’Agostino, Paige Pellaton, and Austin Brown: “Dynamic and responsive transportation systems are a core pillar of equitable and sustainable communities. Achieving such systems requires comprehensive mobility data, or data that reports the movement of individuals and vehicles. Such data enable planners and policymakers to make informed decisions and enable researchers to model the effects of various transportation solutions. However, collecting mobility data also raises concerns about privacy and proprietary interests.

This issue paper provides an overview of the top needs and challenges surrounding mobility data sharing and presents four relevant policy strategies: (1) Foster voluntary agreement among mobility providers for a set of standardized data specifications; (2) Develop clear data-sharing requirements designed for transportation network companies and other mobility providers; (3) Establish publicly held big-data repositories, managed by third parties, to securely hold mobility data and provide structured access by states, cities, and researchers; (4) Leverage innovative land-use and transportation-planning tools….(More)”.

The Promise of Data-Driven Drug Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Center for Data Innovation: “From screening chemical compounds to optimizing clinical trials to improving post-market surveillance of drugs, the increased use of data and better analytical tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) hold the potential to transform drug development, leading to new treatments, improved patient outcomes, and lower costs. However, achieving the full promise of data-driven drug development will require the U.S. federal government to address a number of obstacles. This should be a priority for policymakers for two main reasons. First, enabling data-driven drug development will accelerate access to more effective and affordable treatments. Second, the competitiveness of the U.S. biopharmaceutical industry is at risk so long as these obstacles exist. As other nations, particularly China, pursue data-driven innovation, especially greater use of AI, foreign life sciences firms could become more competitive at drug development….(More)”.

New York Report Studies Risks, Rewards of the Smart City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

GovTech: “The New York state comptroller tasked his staff with analyzing the deployment of new technologies at the municipal level while cautioning local leaders and the public about cyberthreats.

New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced the report, Smart Solutions Across the State: Advanced Technology in Local Governments, during a press conference last week in Schenectady, which was featured in the 25-page document for its deployment of an advanced streetlight network.

“New technologies are reshaping how local government services are delivered,” DiNapoli said during the announcement. “Local officials are stepping up to meet the evolving expectations of residents who want their interactions with government to be easy and convenient.”

The report showcases online bill payment for people to resolve parking tickets, utilities and property taxes; bike-share programs using mobile apps to access bicycles in downtown areas; public Wi-Fi through partnerships with telecommunication companies; and more….The modernization of communities across New York could create possibilities for partnerships between municipalities, counties and the state, she said. The report details how a city might attempt to emulate some of the projects included. Martinez said local government leaders should collaborate and share best practices if they decide to innovate their jurisdictions in similar ways….(More)”.

‘Digital colonialism’: why some countries want to take control of their people’s data from Big Tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jacqueline Hicks at the Conversation: “There is a global standoff going on about who stores your data. At the close of June’s G20 summit in Japan, a number of developing countries refused to sign an international declaration on data flows – the so-called Osaka Track. Part of the reason why countries such as India, Indonesia and South Africa boycotted the declaration was because they had no opportunity to put their own interests about data into the document.

With 50 other signatories, the declaration still stands as a statement of future intent to negotiate further, but the boycott represents an ongoing struggle by some countries to assert their claim over the data generated by their own citizens.

Back in the dark ages of 2016, data was touted as the new oil. Although the metaphor was quickly debunked it’s still a helpful way to understand the global digital economy. Now, as international negotiations over data flows intensify, the oil comparison helps explain the economics of what’s called “data localisation” – the bid to keep citizens’ data within their own country.

Just as oil-producing nations pushed for oil refineries to add value to crude oil, so governments today want the world’s Big Tech companies to build data centres on their own soil. The cloud that powers much of the world’s tech industry is grounded in vast data centres located mainly around northern Europe and the US coasts. Yet, at the same time, US Big Tech companies are increasingly turning to markets in the global south for expansion as enormous numbers of young tech savvy populations come online….(More)”.

