Prizes are a powerful spur to innovation and breakthroughs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Thornhill in the Financial Times: “…All too often today we leave research and innovation in the hands of the so-called professionals, often with disappointing results. Winning a prize often matters less than the stimulus it provides for innovators in neighbouring fields In recent years, there has been an explosion in the number of professional scientists. Unesco estimates that there were 7.8m full-time researchers in 2013.

The number of scientific journals has also increased, making it difficult even for specialists to remain on top of all the latest advances in their field. In spite of this explosion of knowledge and research spending, there has been a striking lack of breakthrough innovations, as economists such as Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen have noted.

Maybe this is because all the low-hanging technological fruit has been eaten. Or perhaps it is because our research and development methodology has gone awry.

Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of Nesta, is one of those who is trying to revive the concept of prizes as a means of encouraging innovation. His public foundation runs the Challenge Prize Centre, offering awards of up to £10m for innovation in the fields of energy and the environment, healthcare, and community wellbeing. “Setting a specific target, opening up to anyone to meet it, and providing a financial reward if they succeed is the opposite of how most R&D is done,” Mr Mulgan says. “We should all focus more on outcomes than inputs.”…
But these prizes are far from being a panacea. Indeed, they can sometimes lead to perverse results, encouraging innovators to fixate on just one, original goal while ignoring serendipitous surprises along the way. Many innovations are the happy byproduct of research rather than its primary outcome. An academic paper on the effectiveness of innovation prizes concluded that they could be a useful addition to the armoury but were no substitute for other proven forms of research and development. The authors also warned that if prizes were poorly designed, managed, and awarded they could prove “ineffective or even harmful”.

That makes it essential to design competitions in careful and precise detail. It also helps if there are periodic payouts along the way to encourage the most promising ideas. Many companies have embraced the concept of open innovation and increasingly look to collaborate with outside partners to develop fresh ideas, sometimes by means of corporate prizes….(More)”.

Bad Governance and Corruption

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Textbook by Richard Rose and Caryn Peiffer: “This book explains why the role of corruption varies greatly between public services, between people, between national systems of governance, and between measures of corruption.

More than 1.8 billion people pay the price of bad government each year, by sending a bribe to a public official.

In developing countries, corruption affects social services, such as health care and education, and law enforcement institutions, such as the police. When public officials do not act as bureaucrats delivering services by the book, people can try to get them by hook or by crook. The book’s analysis draws on unique evidence: a data base of sample surveys of 175,000 people in 125 countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North and South America. The authors avoid one-size-fits-all proposals for reform and instead provide measures that can be applied to particular public services to reduce or eliminate opportunities for corruption….(More)”.

Open Data in Tourism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Data Portal: “New technologies are rapidly changing the tourism industry. Data are central assets in management and marketing of tourism destinations and businesses. Data driven services became a prominent tool for tourists to plan their trips. The study “Utilizing open data in tourism” predicts great potential for Open Data to increase innovations and destination management. Several actors already use Open Data to provide services in the tourism industry, e.g. the open service called Helsinki Region Infoshare from the city of Helsinki. Malta and Montenegro, for example, are providing data sets on tourist expenditure, hotels, accommodation, restaurants, events, bicycle stations, heritage sites, or beaches.

But not only government organisations and companies use Open Data in tourism. User-generated content, such as reviews and comments spread via social networking services, supports Tourists’ decision making. The study “You will like it!”  analyses user generated Open Data to predict tourists’ perception of sights or attractions.  Thereby they are contributing to the process of predicting tourists’ future preferences, what has potential implications and benefits for the tourism industry.

Engage in the discourse of Open data in tourism, for example on 18 July: the meeting “Linked Open Data im Tourismus“for destination marketing organizations (DMOs) takes place  in Innsbruck to discuss possibilities and prerequisites for using Open Data in tourism. If you rather try out using Open Data to plan your next weekend trip, visit the European Data Portal featured data article on  “Use Open Data to prepare your holiday trip”….(More)”.

What is a data trust?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Jack Hardinges at ODI: “There are different interpretations of what a data trust is, or should be…

There’s not a well-used definition of ‘a data trust’, or even consensus on what one is. Much of the recent interest in data trusts in the UK has been fuelled by them being recommended as a way to ‘share data in a fair, safe and equitable way’ by a UK government-commissioned independent review into Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 2017. However, there has been wider international interest in the concept for some time.

At a very high level, the aim of data trusts appears to be to give people and organisations confidence when enabling access to data in ways that provide them with some value (either directly or indirectly) in return. Beyond that high level goal, there are a variety of thoughts about what form they should take. In our work so far, we’ve found different interpretations of the term ‘data trust’:

  • A data trust as a repeatable framework of terms and mechanisms.
  • A data trust as a mutual organisation.
  • A data trust as a legal structure.
  • A data trust as a store of data.
  • A data trust as public oversight of data access….(More)”

America’s Problem Isn’t Too Little Democracy. It’s Too Much.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joshua A. Geltzer at PoliticoMagazine: “Democracy’s lamentations sometimes seem deafening these days. “Democracy is dying,” proclaimed a recent article in Foreign Policy—and another in the Guardian, and yet another in Quartz. We’ve reached “the end of democracy,” avows a new book—as well as an op-ed in the Washington Post.

