New study improves ‘crowd wisdom’ estimates

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Santa Fe Institute: “In 1907, a statistician named Francis Galton recorded the entries from a weight-judging competition as people guessed the weight of an ox. Galton analyzed hundreds of estimates and found that while individual guesses varied wildly, the median of the entries was surprisingly accurate and within one percent of the ox’s real weight. When Galton published his results, he ushered the theory of collective intelligence, or the “wisdom of crowds,” into the public conscience.

Collective wisdom has its limits, though. In a new study published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, researchers Albert Kao (Harvard University), Andrew Berdahl (Santa Fe Institute), and their colleagues examined just how accurate our collective intelligence is and how individual bias and information sharing skew aggregate estimates. Using their findings, they developed a mathematical correction that takes into account bias and social information to generate an improved crowd estimate. In the study, their corrected measures were more accurate than the mean, median, and other traditional statistics.

“There is growing evidence that the wisdom of crowds can be really powerful,” Kao says. “A lot of studies show that you can calculate the average of estimates and that average can be surprisingly good.”

“However,” adds Berdahl, “there is a great deal of evidence that people have strong biases in estimation and decision tasks.”

The researchers recruited over 800 volunteers to participate in the study and asked each participant to guess the number of gumballs in a jar, which ranged over several orders of magnitude from 54 to more than 27,000. Additionally, they quantified how individuals incorporate social information into their own opinion. To do so, the researchers offered participants fake details about other people’s guesses and allowed them to change their estimate in light of that information.

Kao’s team found that while estimates varied considerably, they were highly predictable. People tended to guess numbers smaller than the actual value and guessed a wider range of numbers for larger jars. Social information also plays a role in collective wisdom. For example, the simulated social information revealed that peer advice more strongly influenced an individual if the knowledge suggested the actual number of items was higher than the guesser’s initial estimate. Smaller guesses, even if more accurate, appear to be more frequently discounted…(More)”

See: “Counteracting estimation bias and social influence to improve the wisdom of crowds” in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface (April 18, 2018)

The digital economy is disrupting our old models

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Diane Coyle at The Financial Times: “One of the many episodes of culture shock I experienced as a British student in the US came when I first visited the university health centre. They gave me my medical notes to take away. Once I was over the surprise, I concluded this was entirely proper. After all, the true data was me, my body. I was reminded of this moment from the early 1980s when reflecting on the debate about Facebook and data, one of the collective conclusions of which seems to be that personal data are personal property so there need to be stronger rights of ownership. If I do not like what Facebook is doing with my data, I should be able to withdraw them. Yet this fix for the problem is not straightforward.

“My” data are inextricably linked with that of other people, who are in my photographs or in my network. Once the patterns and correlations have been extracted from it, withdrawing my underlying data is neither here nor there, for the value lies in the patterns. The social character of information can be seen from the recent example of Strava accidentally publishing maps of secret American military bases because the aggregated route data revealed all the service personnel were running around the edge of their camps. One or two withdrawals of personal data would have made no difference. To put it in economic jargon, we are in the territory of externalities and public goods. Information once shared cannot be unshared.
The digital economy is one of externalities and public goods to a far greater degree than in the past. We have not begun to get to grips with how to analyse it, still less to develop policies for the common good. There are two questions at the heart of the challenge: what norms and laws about property rights over intangibles such as data or ideas or algorithms are going to be needed? And what will the best balance between collective and individual actions be or, to put it another way, between government and market?
Tussles about rights over intangible or intellectual property have been going on for a while: patent trolls on the one hand, open source creators on the other. However, the issue is far from settled. Do we really want to accept, for example, that John Deere, in selling an expensive tractor to a farmer, is only in fact renting it out because it claims property rights over the installed software?