Digital Media and Wireless Communication in Developing Nations: Agriculture, Education, and the Economic Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Megh R. Goyal and Emmanuel Eilu: “… explores how digital media and wireless communication, especially mobile phones and social media platforms, offer concrete opportunities for developing countries to transform different sectors of their economies. The volume focuses on the agricultural, economic, and education sectors. The chapter authors, mostly from Africa and India, provide a wealth of information on recent innovations, the opportunities they provide, challenges faced, and the direction of future research in digital media and wireless communication to leverage transformation in developing countries….(More)”.

A fairer way forward for AI in health care

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Linda Nordling at Nature: “When data scientists in Chicago, Illinois, set out to test whether a machine-learning algorithm could predict how long people would stay in hospital, they thought that they were doing everyone a favour. Keeping people in hospital is expensive, and if managers knew which patients were most likely to be eligible for discharge, they could move them to the top of doctors’ priority lists to avoid unnecessary delays. It would be a win–win situation: the hospital would save money and people could leave as soon as possible.

Starting their work at the end of 2017, the scientists trained their algorithm on patient data from the University of Chicago academic hospital system. Taking data from the previous three years, they crunched the numbers to see what combination of factors best predicted length of stay. At first they only looked at clinical data. But when they expanded their analysis to other patient information, they discovered that one of the best predictors for length of stay was the person’s postal code. This was puzzling. What did the duration of a person’s stay in hospital have to do with where they lived?

As the researchers dug deeper, they became increasingly concerned. The postal codes that correlated to longer hospital stays were in poor and predominantly African American neighbourhoods. People from these areas stayed in hospitals longer than did those from more affluent, predominantly white areas. The reason for this disparity evaded the team. Perhaps people from the poorer areas were admitted with more severe conditions. Or perhaps they were less likely to be prescribed the drugs they needed.

The finding threw up an ethical conundrum. If optimizing hospital resources was the sole aim of their programme, people’s postal codes would clearly be a powerful predictor for length of hospital stay. But using them would, in practice, divert hospital resources away from poor, black people towards wealthy white people, exacerbating existing biases in the system.

“The initial goal was efficiency, which in isolation is a worthy goal,” says Marshall Chin, who studies health-care ethics at University of Chicago Medicine and was one of the scientists who worked on the project. But fairness is also important, he says, and this was not explicitly considered in the algorithm’s design….(More)”.

The Church of Techno-Optimism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Margaret O’Mara at the New York Times: “…But Silicon Valley does have a politics. It is neither liberal nor conservative. Nor is it libertarian, despite the dog-eared copies of Ayn Rand’s novels that you might find strewn about the cubicles of a start-up in Palo Alto.

It is techno-optimism: the belief that technology and technologists are building the future and that the rest of the world, including government, needs to catch up. And this creed burns brightly, undimmed by the anti-tech backlash. “It’s now up to all of us together to harness this tremendous energy to benefit all humanity,” the venture capitalist Frank Chen said in a November 2018 speech about artificial intelligence. “We are going to build a road to space,” Jeff Bezos declared as he unveiled plans for a lunar lander last spring. And as Elon Musk recently asked his Tesla shareholders, “Would I be doing this if I weren’t optimistic?”

But this is about more than just Silicon Valley. Techno-optimism has deep roots in American political culture, and its belief in American ingenuity and technological progress. Reckoning with that history is crucial to the discussion about how to rein in Big Tech’s seemingly limitless power.

The language of techno-optimism first appears in the rhetoric of American politics after World War II. “Science, the Endless Frontier” was the title of the soaringly techno-optimistic 1945 report by Vannevar Bush, the chief science adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, which set in motion the American government’s unprecedented postwar spending on research and development. That wave of money transformed the Santa Clara Valley and turned Stanford University into an engineering powerhouse. Dwight Eisenhower filled the White House with advisers whom he called “my scientists.” John Kennedy, announcing America’s moon shot in 1962, declared that “man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred.”

