Paper by Simon Forge for the European Parliament Think Tank: “Data is not static in a personal/non-personal classification – with modern analytic methods, certain non-personal data can help to generate personal data – so the distinction may become blurred. Thus, de-anonymisation techniques with advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and manipulation of large datasets will become a major issue. In some new applications, such as smart cities and connected cars, the enormous volumes of data gathered may be used for personal information as well as for non-personal functions, so such data may cross over from the technical and non-personal into the personal domain. A debate is taking place on whether current EU restrictions on confidentiality of personal private information should be relaxed so as to include personal information in free and open data flows. However, it is unlikely that a loosening of such rules will be positive for the growth of open data. Public distrust of open data flows may be exacerbated because of fears of potential commercial misuse of such data, as well of leakages, cyberattacks, and so on. The proposed recommendations are: to promote the use of open data licences to build trust and openness, promote sharing of private enterprises’ data within vertical sectors and across sectors to increase the volume of open data through incentive programmes, support testing for contamination of open data mixed with personal data to ensure open data is scrubbed clean – and so reinforce public confidence, ensure anti-competitive behaviour does not compromise the open data initiative….(More)”.
Redefining ‘impact’ so research can help real people right away, even before becoming a journal article
Perhaps nowhere is impact of greater importance than in my own fields of ecology and conservation science. Researchers often conduct this work with the explicit goal of contributing to the restoration and long-term survival of the species or ecosystem in question. For instance, research on an endangered plant can help to address the threats facing it.
But scientific impact is a very tricky concept. Science is a process of inquiry; it’s often impossible to know what the outcomes will be at the start. Researchers are asked to imagine potential impacts of their work. And people who live and work in the places where the research is conducted may have different ideas about what impact means.
In collaboration with several Bolivian colleagues, I studied perceptions of research and its impact in a highly biodiverse area in the Bolivian Amazon. We found that researchers – both foreign-based and Bolivian – and people living and working in the area had different hopes and expectations about what ecological research could help them accomplish…
Eighty-three percent of researchers queried told us their work had implications for management at community, regional and national levels rather than at the international level. For example, knowing the approximate populations of local primate species can be important for communities who rely on the animals for food and ecotourism.
But the scale of relevance didn’t necessarily dictate how researchers actually disseminated the results of their work. Rather, we found that the strongest predictor of how and with whom a researcher shared their work was whether they were based at a foreign or national institution. Foreign-based researchers had extremely low levels of local, regional or even national dissemination. However, they were more likely than national researchers to publish their findings in the international literature….
Rather than impact being addressed at the end of research, societal impacts can be part of the first stages of a study. For example, people living in the region where data is to be collected might have insight into the research questions being investigated; scientists need to build in time and plan ways to ask them. Ecological fieldwork presents many opportunities for knowledge exchange, new ideas and even friendships between different groups. Researchers can take steps to engage more directly with community life, such as by taking a few hours to teach local school kids about their research….(More)”.
The world’s first neighbourhood built “from the internet up”
The Economist: “Quayside, an area of flood-prone land stretching for 12 acres (4.8 hectares) on Toronto’s eastern waterfront, is home to a vast, pothole-filled parking lot, low-slung buildings and huge soyabean silos—a crumbling vestige of the area’s bygone days as an industrial port. Many consider it an eyesore but for Sidewalk Labs, an “urban innovation” subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, it is an ideal location for the world’s “first neighbourhood built from the internet up”.
Sidewalk Labs is working in partnership with Waterfront Toronto, an agency representing the federal, provincial and municipal governments that is responsible for developing the area, on a $50m project to overhaul Quayside. It aims to make it a “platform” for testing how emerging technologies might ameliorate urban problems such as pollution, traffic jams and a lack of affordable housing. Its innovations could be rolled out across an 800-acre expanse of the waterfront—an area as large as Venice.
Sidewalk Labs is planning pilot projects across Toronto this summer to test some of the technologies it hopes to employ at Quayside; this is partly to reassure residents. If its detailed plan is approved later this year (by Waterfront Toronto and also by various city authorities), it could start work at Quayside in 2020.
That proposal contains ideas ranging from the familiar to the revolutionary. There will be robots delivering packages and hauling away rubbish via underground tunnels; a thermal energy grid that does not rely on fossil fuels; modular buildings that can shift from residential to retail use; adaptive traffic lights; and snow-melting sidewalks. Private cars are banned; a fleet of self-driving shuttles and robotaxis would roam freely. Google’s Canadian headquarters would relocate there.
Undergirding Quayside would be a “digital layer” with sensors tracking, monitoring and capturing everything from how park benches are used to levels of noise to water use by lavatories. Sidewalk Labs says that collecting, aggregating and analysing such volumes of data will make Quayside efficient, liveable and sustainable. Data would also be fed into a public platform through which residents could, for example, allow maintenance staff into their homes while they are at work.