…

Free digital goods of the open source kind are being cross-subsidised by their creators’ other sources of income. Free digital goods of the social media kind are being funded by various advertising services — and that turns out to be an ugly solution. Yet the network effects are so strong, the benefits they provide so great, that if Facebook and Google were shut down by antitrust action tomorrow, replacement digital groups could well emerge before too long. China seems to be in effect nationalising its big digital platforms but many in the west will find that even less appealing than a private data market. In short, neither “market” nor “state” looks like the right model for ownership and governance in an information economy pervaded by externalities and public goods. Finding alternative models for the creation and sharing of value in the digital world, when these are inherently collective and non-rival activities, is an urgent challenge….(More).

Can government stop losing its mind?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Gavin Starks: “Can government remember? Is it condemned to repeat mistakes? Or does it remember too much and so see too many reasons why anything new is bound to fail?

While we are at the beginnings of a data revolution, we are also at a point where the deluge of data is creating the potential for an ‘information collapse’ in complex administrations: structured information and knowledge is lost in the noise or, worse, misinformation rises as fact.

There are many reasons for this: the technical design of systems, turnover of people, and contracting out. Information is stored in silos and often guarded jealously. Cultural and process issues lead to poor use of technologies. Knowledge is both formal (codified) and informal (held in people’s brains). The greatest value will be unlocked by combining these with existing and emerging tools.

This report sets out how the public sector could benefit from a federated, data-driven approach: one that provides greater power to its leaders, benefits its participants and users, and improves performance through better use of, and structured access to, data.

The report explores examples from the Open Data Institute, Open Banking Standard, BBC Archives, Ministry of Justice, NHS Blood and Transplant, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and Ministry of Defence.

Recommendations:

  1. Design for open; build for search
  2. Build reciprocity into data supply chains
  3. Develop data ethics standards that can evolve at pace
  4. Create a Digital Audit Office
  5. Develop and value a culture of network thinking

To shorten the path between innovation and policy in a way that is repeatable and scalable, the report proposes six areas of focus be considered in any implementation design.

  1. Policy Providing strategic leadership and governance; framing and analysing economic, legal and regulatory impacts (e.g. GDPR, data ethics, security) and highlighting opportunities and threats.
  2. Culture Creating compelling peer, press and public communication and engagement that both address concerns and inspire people to engage in the solutions.
  3. Making Commissioning startups, running innovation competitions and programmes to create practice-based evidence that illustrates the challenges and business opportunities.
  4. Learning Creating training materials that aid implementation and defining evidence-based sustainable business models that are anchored around user-needs.
  5. Standards Defining common human and machine processes that enable both repeatability and scale within commercial and non-commercial environments.
  6. Infrastructure Defining and framing how people and machines will use data, algorithms and open APIs to create sustainable impact….(More)”.

Can mobile phone traces help shed light on the spread of Zika in Colombia?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniela Perrotta at UN Global Pulse: “Nowadays, thanks to the continuous growth of the transport infrastructures, millions of people travel every day around the world, resulting in more opportunities for infectious diseases to spread on a large scale faster than ever before. Already at the beginning of the last century, between 1918 and 1920, due to the special circumstances that were created during World War I, such as overcrowded camps and hospitals, and soldiers piled in trenches or in transit every day, the Spanish Flu killed between 20 and 100 million people, more than the war itself, resulting perhaps in the most lethal pandemic in the history of humankind.

The question that then arises naturally is the following: what if an equally virulent and deadly virus would hit today’s highly-connected world where nearly any point can be easily reached in less than a day’s journey?…

To overcome these limitations, more and more sources of data and innovative techniques are used to detect people’s physical movements over time, such as the digital traces generated by human activities on the Internet (e.g. Twitter, Flickr, Foursquare) or the footprints left by mobile phone users’ activity. In particular, cellular networks implicitly bring a large ensemble of details on human activity, incredibly helpful for capturing mobility patterns and providing a high-level picture of human mobility.

