Collection

Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future

Curated on May 9, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Alan Jacobs at the Hedgehog Review: “Facebook is unlikely to shut down tomorrow; nor is Twitter, or Instagram, or any other major social network. But they could. And it would be a good exercise to reflect on the fact that, should any or all of them disappear, no user would have any legal or practical recourse….In the years since I became fully aware of the vulnerability of what the Internet likes to call my “content,” I have made some changes in how I live online. But I have also become increasingly convinced that this vulnerability raises wide-ranging questions that ought to be of general concern. Those of us who live much of our lives online are not faced here simply with matters of intellectual property; we need to confront significant choices about the world we will hand down to those who come after us. The complexities of social media ought to prompt deep reflection on what we all owe to the future, and how we might discharge this debt.

A New Kind of Responsibility

Hans Jonas was a German-born scholar who taught for many years at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He is best known for his 1958 book The Gnostic Religion, a pathbreaking study of Gnosticism that is still very much worth reading. Jonas was a philosopher whose interest in Gnosticism arose from certain questions raised by his mentor Martin Heidegger. Relatively late in his career, though he had repudiated Heidegger many years earlier for his Nazi sympathies, Jonas took up Heidegger’s interest in technology in an intriguing and important book called The Imperative of Responsibility….

What is required of a new ethics adequate to the challenge posed by our own technological powers? Jonas argues that the first priority is an expansion and complication of the notion of responsibility. Unlike our predecessors, we need always to be conscious of the effects of our actions on people we have never met and will never meet, because they are so far removed from us in space and time. Democratically elected governments can to some degree adapt to spatially extended responsibility, because our communications technologies link people who cannot meet face-to-face. But the chasm of time is far more difficult to overcome, and indeed our governments (democratic or otherwise) are all structured in such a way that the whole of their attention goes to the demands of the present, with scarcely a thought to be spared for the future. For Jonas, one of the questions we must face is this “What force shall represent the future in the present?”

I want to reflect on Jonas’s challenge in relation to our digital technologies. And though this may seem remote from the emphasis on care for the natural world that Jonas came to be associated with, there is actually a common theme concerning our experiences within and responsibility for certain environmental conditions. What forces, not in natural ecology but in media ecology, can best represent the future in the present?…(More)”.

Everyone can now patrol this city’s streets for crime. ACLU says that’s a bad idea

Curated on May 9, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

NJ.com: “All eyes are on the city of Newark, literally. The city recently revealed its new “Citizen Virtual Patrol” program, which places 60 cameras around the city’s intersections, putting the city’s streets, and those who venture out on them, on display seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

That isn’t startling, as cameras have been up in the city for the past dozen years, says Anthony Ambrose, the city’s public safety director.

What is new, and not found in other cities, is that police officers won’t be the only ones trolling for criminals. Now, anyone who’s willing to submit their email address and upload an app onto their home computer or phone, can watch those cameras.

Citizens can then alert police when they see suspicious activity and remain anonymous. “Right now, in this era of society, it’s impossible to be outside without being recorded,” said Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. “We need to be able to use that technology to allow the police to do their job more efficiently and more cost effective.”

Those extra eyes, however, come at a cost. The cameras could also provide stalkers with their victim’s whereabouts, show intimate scenes and even when residents leave their homes vacant as they head out on vacation.

The American Civil Liberties Association of New Jersey is asking Newark to end the program, saying it’s a violation of privacy and the Fourth Amendment.

“Newark is crowdsourcing it’s responsibility to the public instead of engaging in policing,” said ACLU-NJ Executive Director Amol Sinha.

“There’s a fundamental difference between a civilian using their phone to record a certain area than government having cameras where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy,” Sinha said….

The city also plans to launch a campaign informing residents about the cameras.

“It’s about transparency,” Ambrose said. “We’re not saying we put cameras out there and you don’t know where they are at, we’re telling you.” …(More)”.

Health Citizenship: A New Social Contract To Improve The Clinical Trial Process

Curated on May 9, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Cynthia Grossman and Tanisha Carino: “…We call this new social contract health citizenship, which includes a set of implied rights and responsibilities for all parties.

Three fundamental truths underpin our efforts:

The path to better health and the advancement of science begin and end with engaged patients.
The biomedical research enterprise lives all around us — in clinical trials, the data in our wearables, electronic health records, and data used for payment.
The stakeholders that fuel advancement — clinicians, academia, government, the private sector, and investors — must create a system focused on speeding medical research and ensuring that patients have appropriate access to treatments.

