AI software created for drones monitors wild animals and poachers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Artificial intelligence software installed into drones is to be used by US tech company Neurala to help protect endangered species from poachers. Working with the region’s Lingbergh Foundation, Neurala is currently helping operations in South Africa, Malawi and Zimbabwe and have had requests from Botswana, Mozambique and Zambia for assistance with combatting poaching.

The software is designed to monitor video as it is streamed back to researchers from unmanned drones that can fly for up to five hours, identifying animals, vehicles and poachers in real time without any human input. It can then alert rangers via the mobile command center if anything out of the ordinary is detected. The software can analyze regular or infrared footage, and therefore works with video taken day or night.

The Lindbergh Foundation will be deploying the technology as part of operation Air Shepherd, which is aimed at protecting elephants and rhinos in Southern Africa from poachers. According to the Foundation, elephants and rhinos are at risk of being extinct in just 10 years if current poaching rates continue, and has logged 5,000 hours of drone flight time over the course of 4,000 missions to date.

The use of drones within business models is proving popular, with recent innovations including a drone painting systemthat created crowdfunded murals and two Swiss hospitals that used a drone to deliver lab samples between them….(More)”.

LSE launches crowdsourcing project inspiring millennials to shape Brexit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

LSE Press Release: “A crowdsourcing project inspiring millennials in Britain and the EU to help shape the upcoming Brexit negotiations is being launched by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) this week.

The social media-based project, which hopes to engage 3000 millennials aged 35 and under, kicks off on 23 June, the first anniversary of the life-changing vote to take Britain out of the EU.

One of the Generation Brexit project leaders, Dr Jennifer Jackson-Preece from LSE’s European Institute, said the online platform would give a voice to British and European millennials on the future of Europe in the Brexit negotiations and beyond.

She said: “We’re going to invite millennials from across the UK and Europe to debate, decide and draft policy proposals that will be sent to parliaments in Westminster and Strasbourg during the negotiations.”

Another project leader, Dr Roch Dunin-Wąsowicz, said the pan-European project would seek views from a whole cross section of millennials, including Leavers, Remainers, left and right-wingers, European federalists and nationalists.

“We want to come up with millennial proposals for a mutually beneficial relationship, reflecting the diverse political, cultural, religious and economic backgrounds in the UK and EU.

“We are especially keen to engage the forgotten, the apolitical and the apathetic – for whom Brexit has become a moment of political awakening,” he said.

Generation Brexit follows on the heels of LSE’s Constitution UK crowdsourcing project in 2015, which broke new ground in galvanising people around the country to help shape Britain’s first constitution. The 10-week internet project signed up 1500 people from all corners of the UK to debate how the country should be governed.

Dr Manmit Bhambra, also working on the project, said the success of the Constitution UK platform had laid the foundation for Generation Brexit, with LSE hoping to double the numbers and sign up 3000 participants, split equally between Britain and Europe.

The project can be accessed at www.generationbrexit.org and all updates will be available on Twitter @genbrexit & @lsebrexitvote with the hashtag #GenBrexit, and on facebook.com/GenBrexit… (More)”.

Remix, Slang and Memes: A New Collection Documents Web Culture

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Library of Congress: “…just announced the release of the Web Cultures Web Archive Collection, a representative sampling of websites documenting the creation and sharing of emergent cultural traditions on the web.

Why is this important? Increasingly, people take to their smart phones, tablets and laptops to enact much of their lives through creative communication, making the web a predominant place to share folklore. It is where a significant portion of the historical record is now being written.

Archived from the web starting in 2014, the new—and growing—collection of collaborative cultural creation includes reaction GIFs (animated images, often bodies in motion, used online as responses or reactions to previous posts in a communication thread); image macros (photographic images on which a funny caption is superimposed); and memes (in this context, internet phenomena).