In this context, the Computational Epidemiology Lab at the ISI Foundation in Turin (Italy), in collaboration with UN Global Pulse, an innovation initiative of the United Nations, and Telefonica Research in Madrid (Spain), is currently investigating the human mobility patterns relevant to the epidemic spread of Zika at a local level, in Colombia, mainly focusing on the potential benefits of harnessing mobile phone data as a proxy for human movements. Specifically, mobile phone data are defined as the information elements contained in call detail records (CDRs) created by telecom operators for billing purposes and summarizing mobile subscribers’ activity, i.e. phone calls, text messages and data connections. Such “digital traces” are continuously collected by telecom providers and thus represent a relatively low-cost and endless source for identifying human movements at an unprecedented scale.

In this study, more than two billion encrypted and anonymized calls made by around seven million mobile phone users in Colombia have been used to identify population movements across the country. To assess the value of such human mobility derived from CDRs, the data is evaluated against more traditional methods: census data, that are considered as a reference since they ideally represent the entire population of the country and its mobility features, and mobility models, i.e. the gravity model and the radiation model, that are the most commonly used today. In particular, the gravity model assumes that the number of trips increases with population size and decreases with distances, whereas the radiation model assumes that the mobility depends on population density….(More)”.

Blockchain To Solve Bahamas’ ‘Major Workforce Waste’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tribune 242: “The Government’s first-ever use of blockchain technology will tackle what was yesterday branded “an enormous waste of human capital”.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), unveiling a $200,000 ‘technical co-operation’ project, revealed that the Minnis administration plans to deploy the technology as a way to determine the success of an apprenticeship programme targeted at 1,350 Bahamians aged between 16-40 years-old, and who are either unemployed or school leavers.

Documents obtained by Tribune Business reveal that the Government is also looking to blockchain to combat the widespread problem of lost/missing student records and certifications, which the IDB described as a major constraint to developing a skilled, productive Bahamian workforce.

“Currently, the certification process in the Bahamas lacks technological advances,” the IDB report said. “Today, student records management is a lengthy and cumbersome process. Students do not own their own records of achievement, depending on issuing institutions to verify their achievements throughout their lives. “This results not only in a verification process that can last weeks or months, and involves hours of human labour and (fallible) judgment, but also creates inefficiencies in placing new students and processing transfer equivalencies.“In extreme cases, when the issuing institution goes out of business, loses their records or is destroyed due to natural disasters, students have no way of verifying their achievements and must often start from nothing. This results in an enormous waste of human capital.”

The IDB report said the Bahamas was now “in a singular position to highlight the value of blockchain-based digital records for both students and institutions”, with the technology seen as a mechanism for Bahamians to possess and share records of their educational achievements. Blockchain technology allows information to be recorded, shared and updated by a particular community, with each member maintaining their own copy of data that has to be verified collectively.

Anything that can be described in digital form, such as contracts, transactions and assets, could thus be suitable for blockchain solutions. And Blockcerts, the open-standard for creating, issuing and verifying blockchain-based certificates, ensures they are tamper-proof. “Not only does the Blockcerts standard (open standard for digital documents anchored to the blockchain) allow Bahamian institutions to prevent records fraud, safeguarding and building confidence in their brands, but it allows them to leapfrog the digitisation process, skipping many of the interoperability issues associated with legacy digital formats (i.e. PDF, XML),” the IDB report said.

“Blockcerts provides students with autonomy, privacy, security and greater access all over the world, while allowing the Bahamian government to consolidate and streamline its credentialing operations in a way that produces real return on investment over a period. Primary use cases include: Student diplomas, professional certifications, awards, transcripts, enrollment verification, employment verification, verifications of qualifications, credit equivalencies and more.”…(More)”.

What To Do With The Urban Spaces Technology Makes Obsolete

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Peter Madden at the Huffington Post: “Digital tech will make many city spaces redundant: artificial intelligence doesn’t care where it works; autonomous vehicles don’t care they where they park. These spaces must be repurposed for cities to thrive in the future….

This is an opportunity to ask what people want from their cities and how redundant spaces can meet these needs.