Similar “smart city” projects, such as Masdar in the United Arab Emirates or South Korea’s Songdo, have spawned lots of hype but are not seen as big successes. Many experience delays because of shifting political and financial winds, or because those overseeing their construction fail to engage locals in the design of communities, says Deland Chan, an expert on smart cities at Stanford University. Dan Doctoroff, the head of Sidewalk Labs, who was deputy to Michael Bloomberg when the latter was mayor of New York City, says that most projects flop because they fail to cross what he terms “the urbanist-technologist divide”.
That divide, between tech types and city-planning specialists, will also need to be bridged before Sidewalk Labs can stick a shovel in the soggy ground at Quayside. Critics of the project worry that in a quest to become a global tech hub, Toronto’s politicians may give it too much freedom. Sidewalk Labs’s proposal notes that the project needs “substantial forbearances from existing [city] laws and regulations”….(More)”.
Citizen Representation in City Government-Driven Crowdsourcing
This article examines the citizen representativeness of crowdsourcing achieved through 311 systems—the non-emergency and quality of life service request reporting systems used by local governments. Based on surveys of San Francisco residents conducted in 2011, 2013, and 2015, our findings suggest that no systematic biases exist in participation rates across a range of socio-economic indicators. In addition, the findings provide evidence that participation may be responding positively to the city’s responsiveness, thus creating a self-reinforcing process that benefits an increasingly diverse and representative body of users. This inquiry builds on earlier studies of Boston and San Francisco that show that 311 systems did not bias response to traditionally disadvantaged groups (lower socioeconomic status or racial/ethnic minorities) at the demand level nor from high-volume users….(More)”.
Open Social Innovation: Why and How Seekers Use Crowdsourcing for Societal Benefits
Paper by Krithika Randhawa, Ralf Wilden Macquarie and Joel West: “Despite the increased research attention on crowdsourcing, we know little about why and how seeker organizations use this open innovation mechanism. Furthermore, previous studies have focused on profit-seeking firms, despite the use of open innovation practices by public sector organizations to achieve societal benefits. In this study, we investigate the organizational and project level choices of government (seekers) that crowdsource from citizens (solvers) to drive open social innovation, and thus develop new ways to address societal problems, a process referred to as “citizensourcing”.
Using a dataset of 18 local government seekers that use the same intermediary to conduct more than 2,000 crowdsourcing projects, we develop a model of seeker crowdsourcing implementation that links a previously-unstudied variance in seeker intent and engagement strategies, at the organizational level, to differences in project team motivation and capabilities, in turn leading to varying online engagement behaviors and ultimately project outcomes. Comparing and contrasting governmental with the more familiar corporate context, we further find that the non-pecuniary orientation of both seekers and solvers means that the motives of government crowdsourcing differ fundamentally from corporate crowdsourcing, but that the process more closely resembles a corporate-sponsored community rather than government-sponsored contests. More broadly, we offer insights on how seeker organizational factors and choices shape project-level implementation and success of crowdsourcing efforts, as well as suggest implications for open innovation activities of other smaller, geographicallybound organizations….(More)”.
Digital Skills Toolkit
Report by the International Telecommunications Union: “This toolkit provides stakeholders with guidance on developing a digital skills strategy. It is intended for policymakers, along with partners in the private sector, non-governmental organizations, and academia. Its overarching aim is to facilitate the development of a comprehensive digital skills strategy at country level. It is also possible to use this guide to focus on selected priorities that require a fresh approach.
Why do countries need a digital skills strategy?
Digital skills underpin nearly every aspect of work and life. From filling in a government form to communicating for work, it is difficult to find a job or life-task that does not require a basic level of digital functioning. And with new technologies emerging every day, we need lifelong opportunities to learn new skills that will allow us to succeed in an era of ongoing digital transformation. Digital skills are essential in opening the door to a wide range of opportunities in the 21st century. Countries that implement comprehensive digital skills strategies ensure their populations have the skills they need to be more employable, productive, creative, and successful while ensuring they remain safe, secure and healthy online. Critically, digital skills strategies need to be updated regularly to respond to the emergence of new technologies and their impact on the digital economy and digital society. The digital economy has created a huge shortage of people with the necessary digital skills. ITU research shows that there will be tens of millions of jobs for people with advanced digital skills in the coming years. In Europe, for example, estimates suggest there will be 500,000 unfilled positions for ICT professionals by 2020. Every region faces similar challenges. In addition to existing skills gaps, experts forecast that advances in areas like artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, 3D printing, and other technologies will usher in a new era that will radically alter patterns of consumption, production, and employment. Many countries view digital skills as one of the core foundations of the digital transformation….(More)”
Big Data in the Arts and Humanities: Theory and Practice
Book edited by Giovanni Schiuma and Daniela Carlucci: “As digital technologies occupy a more central role in working and everyday human life, individual and social realities are increasingly constructed and communicated through digital objects, which are progressively replacing and representing physical objects. They are even shaping new forms of virtual reality. This growing digital transformation coupled with technological evolution and the development of computer computation is shaping a cyber society whose working mechanisms are grounded upon the production, deployment, and exploitation of big data. In the arts and humanities, however, the notion of big data is still in its embryonic stage, and only in the last few years, have arts and cultural organizations and institutions, artists, and humanists started to investigate, explore, and experiment with the deployment and exploitation of big data as well as understand the possible forms of collaborations based on it.