To find tomorrow’s cures, treatments, and prevention measures, every aspect of society needs to get involved. Health citizenship recognizes that the future of innovative research and development depends on both patients and the formal healthcare system stepping up to the plate.

Moving Toward A Culture Of Transparency

Increasing clinical trials registration and posting of research results are steps in the direction of transparency. Access to information about clinical trials — enrollment criteria, endpoints, locations, and results — is critical to empowering patients, their families, and primary care physicians. Also, transparency has a cascading impact on the cost and speed of scientific discovery, through ensuring validation and reproducibility of results…..

Encouraging Data Sharing

Data is the currency of biomedical research, and now patients are poised to contribute more of it than ever. In fact, many patients who participate in clinical research expect that their data will be shared and want to be partners, not just participants, in how data is used to advance the science and clinical practice that impact their disease or condition.

Engaging more patients in data sharing is only one part of what is needed to advance a data-sharing ecosystem. The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) conducted a consensus study that details the challenges to clinical trial data sharing. Out of that study spun a new data-sharing platform, Vivli, which will publicly launch this year. The New England Journal of Medicine took an important step toward demonstrating the value of sharing clinical trial data through its SPRINT Data Challenge, where it opened up a data set and supported projects that sought to derive new insights from the existing data. Examples like these will go a long way toward demonstrating the value of data sharing to advancing science, academic careers, and, most importantly, patient health.

As the technology to share clinical trial data improves, it will become less of an impediment than aligning incentives. The academic environment incentivizes researchers through first author and top-tier journal publications, which contribute to investigators holding on to clinical trial data. A recent publication suggests a way to ensure academic credit, through publication credit, for sharing data sets and allows investigators to tag data sets with unique IDs.

While this effort could assist in incentivizing data sharing, we see the value of tagging data sets as a way to rapidly gather examples of the value of data sharing, including what types of data sets are taken up for analysis and what types of analyses or actions are most valuable. This type of information is currently missing, and, without the value proposition, it is difficult to encourage data sharing behavior.

The value of clinical trial data will need to be collectively reexamined through embracing the sharing of data both across clinical trials and combined with other types of data. Similar to the airline and car manufacturing industries sharing data in support of public safety,7 as more evidence is gathered to support the impact of clinical trial data sharing and as the technology is developed to do this safely and securely, the incentives, resources, and equity issues will need to be addressed collectively…(More)”.

Crowdsourcing & Data Analytics: The New Settlement Tools

Curated on May 9, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Chao, Bernard and Robertson, Christopher T. and Yokum, David V: “In the jury trial rights, the State and Federal Constitutions recognize the fundamental value of having laypersons resolve civil and criminal disputes. Nonetheless, settlement allows parties to avoid the risks and cost of trials, and settlements help clear court dockets efficiently. But achieving settlement can be a challenge. Parties naturally view their cases from different perspectives, and these perspectives often cause both sides to be overly optimistic. This article describes a novel method of providing parties more accurate information about the value of their case by incorporating layperson perspectives. Specifically, we suggest that working with mediators or settlement judges, the parties should create mini-trials and then recruit hundreds of online mock jurors to render decisions. By applying modern statistical techniques to these results, the mediators can show the parties the likelihood of possible outcomes and also collect qualitative information about strengths and weaknesses for each side. These data will counter the parties’ unrealistic views and thereby facilitate settlement….(More)”.

Community Academic Research Partnership in Digital Contexts: Opportunities, Limitations, and New Ways to Promote Mutual Benefit

Curated on May 8, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Liat Racin and Eric Gordon: “It’s widely accepted that community-academic collaborations have the potential to involve more of the people and places that a community values as well as address the concerns of the very constituents that community-based organizations care for. Just how to involve them and ensure their benefit remains highly controversial in the digital age. This report provides an overview of the concerns, values, and the roles of digital data and communications in community-academic research partnerships from the perspectives of Community Partner Organizations (CPOs) in Boston, Massachusetts. It can serve as a resource for researchers and academic organizations seeking to better understand the position and sentiments of their community partners, and ways in which to utilize digital technology to address conflicting notions on what defines ‘good’ research as well as the power imbalances that may exist between all involved participants. As research involves community members and agencies more closely, it’s commonly assumed that the likelihood of CPOs accepting and endorsing a projects’ or programs’ outcomes increases if they perceive that the research itself is credible and has direct beneficial application.