There have been multiple academic studies and marketing surveys on this, and they boil down to two main things. Citizens first want the basics: employment opportunities, affordable housing, good transport, and safe streets. Further up the hierarchy of needs, they also care about the physical appearance of the city, including the availability of parks and green spaces, the feel of the city in terms of openness, diversity and social interaction, and the experience in the city whether that’s tasting new foods, buying an unexpected gift, or discovering a new band.

Re-Greening

The places that were once reserved for cars can be spaces for pedestrians and bike lanes, with walkable and cycle-friendly cities offering cheaper transit, healthier citizens, and stronger communities. Greenery could flourish, with new parks, trees and allotments providing access to nature, sponges to absorb flood-water and urban cooling in a warming world.

Flexible Working

Who really wants a lengthy commute to a regimented workplace? Future office spaces will harness new technology to help people work flexibly, collaboratively and from multiple locations. When they do travel into the city centre office, this will be oriented around the experience of the individual employee, beautifully designed, technologically responsive, with different spaces for how they work best at different times of the day and on different tasks.

Making in Cities

The 4th industrial revolution allows manufacturing to return to urban centres for just-in-time, on demand and hyper-personalised production. Some ‘on-shoring’ is already happening, with McLaren car chassis, Clarks boots and Frog bikes being made again in British towns again. Data analytics, virtual reality, new materials, robotics and 3D printing will make it possible to produce or customise things on the high-street, right where the consumer wants them.

Affordable Housing

Unused buildings and empty land will be filled by new types of housing. In my home city, Bristol, a redundant building in a parade of shops is being turned into living space for the homeless, AEOB will ‘buy and convert empty offices into homes for people’, and ‘We Can Make’ is offering affordable prefabricated houses for empty urban plots. Housing innovations like this are springing up in cities across the world….(More)”.

Data in the EU: Commission steps up efforts to increase availability and boost healthcare data sharing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PressRelease: “Today, the European Commission is putting forward a set of measures to increase the availability of data in the EU, building on previous initiatives to boost the free flow of non-personal data in the Digital Single Market.

Data-driven innovation is a key enabler of market growth, job creation, particularly for SMEs and startups, and the development of new technologies. It allows citizens to easily access and manage their health data, and allows public authorities to use data better in research, prevention and health system reforms….

Today’s proposals build on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will enter into application as of 25 May 2018. They will ensure:

  • Better access to and reusability of public sector data: A revised law on Public Sector Information covers data held by public undertakings in transport and utilities sectors. The new rules limit the exceptions that allow public bodies to charge more than the marginal costs of data dissemination for the reuse of their data. They also facilitate the reusability of open research data resulting from public funding, and oblige Member States to develop open access policies. Finally, the new rules require – where applicable – technical solutions like Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to provide real-time access to data.
  • Scientific data sharing in 2018: A new set of recommendations address the policy and technological changes since the last Commission proposal on access to and preservation of scientific information. They offer guidance on implementing open access policies in line with open science objectives, research data and data management, the creation of a European Open Science Cloud, and text and data-mining. They also highlight the importance of incentives, rewards, skills and metrics appropriate for the new era of networked research.
  • Private sector data sharing in business-to-business and business-to-governments contexts: A new Communication entitled “Towards a common European data space” provides guidance for businesses operating in the EU on the legal and technical principles that should govern data sharing collaboration in the private sector.
  • Securing citizens’ healthcare data while fostering European cooperation: The Commission is today setting out a plan of action that puts citizens first when it comes to data on citizens’ health: by securing citizens’ access to their health data and introducing the possibility to share their data across borders; by using larger data sets to enable more personalised diagnoses and medical treatment, and better anticipate epidemics; and by promoting appropriate digital tools, allowing public authorities to better use health data for research and for health system reforms. Today’s proposal also covers the interoperability of electronic health records as well as a mechanism for voluntary coordination in sharing data – including genomic data – for disease prevention and research….(More)”.