But what if these perspectives have it all backwards? What if our problem isn’t too little democracy, but too much?

There’s no doubt that democracy in the United States appears on shaky ground. That’s not because 2016 marked the first time in American history that the presidency was captured by a candidate with no political or military experience. It’s not even because Donald Trump did so despite losing the popular vote by almost 3 million ballots, with his adversary garnering the most votes ever cast for a losing presidential candidate.

It’s because the 2016 election revealed new vulnerabilities in our democracy, generated by social media’s explosion and utilized by Russia and Russian-linked actors—possibly including Trump’s team itself. And it’s also because the aftermath of that election has laid bare a Congress so polarized, gridlocked and downright incapacitated that it has proved unable even to keep our government from shutting down and has consistently failed to fulfill its responsibility to exercise meaningful oversight of the executive branch.

What ails us? The current vogue is to place the blame on the inadequacies of our incarnation of democracy. The brilliant Yascha Mounk, for example, argues that the American people may think they’re living in a democracy, but—unbeknownst to them—it’s really all a charade. On Mounk’s account, Americans speak at town halls, organize on behalf of candidates and cast ballots; but, because the game’s been rigged by the powerful, all of that activity doesn’t really matter compared to the influence of the well-placed and well-heeled. In the words of two political scientists quoted favorably by Mounk, what we think of as democracy in action really amounts to “a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Some suggest that democracy’s insufficiencies are global, and the defining problem of our times. In his magisterial account of democracy’s fading allure in Hungary and Poland, Roger Cohen echoes earlier scholars in seeing democracy now eclipsed by “competitive authoritarianism, a form of European single-party rule that retains a veneer of democracy while skewing the contest sufficiently to ensure it is likely to yield only one result.”

But while these commentators are right that the cracks are there, the cause is the very opposite of what they claim, at least when it comes to America. The problem isn’t that democracy is in short supply in the United States. It’s that technology has helped to unleash hyper-democratization—a shift away from the mediated, checked republic that America’s founders carefully crafted toward an impulsive, unleashed direct democracy that’s indulging the worst impulses of our most extreme elements.

To put it bluntly, we’re increasingly ruled by an online mob. And it’s a mob getting besieged with misinformation…(More)”.

Hope for Democracy: 30 years of Participatory Budgeting Worldwide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Nelson Dias: “Hope for Democracy” is not only the title of this book, but also the translation of a state of mind infected by innovation and transformative action of many people who in different parts of the world, are engaged in the construction of more lasting and intense ways of living democracy.

The articles found within this publication are “scales” of a fascinating journey through the paths of participatory democracy, from North America to Asia, Oceania to Europe, and Latin America to Africa.

With no single directions, it is up to the readers to choose the route they want to travel, being however invited to reinforce this “democratizing wave”, encouraging the emergence of new and renewed spaces of participation in the territories where they live and work….(More)

What if people were paid for their data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “Data Slavery” Jennifer Lyn Morone, an American artist, thinks this is the state in which most people now live. To get free online services, she laments, they hand over intimate information to technology firms. “Personal data are much more valuable than you think,” she says. To highlight this sorry state of affairs, Ms Morone has resorted to what she calls “extreme capitalism”: she registered herself as a company in Delaware in an effort to exploit her personal data for financial gain. She created dossiers containing different subsets of data, which she displayed in a London gallery in 2016 and offered for sale, starting at £100 ($135). The entire collection, including her health data and social-security number, can be had for £7,000.

Only a few buyers have taken her up on this offer and she finds “the whole thing really absurd”. ..Given the current state of digital affairs, in which the collection and exploitation of personal data is dominated by big tech firms, Ms Morone’s approach, in which individuals offer their data for sale, seems unlikely to catch on. But what if people really controlled their data—and the tech giants were required to pay for access? What would such a data economy look like?…

Labour, like data, is a resource that is hard to pin down. Workers were not properly compensated for labour for most of human history. Even once people were free to sell their labour, it took decades for wages to reach liveable levels on average. History won’t repeat itself, but chances are that it will rhyme, Mr Weyl predicts in “Radical Markets”, a provocative new book he has co-written with Eric Posner of the University of Chicago. He argues that in the age of artificial intelligence, it makes sense to treat data as a form of labour.