Our research is informed by informal discussions with participants of events and workshops organized by both the Boston Civic Media Consortium and the Engagement Lab at Emerson College between 2015-2016. These events are free to the public and were attended by both CPOs and academics from various fields and interest positions. We also conducted interviews with 20 CPO representatives in the Greater Boston region who were currently or had recently engaged in academic research partnerships. These representatives presented a diverse mix of experiences and were not disproportionately associated with any one community issue. The interview protocol consisted of 15 questions that explored issues related to the benefits, challenges, structure and outcomes of their academic collaborations. It also included questions about the nature and processes of data management. Our goal was to uncover patterns of belief in the roles, values, and concerns of CPO representatives in partnerships, focusing on how they understand and assign value to digital data and technology.

Unfortunately, the growing use and dependence on digital tools and technology in our modern-day research context has failed to inspire in-depth analysis on the influences of ‘the digital’ in community-engaged social research, such as how data is produced, used, and disseminated by community members and agencies. This gap exists despite the growing proliferation of digital technologies and born-digital data in the work of both social researchers and community groups (Wright, 2005; Thompson et al., 2003; Walther and Boyd 2002). To address this gap and identify the discourses about what defines ‘good’ research processes, we ask: “To what extent do community-academic partnerships meet the expectations of community groups?” And, “what are the main challenges of CPO representatives when they collaboratively generate and exchange knowledge with particular regard to the design, access and (re)use of digital data?”…(More)”.

A Framework for Strengthening Data Ecosystems to Serve Humanitarian Purposes

Curated on May 8, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Marc van den Homberg et al: “The incidence of natural disasters worldwide is increasing. As a result, a growing number of people is in need of humanitarian support, for which limited resources are available. This requires an effective and efficient prioritization of the most vulnerable people in the preparedness phase, and the most affected people in the response phase of humanitarian action. Data-driven models have the potential to support this prioritization process. However, the applications of these models in a country requires a certain level of data preparedness.

To achieve this level of data preparedness on a large scale we need to know how to facilitate, stimulate and coordinate data-sharing between humanitarian actors. We use a data ecosystem perspective to develop success criteria for establishing a “humanitarian data ecosystem”. We first present the development of a general framework with data ecosystem governance success criteria based on a systematic literature review. Subsequently, the applicability of this framework in the humanitarian sector is assessed through a case study on the “Community Risk Assessment and Prioritization toolbox” developed by the Netherlands Red Cross. The empirical evidence led to the adaption the framework to the specific criteria that need to be addressed when aiming to establish a successful humanitarian data ecosystem….(More)”.

Data sharing in PLOS ONE: An analysis of Data Availability Statements

Curated on May 8, 2018October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Lisa M. Federer et al at PLOS One: “A number of publishers and funders, including PLOS, have recently adopted policies requiring researchers to share the data underlying their results and publications. Such policies help increase the reproducibility of the published literature, as well as make a larger body of data available for reuse and re-analysis. In this study, we evaluate the extent to which authors have complied with this policy by analyzing Data Availability Statements from 47,593 papers published in PLOS ONE between March 2014 (when the policy went into effect) and May 2016. Our analysis shows that compliance with the policy has increased, with a significant decline over time in papers that did not include a Data Availability Statement. However, only about 20% of statements indicate that data are deposited in a repository, which the PLOS policy states is the preferred method. More commonly, authors state that their data are in the paper itself or in the supplemental information, though it is unclear whether these data meet the level of sharing required in the PLOS policy. These findings suggest that additional review of Data Availability Statements or more stringent policies may be needed to increase data sharing….(More)”.

Creating a Machine Learning Commons for Global Development

Curated on May 7, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Hamed Alemohammad: “Advances in sensor technology, cloud computing, and machine learning (ML) continue to converge to accelerate innovation in the field of remote sensing. However, fundamental tools and technologies still need to be developed to drive further breakthroughs and to ensure that the Global Development Community (GDC) reaps the same benefits that the commercial marketplace is experiencing. This process requires us to take a collaborative approach.

Data collaborative innovation — that is, a group of actors from different data domains working together toward common goals — might hold the key to finding solutions for some of the global challenges that the world faces. That is why Radiant.Earth is investing in new technologies such as Cloud Optimized GeoTiffs, Spatial Temporal Asset Catalogues (STAC), and ML. Our approach to advance ML for global development begins with creating open libraries of labeled images and algorithms. This initiative and others require — and, in fact, will thrive as a result of — using a data collaborative approach.

“Data is only as valuable as the decisions it enables.”

This quote by Ion Stoica, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, may best describe the challenge facing those of us who work with geospatial information:

How can we extract greater insights and value from the unending tsunami of data that is before us, allowing for more informed and timely decision making?…(More).