What Is Human-Centric Design?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zack Quaintance at GovTech: “…Government services, like all services, have historically used some form of design to deploy user-facing components. The design portion of this equation is nothing new. What Olesund says is new, however, is the human-centric component.

“In the past, government services were often designed from the perspective and need of the government institution, not necessarily with the needs or desires of residents or constituents in mind,” said Olesund. “This might lead, for example, to an accumulation of stats and requirements for residents, or utilization of outdated technology because the government institution is locked into a contract.”

Basically, government has never set out to design its services to be clunky or hard to use. These qualities have, however, grown out of the legally complex frameworks that governments must adhere to, which can subsequently result in a failure to prioritize the needs of the people using the services rather than the institution.

Change, however, is underway. Human-centric design is one of the main priorities of the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) and 18F, a pair of organizations created under the Obama administration with missions that largely involve making government services more accessible to the citizenry through efficient use of tech.

Although the needs of state and municipal governments are more localized, the gov tech work done at the federal level by the USDS and 18F has at times served as a benchmark or guidepost for smaller government agencies.

“They both redesign services to make them digital and user-friendly,” Olesund said. “But they also do a lot of work creating frameworks and best practices for other government agencies to adopt in order to achieve some of the broader systemic change.”

One of the most tangible examples of human-centered design at the state or local level can be found at Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services, which recently worked with the Detroit-based design studio Civillato reduce its paper services application from 40 pages, 18,000-some words and 1,000 questions, down to 18 pages, 3,904 words and 213 questions. Currently, Civilla is working with the nonprofit civic tech group Code for America to help bring the same massive level of human-centered design progress to the state’s digital services.

Other work is underway in San Francisco’s City Hall and within the state of California. A number of cities also have iTeams funded through Bloomberg Philanthropies, and their missions are to innovate in ways that solve ongoing municipal problems, a mission that often requires use of human-centric design….(More)”.

The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can’t Do

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Edward Tenner: “A bold challenge to our obsession with efficiency–and a new understanding of how to benefit from the powerful potential of serendipity

Algorithms, multitasking, the sharing economy, life hacks: our culture can’t get enough of efficiency. One of the great promises of the Internet and big data revolutions is the idea that we can improve the processes and routines of our work and personal lives to get more done in less time than we ever have before. There is no doubt that we’re performing at higher levels and moving at unprecedented speed, but what if we’re headed in the wrong direction?

Melding the long-term history of technology with the latest headlines and findings of computer science and social science, The Efficiency Paradox questions our ingrained assumptions about efficiency, persuasively showing how relying on the algorithms of digital platforms can in fact lead to wasted efforts, missed opportunities, and above all an inability to break out of established patterns. Edward Tenner offers a smarter way of thinking about efficiency, revealing what we and our institutions, when equipped with an astute combination of artificial intelligence and trained intuition, can learn from the random and unexpected….(More)”

How Artificial Intelligence Could Increase the Risk of Nuclear War

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rand Corporation: “The fear that computers, by mistake or malice, might lead humanity to the brink of nuclear annihilation has haunted imaginations since the earliest days of the Cold War.

The danger might soon be more science than fiction. Stunning advances in AI have created machines that can learn and think, provoking a new arms race among the world’s major nuclear powers. It’s not the killer robots of Hollywood blockbusters that we need to worry about; it’s how computers might challenge the basic rules of nuclear deterrence and lead humans into making devastating decisions.

That’s the premise behind a new paper from RAND Corporation, How Might Artificial Intelligence Affect the Risk of Nuclear War? It’s part of a special project within RAND, known as Security 2040, to look over the horizon and anticipate coming threats.

“This isn’t just a movie scenario,” said Andrew Lohn, an engineer at RAND who coauthored the paper and whose experience with AI includes using it to route drones, identify whale calls, and predict the outcomes of NBA games. “Things that are relatively simple can raise tensions and lead us to some dangerous places if we are not careful.”…(More)”.