In a 1963 speech, a founder of Hewlett-Packard, David Packard, looked back on his life during the Depression and marveled at the world that he lived in, giving much of the credit to technological innovation unhindered by bureaucratic interference: “Radio, television, Teletype, the vast array of publications of all types bring to a majority of the people everywhere in the world information in considerable detail, about what is going on everywhere else. Horizons are opened up, new aspirations are generated.”…(More)”

Social Systems Evidence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Social Systems Evidence is the world’s most comprehensive, continuously updated repository of syntheses of research evidence about the programs, services and products available in a broad range of government sectors and program areas (e.g., climate action, community and social services, economic development and growth, education, environmental conservation, education, housing and transportation) as well as the governance, financial and delivery arrangements within which these programs, services and products are provided, and the implementation strategies that can help to ensure that these programs, services and products get to those who need them. The content contained in Social Systems Evidence covers the Sustainable Development Goals, with the exceptions of the health part of goal 3 (which is already well covered by databases such as ACCESSSS for clinical evidence, Health Evidence for public health evidence, and Health Systems Evidence for the governance, financial and delivery arrangements, and the implementation strategies that determine whether the right programs, services and products get to those who need them).

The types of syntheses in Social Systems Evidence include evidence briefs for policy, overviews of systematic reviews, systematic reviews, systematic reviews in progress (i.e. protocols for systematic reviews), and systematic reviews being planned (i.e. registered titles for systematic reviews). Social Systems Evidence also contains a continuously updated repository of economic evaluations in these same domains.

Documents included in Social Systems Evidence are identified through weekly electronic searches of online bibliographic databases (EBSCOhost, ProQuest and Web of Science) and through manual searches of the websites of high-volume producers of research syntheses relevant to social-system program and service areas (see acknowledgements below).

For all types of documents, Social Systems Evidence provides links to user-friendly summaries, scientific abstracts, and full-text reports (if applicable and when freely available). For each systematic review, Social Systems Evidence also provides an assessment of its methodological quality, and links to the studies contained in the review.

While SSE is free to use and does not require that users have an account, creating an account will allow you to view more than 20 search results, to save documents and searches, and to subscribe to email alerts, among other advanced features. You can create an account by clicking ‘Create account’ on the top banner (for desktop and laptop computers) or in the menu on far right of the banner (for mobile devices).

Social Systems Evidence can save social-system policymakers and stakeholders a great deal of time by helping them to rapidly identify: a synthesis of the best available research evidence on a given topic that has been prepared in a systematic and transparent way, how recently the search for studies was conducted, the quality of the synthesis, the countries in which the studies included in the synthesis were conducted, and the key findings from the synthesis. Social Systems Evidence can also help them to rapidly identify economic evaluations in these same domains…(More)”.

Rational Democracy: a critical analysis of digital democracy in the light of rational choice institutionalism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ricardo Zapata Lopera: “Since its beginnings, digital technologies have increased the enthusiasm for the realisation of political utopias about a society capable of achieving self-organisation and decentralised governance. The vision was initially brought to concrete technological developments in mid-century with the surge of cybernetics and the attempt to automatise public processes for a more efficient State, taking its most practical form with the Cybersyn Project between 1971-73. Contemporary developments of governance technologies have learned and leveraged particularly from the internet, the free software movement and the increasing micro-processing capacity to come up with more efficient solutions for collective decision-making, preserving, in most cases, the same ethos of “algorithmic regulation”. This essay examines how rational choice institutionalism has framed the scope of digital democracy, and how recent supporting technologies like blockchain have made more evident the objective of creating new institutional arrangements to overcome market failures and increasing inequality, without questioning the utility-maximisation logic. This rational logic of governance could explain the paradoxical movements towards centralisation and power concentration experienced by some of these technologies.