Because the collection aims to document online communities that have established, shaped and disseminated communication tropes and themes, it also includes sites that capture icon-based communications, such as emoji, and those that establish or define vernacular language. Examples of these include “Leet” and “Lolspeak,” two examples of written English language that derive from internet usages. Leet emerged from 1980s software piracy communities, referring to “elite” code wranglers. Lolspeak primarily features in memes and carries collective meaning as the form of English that cats might use.

Some sites represent the DIY (do-it-yourself) movements of crafting and making—for example, Instructables. Still others focus on the distribution and discussion of digital “urban legends” and lore, such as Creepypasta, or vernacular creative forms, such as fan fiction.

The project is a contemporary manifestation of the AFC’s mission to document traditional cultural forms and practices, and results from the collaborative work between the AFC and those steeped in digital culture, both scholars and enthusiasts….(More)”.

Does democracy cause innovation? An empirical test of the popper hypothesis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Yanyan Gao, Leizhen Zang, Antoine Roth, and Puqu Wang in Research Policy: “Democratic countries produce higher levels of innovation than autocratic ones, but does democratization itself lead to innovation growth either in the short or in the long run? The existing literature has extensively examined the relationship between democracy and growth but seldom explored the effect of democracy on innovation, which might be an important channel through which democracy contributes to economic growth. This article aims to fill this gap and contribute to the long-standing debate on the relationship between democracy and innovation by offering empirical evidence based on a data set covering 156 countries between 1964 and 2010. The results from the difference-in-differences method show that democracy itself has no direct positive effect on innovation measured with patent counts, patent citations and patent originality….(More)”.

 

Towards Crowd-Scale Deliberation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mark Klein: “Let us define deliberation as the activity where groups of people (1) identify possible solutions for a problem, (2) evaluate these alternatives, and (3) select the solution(s) that best meet their needs. Deliberation processes have changed little in centuries. Typically, small groups of powerful players craft policies behind closed doors, and then battle to engage wider support for their preferred options. Most people affected by the decisions have at best limited input into defining the solution options. This approach has become increasingly inadequate as the scale and complexity of the problems we face has increased. Many important ideas and perspectives simply do not get incorporated, squandering the opportunity for far superior outcomes. We have the potential to do much better by radically widening the circle of people involved in complex deliberations, moving from “team” scales (tens of participants) to “crowd” scales (hundreds, thousands, or more).

This is because crowd-scale interactions have been shown to produce, in appropriate circumstances, such powerful emergent phenomena as:

  • The long tail: crowd-scale participation enables access to a much greater diversity of ideas than would otherwise be practical: potentially superior solutions “small voices” (the tail of the frequency distribution) have a chance to be heard .
  • Idea synergy: the ability for users to share their creations in a common forum can enable a synergistic explosion of creativity, since people often develop new ideas by forming novel combinations and extensions of ideas that have been put out by others.
  • Many eyes: crowds can produce remarkably high-quality results (e.g. in open source software) by virtue of the fact that there are multiple independent verifications – many eyes continuously checking the shared content for errors and correcting them .
  • Wisdom of the crowds: large groups of (appropriately independent, motivated and informed) contributors can collectively make better judgments than those produced by the individuals that make them up, often exceeding the performance of experts,because their collective judgment cancels out the biases and gaps of the individual members…

Our team has been developing crowd-scale deliberation support technologies that address these three fundamental challenges by enabling:

  • better ideation: helping crowds develop better solution ideas
  • better evaluation: helping crowds evaluate potential solutions more accurately
  • better decision-making: helping crowds select pareto-optimal solutions…(More)”.