Big Data in the Arts and Humanities: Theory and Practice explores the meaning, properties, and applications of big data. This book examines therelevance of big data to the arts and humanities, digital humanities, and management of big data with and for the arts and humanities. It explores the reasons and opportunities for the arts and humanities to embrace the big data revolution. The book also delineates managerial implications to successfully shape a mutually beneficial partnership between the arts and humanities and the big data- and computational digital-based sciences.
Big data and arts and humanities can be likened to the rational and emotional aspects of the human mind. This book attempts to integrate these two aspects of human thought to advance decision-making and to enhance the expression of the best of human life….(More)“.
How Do You Control 1.4 Billion People?
Robert Foyle Hunwick at The New Republic: China’s “social credit system”, which becomes mandatory in 2020, aims to funnel all behavior into a credit score….The quoted text is from a 2014 State Council resolution which promises that every involuntary participant will be rated according to their “commercial sincerity,” “social security,” “trust breaking” and “judicial credibility.”
Some residents welcome it. Decades of political upheaval and endemic corruption has bred widespread mistrust; most still rely on close familial networks (guanxi) to get ahead, rather than public institutions. An endemic lack of trust is corroding society; frequent incidents of “bystander effect”—people refusing to help injured strangers for fear of being held responsible—have become a national embarrassment. Even the most enthusiastic middle-class supporters of the ruling Communist Party (CCP) feel perpetually insecure. “Fraud has become ever more common,” Lian Weiliang, vice chairman of the CCP’s National Development and Reform Commission, recently admitted. “Swindlers must pay a price.”
The solution, apparently, lies in a data-driven system that automatically separates the good, the bad, and the ugly…
once compulsory state “social credit” goes national in 2020, these shadowy algorithms will become even more opaque. Social credit will align with Communist Party policy to become another form of law enforcement. Since Beijing relaxed its One Child Policy to cope with an aging population (400 million seniors by 2035), the government has increasingly indulged in a form of nationalist natalism to encourage more two-child families. Will women be penalized for staying single, and rewarded for swapping their careers for childbirth? In April, one of the country’s largest social-media companies banned homosexual content from its Weibo platform in order to “create a bright and harmonious community environment” (the decision was later rescinded in favor of cracking down on all sexual content). Will people once again be forced to hide non-normative sexual orientations in order to maintain their rights? An investigation by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab also warns that social credit policies would be used to discourage protest.
State media has defended social credit against Orwellian charges, arguing that China’s maturing economy requires a “well-functioning” apparatus like the U.S.’s FICO credit score system. But, counters Lubman, “the U.S. systems, maintained by three companies, collect only financially related information.” In the UK, citizens are entitled to an Equifax report itemizing their credit status. In China, only the security services have access to an individual’s dang’an, the personal file containing every scrap of information the state keeps on them, from exam results to their religious and political views….(More)”.
The DNA Data We Have Is Too White. Scientists Want to Fix That
Sarah Elizabeth Richards at Smithsonian: “We live in the age of big DNA data. Scientists are eagerly sequencing millions of human genomes in the hopes of gleaning information that will revolutionize health care as we know it, from targeted cancer therapies to personalized drugs that will work according to your own genetic makeup.
There’s a big problem, however: the data we have is too white. The vast majority of participants in worldwide genomics research are of European descent. This disparity could potentially leave out minorities from benefitting from the windfall of precision medicine. “It’s hard to tailor treatments for people’s unique needs, if the people who are suffering from those diseases aren’t included in the studies,” explains Jacquelyn Taylor, associate professor in nursing who researches health equity at New York University.
That’s about to change with the “All of Us” initiative, an ambitious health research endeavor by the National Institutes of Health that launches in May. Originally created in 2015 under President Obama as the Precision Medicine Initiative, the project aims to collect data from at least 1 million people of all ages, races, sexual identities, income and education levels. Volunteers will be asked to donate their DNA, complete health surveys and wear fitness and blood pressure trackers to offer clues about the interplay of their stats, their genetics and their environment….(More)”.