Digital democracy will be understood as a heterogeneous field that explores how digital tools and technologies are used in the practice of democracy (Simon, Bass & Mulgan, 2017). Its understanding needs to go in hand however with the use of supporting technologies and practices that amplify the role of the people in the public decision-making process, either by decentralisation (of public goods) or aggregation (of opinions), including blockchain, data processing (open data and big data), open government, and recent developments in civic tech (Knight Foundation, 2013). It must be noted that the use of digital democracy as a category to describe the use of these technologies to support democratic processes remains contended and requires further debate.

Dahlberg (2011) makes a useful characterisation of four common positions in digital democracy, where the ‘liberal-consumer’ and the ‘deliberative’ positions dominate mainstream thinking and practice, while other alternative positions (‘counter publics’ and ‘autonomous Marxist’) exist, but mostly in experimental or specific contexts. The liberal-consumer position conceives a self-sufficient, rational-strategic individual who acts in a competitive-aggregative democracy by “aggregating, calculating, choosing, competing, expressing, fundraising, informing, petitioning, registering, transacting, transmitting and voting” (p. 865). The deliberative subject is an inter-subjectively rational individual acting in a deliberative consensual democracy “agreeing, arguing, deliberating, disagreeing, informing, meeting, opinion forming, publicising, and reflecting” (p. 865).

Practice has been more homogeneous adopting the ‘liberal-consumer’ and ‘deliberative’ positions. Examples of the former include local and national government e-democracy initiatives; media politics sites, especially the ones providing ‘public opinion’ polling and ‘have your say’ comment systems; ‘independent’ e-democracy projects like mysociety.org; and civil society practices like Amnesty International’s digital campaigns, and online petitioning through sites like Change.org or Avaaz.org (Dahlberg, 2011, p. 858). On the other side, examples of the deliberative position include online government consultation projects (e.g. Your Priorities app and DemocracyOS.eu platform), writing and commentary of online citizen journalism in media sites; “online discussion forums of political interest groups; and the vast array of informal online debate on e-mail lists, web discussion boards, chat channels, blogs, social networking sites, and wikis” (p. 859). Recent developments not only include a mixture of both positions, but a more dynamic online-offline experience….

To shed a light on the understanding of this situation, it might be important to consider how rational choice institutionalism (RCI) explains the inherent logic of digital democracy. Rational choice institutionalism is a theoretical approach of ‘bounded rationality’, that is, it supposes rational utility-maximising actors playing in contexts constrained by institutions. According to Hall and Taylor (1996), this approach assumes rational actors to be incapable of reaching social optimal situations due to insufficient institutional configurations. The actors play strategic interactions in a configured scenario that affects “the range and sequence of alternatives on the choice-agenda or [provides] information and enforcement mechanisms that reduce uncertainty about the corresponding behaviour of others and allows ‘gains from exchange’, thereby leading actors toward particular calculations and potentially better social outcomes” (p. 945). RCI focuses on the reduction of transaction costs and the solution of the ‘principal-agent problem’, where “principals can monitor and enforce compliance on their agents” (p. 943)….(More)”.

How cities can leverage citizen data while protecting privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MIT News: “India is on a path with dual — and potentially conflicting — goals related to the use of citizen data.

To improve the efficiency their municipal services, many Indian cities have started enabling government-service requests, which involves collecting and sharing citizen data with government officials and, potentially, the public. But there’s also a national push to protect citizen privacy, potentially restricting data usage. Cities are now beginning to question how much citizen data, if any, they can use to track government operations.

In a new study, MIT researchers find that there is, in fact, a way for Indian cities to preserve citizen privacy while using their data to improve efficiency.

The researchers obtained and analyzed data from more than 380,000 government service requests by citizens across 112 cities in one Indian state for an entire year. They used the dataset to measure each city government’s efficiency based on how quickly they completed each service request. Based on field research in three of these cities, they also identified the citizen data that’s necessary, useful (but not critical), or unnecessary for improving efficiency when delivering the requested service.

In doing so, they identified “model” cities that performed very well in both categories, meaning they maximized privacy and efficiency. Cities worldwide could use similar methodologies to evaluate their own government services, the researchers say. …(More)”.