How did awful panel discussions become the default format?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at The Guardian: “With the occasional exception, my mood in conferences usually swings between boredom, despair and rage. The turgid/self-aggrandizing keynotes and coma-inducing panels, followed by people (usually men) asking ‘questions’ that are really comments, and usually not on topic. The chairs who abdicate responsibility and let all the speakers over-run, so that the only genuinely productive bit of the day (networking at coffee breaks and lunch) gets squeezed. I end up dozing off, or furiously scribbling abuse in my notebook as a form of therapy, and hoping my neighbours can’t see what I’m writing. I probably look a bit unhinged…

This matters both because of the lost opportunity that badly run conferences represent, and because they cost money and time. I hope that if it was easy to fix, people would have done so already, but the fact is that the format is tired and unproductive.

For example, how did something as truly awful as panel discussions become the default format? They end up being a parade of people reading out papers, or they include terrible powerpoints crammed with too many words and illegible graphics. Can we try other formats, like speed dating (eg 10 people pitch their work for 2 minutes each, then each goes to a table and the audience hooks up (intellectually, I mean) with the ones they were interested in); world cafes; simulation games; joint tasks (eg come up with an infographic that explains X)? Anything, really. Yes ‘manels’ (male only panels – take the pledge here) are an outrage, but why not go for complete abolition, rather than mere gender balance?

Conferences frequently discuss evidence and results. So where is the evidence and results for the efficacy of conferences? Given the resources being ploughed into research on development (DFID alone spends about £350m a year), surely it would be a worthwhile investment, if it hasn’t already been done, to sponsor a research programme that runs multiple parallel experiments with different event formats, and compares the results in terms of participant feedback, how much people retain a month after the event etc? At the very least, can they find or commission a systematic review on what the existing evidence says?

Feedback systems could really help. A public eBay-type ratings system to rank speakers/conferences would provide nice examples of good practice for people to draw on (and bad practice to avoid). Or why not go real-time and encourage instant audience feedback? OK, maybe Occupy-style thumbs up from the audience if they like the speaker, thumbs down if they don’t would be a bit in-your-face for academe, but why not introduce a twitterwall to encourage the audience to interact with the speaker (perhaps with moderation to stop people testing the limits, as my LSE students did to Owen Barder last term)?

We need to get better at shaping the format to fit the the precise purpose of the conference. … if the best you can manage is ‘disseminating new research’ of ‘information sharing’, alarm bells should probably ring….(More)”.

Fly on the Facebook Wall: How UNHCR Listened to Refugees on Social Media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at Social Media for Good: “In “From a Refugee Perspective” UNHCR shows how to conduct meaningful, qualitative social media monitoring in a humanitarian crisis.

From A Refugee PerspectiveBetween March and December 2016 the project team (one project manager, one Pashto and Dari speaker, two native Arabic speakers and an English copy editor) monitored Facebook conversations related to flight and migration in the Afghan and Arabic speaking communities.

To do this, the team created Facebook accounts, joined relevant Facebook groups and summarised their findings in weekly monitoring reports to UNHCR staff and other interested people. I received these reports every week while working as the UNHCR team leader for the Communicating with Communities team in Greece and found them very useful since they gave me insights into what were some of the burning issues that week.

The project did not monitor Twitter because Twitter was not widely used by the communities.

In “From a Refugee Perspective” UNHCR has now summarised their findings from the ten-month project. The main thing I really liked about this project is that UNHCR invested the resources for proper qualitative social media monitoring, as opposed to the purely quantitative analyses that we see so often and which rarely go beyond keyword counting. To complement the social media information, the team held focus group and other discussions with refugees who had arrived in Europe. Among other things, these discussion provided information on how the refugees and migrants are consuming and exchanging information (related: see this BBC Media Action report).

Of course, this type of research is much more resource intensive than what most organisations have in mind when they want to do social media monitoring, but this report shows that additional resources can also result in more meaningful information.