To understand why, it helps to keep in mind that “artificial intelligence” is something of a misnomer. Messrs Weyl and Posner call it “collective intelligence”: most AI algorithms need to be trained using reams of human-generated examples, in a process called machine learning. Unless they know what the right answers (provided by humans) are meant to be, algorithms cannot translate languages, understand speech or recognise objects in images. Data provided by humans can thus be seen as a form of labour which powers AI. As the data economy grows up, such data work will take many forms. Much of it will be passive, as people engage in all kinds of activities—liking social-media posts, listening to music, recommending restaurants—that generate the data needed to power new services. But some people’s data work will be more active, as they make decisions (such as labelling images or steering a car through a busy city) that can be used as the basis for training AI systems….

But much still needs to happen for personal data to be widely considered as labour, and paid for as such. For one thing, the right legal framework will be needed to encourage the emergence of a new data economy. The European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect in May, already gives people extensive rights to check, download and even delete personal data held by companies. Second, the technology to keep track of data flows needs to become much more capable. Research to calculate the value of particular data to an AI service is in its infancy.

Third, and most important, people will have to develop a “class consciousness” as data workers. Most people say they want their personal information to be protected, but then trade it away for nearly nothing, something known as the “privacy paradox”. Yet things may be changing: more than 90% of Americans think being in control of who can get data on them is important, according to the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank….(More)”.

Virtualization of government‐to‐citizen engagement process: Enablers and constraints

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Joshua Ofoeda et al: “The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors that constrain or enable process virtualization in a government‐to‐citizen engagement process. Past research has established that most e‐government projects, especially in developing countries, are regarded as total failure or partial failure.

Citizens’ unwillingness to use government electronic services and lack of awareness are among some of the reasons why these electronic services fail.

Using the process virtualization theory (PVT) as theoretical lens, the authors investigated the various activities within the driver license acquisition process at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority.

The PVT helped in identifying factors which enable or inhibit the virtualization of the driver license acquisition process in Ghana. Based on a survey data of 317 participants, we report that process characteristics in the form of relationship requirements affect citizens’ willingness toward the use of government virtualized processes. Situating the PVT within a developing country context, our findings reveal that some cultural and behavioral attributes such as socialization hinder the virtualization of some activities within the driver licensing process….(More)”.

Neuroscience for Cities Playbook

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tool resulting from a collaboration between Future Cities Catapult, Centric Lab and University College London: “It brings forward a framework of how neuroscience research can be put into practice in cities. This has been presented as a set of new tools, methodologies and strategies for organisations big and small, to adopt neuroscience insights into their supply chain.

With an aim to reach out to a wide audience from businesses to urban planners and academicians and policymakers, We are sure you will find the playbook a useful resource to explore the potential applications of this important area of research.

This playbook helps cities in three stages. The first is identifying the core environmental stressors, which have the widest mental and physical effects on city citizen, even a small reduction will make a fundamental difference in quality of life. The second is understanding the unintended human consequences of urban trends such as urban sprawl or automation. The final is highlighting the different opportunities for enhancing the user experience of cities through neuroscience-informed technology and urban planning.

The idea of using neuroscience to help design cities only arose in last ten years, and the technology to make it possible in the last three years. We are now on the cusp of a revolution in how metrics from neuroscience inform urban innovation strategies and increase the quality of life of the cities inhabitants. Developments in neuroscience are showing us new ways to understand how people experience the built environment, revealing new opportunities for innovation and improved experiences, leading in turn to greater productivity, wellbeing and attraction. Neuroscientists are also discovering important insights about outcomes for the less advantaged in our cities, providing compelling evidence in support of interventions to tackle the negative health impacts of city living, and ways to reduce barriers to access and opportunity.

Success will be a reduction in mental and physical health outbreaks; less cases of depression, dementia, anxiety disorders, etc. It can be seen in economic terms; a healthy population is a productive population….(More)”.

Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter & Jacob N. Shapiro: “The way wars are fought has changed starkly over the past sixty years. International military campaigns used to play out between large armies at central fronts. Today’s conflicts find major powers facing rebel insurgencies that deploy elusive methods, from improvised explosives to terrorist attacks. Small Wars, Big Datapresents a transformative understanding of these contemporary confrontations and how they should be fought. The authors show that a revolution in the study of conflict–enabled by vast data, rich qualitative evidence, and modern methods—yields new insights into terrorism, civil wars, and foreign interventions. Modern warfare is not about struggles over territory but over people; civilians—and the information they might choose to provide—can turn the tide at critical junctures.

The authors draw practical lessons from the past two decades of conflict in locations ranging from Latin America and the Middle East to Central and Southeast Asia. Building an information-centric understanding of insurgencies, the authors examine the relationships between rebels, the government, and civilians. This approach serves as a springboard for exploring other aspects of modern conflict, including the suppression of rebel activity, the role of mobile communications networks, the links between aid and violence, and why conventional military methods might provide short-term success but undermine lasting peace. Ultimately the authors show how the stronger side can almost always win the villages, but why that does not guarantee winning the war.

Small Wars, Big Data provides groundbreaking perspectives for how small wars can be better strategized and favorably won to the benefit of the local population….(More)”.