Smuggling prices

Smuggling prices according to monitored Facebook page. Source: From A Refugee Perspective

Monitoring the conversations on Facebook enabled the team to track trends, such as the rise and fall of prices that smugglers asked for different routes (see image). In addition, it provided fascinating insights into how smugglers are selling their services online….(More)”

Citizen Participation: A Critical Look at the Democratic Adequacy of Government Consultations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
John Morison at Oxford Journal of Legal Studies: “Consultation procedures are used increasingly in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. This account looks critically at consultation as presently practised, and suggests that consulters and consultees need to do much more to ensure both the participatory validity and democratic value of such exercises. The possibility of a ‘right to be consulted’ is examined. Some ideas from a governmentality perspective are developed, using the growth of localism as an example, to suggest that consultation is often a very structured interaction: the actual operation of participation mechanisms may not always create a space for an equal exchange between official and participant views. Examples of best practice in consultation are examined, before consideration is given to recent case law from the UK seeking to establish basic ground rules for how consultations should be organised. Finally, the promise of consultation to reinvigorate democracy is evaluated and weighed against the correlative risk of ‘participatory disempowerment’…(More)”.

Big Data, Data Science, and Civil Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Solon Barocas, Elizabeth Bradley, Vasant Honavar, and Foster Provost:  “Advances in data analytics bring with them civil rights implications. Data-driven and algorithmic decision making increasingly determine how businesses target advertisements to consumers, how police departments monitor individuals or groups, how banks decide who gets a loan and who does not, how employers hire, how colleges and universities make admissions and financial aid decisions, and much more. As data-driven decisions increasingly affect every corner of our lives, there is an urgent need to ensure they do not become instruments of discrimination, barriers to equality, threats to social justice, and sources of unfairness. In this paper, we argue for a concrete research agenda aimed at addressing these concerns, comprising five areas of emphasis: (i) Determining if models and modeling procedures exhibit objectionable bias; (ii) Building awareness of fairness into machine learning methods; (iii) Improving the transparency and control of data- and model-driven decision making; (iv) Looking beyond the algorithm(s) for sources of bias and unfairness—in the myriad human decisions made during the problem formulation and modeling process; and (v) Supporting the cross-disciplinary scholarship necessary to do all of that well…(More)”.

Can we predict political uprisings?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at The Conversation: “Forecasting political unrest is a challenging task, especially in this era of post-truth and opinion polls.

Several studies by economists such as Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler in 1998 and 2002 describe how economic indicators, such as slow income growth and natural resource dependence, can explain political upheaval. More specifically, low per capita income has been a significant trigger of civil unrest.

Economists James Fearon and David Laitin have also followed this hypothesis, showing how specific factors played an important role in Chad, Sudan and Somalia in outbreaks of political violence.

According to the International Country Risk Guide index, the internal political stability of Sudan fell by 15% in 2014, compared to the previous year. This decrease was after a reduction of its per capita income growth rate from 12% in 2012 to 2% in 2013.

By contrast, when the income per capita growth increased in 1997 compared to 1996, the score for political stability in Sudan increased by more than 100% in 1998. Political stability across any given year seems to be a function of income growth in the previous one.

When economics lie

But as the World Bank admitted, “economic indicators failed to predict Arab Spring”.

Usual economic performance indicators, such as gross domestic product, trade, foreign direct investment, showed higher economic development and globalisation of the Arab Spring countries over a decade. Yet, in 2010, the region witnessed unprecedented uprisings that caused the collapse of regimes such as those in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

In our 2016 study we used data for more than 100 countries for the 1984–2012 period. We wanted to look at criteria other than economics to better understand the rise of political upheavals.

We found out and quantified how corruption is a destabilising factor when youth (15-24 years old) exceeds 20% of adult population.

Let’s examine the two main components of the study: demographics and corruption….

We are 90% confident that a youth bulge beyond 20% of adult population, on average, combined with high levels of corruption can significantly destabilise political systems within specific countries when other factors described above also taken into account. We are 99% confident about a youth bulge beyond 30% levels.

Our results can help explain the risk of internal conflict and the possible time window for it happening. They could guide policy makers and international organisations in allocating their anti-corruption budget better, taking into account the demographic structure of societies and the risk of political instability….(More).