Alfredo J. Morales, Vaibhav Vavilala, Rosa M. Benito, and Yaneer Bar-Yam in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface: “Social media are transforming global communication and coordination and provide unprecedented opportunities for studying socio-technical domains. Here we study global dynamical patterns of communication on Twitter across many scales. Underlying the observed patterns is both the diurnal rotation of the earth, day and night, and the synchrony required for contingency of actions between individuals. We find that urban areas show a cyclic contraction and expansion that resembles heartbeats linked to social rather than natural cycles. Different urban areas have characteristic signatures of daily collective activities. We show that the differences detected are consistent with a new emergent global synchrony that couples behavior in distant regions across the world. Although local synchrony is the major force that shapes the collective behavior in cities, a larger-scale synchronization is beginning to occur….(More)”.
What Makes for Successful Open Government Co-Creation?
Panthea Lee at Reboot: “The promise of open government is unlocked when diverse actors work together toward a common vision. It requires engagement by citizens, government, civil society, the private sector, and others with a stake in good governance. Yet while collaborators may share values of transparency, participation, accountability, and innovation, the actual practice of co-creating solutions to advance these ideals can be messy…. we’ve surfaced some insights on what leads to successful co-creation; a sample is shared here, illustrated with snapshots from our remarkable partners. The issues each grappled with will be familiar to anyone working in open government, and we hope that their approaches to addressing the issues will inspire. Finally, we were excited to see OGP release draft co-creation standards to help strengthen government and civil society collaborations on the open government agenda, and we hope these stories help illuminate those guidelines.
Successful open government programs don’t start from scratch—they align with existing political mandates and institutional assets. By building upon current initiatives, and taking advantage of windows of political opportunity, initiatives can have more widespread and sustainable wins….(More)”.
AI, machine learning and personal data
Jo Pedder at the Information Commissioner’s Office Blog: “Today sees the publication of the ICO’s updated paper on big data and data protection.
But why now? What’s changed in the two and a half years since we first visited this topic? Well, quite a lot actually:
- big data is becoming the norm for many organisations, using it to profile people and inform their decision-making processes, whether that’s to determine your car insurance premium or to accept/reject your job application;
- artificial intelligence (AI) is stepping out of the world of science-fiction and into real life, providing the ‘thinking’ power behind virtual personal assistants and smart cars; and
- machine learning algorithms are discovering patterns in data that traditional data analysis couldn’t hope to find, helping to detect fraud and diagnose diseases.
The complexity and opacity of these types of processing operations mean that it’s often hard to know what’s going on behind the scenes. This can be problematic when personal data is involved, especially when decisions are made that have significant effects on people’s lives. The combination of these factors has led some to call for new regulation of big data, AI and machine learning, to increase transparency and ensure accountability.
In our view though, whilst the means by which the processing of personal data are changing, the underlying issues remain the same. Are people being treated fairly? Are decisions accurate and free from bias? Is there a legal basis for the processing? These are issues that the ICO has been addressing for many years, through oversight of existing European data protection legislation….(More)”
When the Big Lie Meets Big Data
Peter Bruce in Scientific America: “…The science of predictive modeling has come a long way since 2004. Statisticians now build “personality” models and tie them into other predictor variables. … One such model bears the acronym “OCEAN,” standing for the personality characteristics (and their opposites) of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Using Big Data at the individual level, machine learning methods might classify a person as, for example, “closed, introverted, neurotic, not agreeable, and conscientious.”
Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica (owned by Trump’s chief donor, Rebekah Mercer), says he has thousands of data points on you, and every other voter: what you buy or borrow, where you live, what you subscribe to, what you post on social media, etc. At a recent Concordia Summit, using the example of gun rights, Nix described how messages will be crafted to appeal specifically to you, based on your personality profile. Are you highly neurotic and conscientious? Nix suggests the image of a sinister gloved hand reaching through a broken window.
In his presentation, Nix noted that the goal is to induce behavior, not communicate ideas. So where does truth fit in? Johan Ugander, Assistant Professor of Management Science at Stanford, suggests that, for Nix and Cambridge Analytica, it doesn’t. In counseling the hypothetical owner of a private beach how to keep people off his property, Nix eschews the merely factual “Private Beach” sign, advocating instead a lie: “Sharks sighted.” Ugander, in his critique, cautions all data scientists against “building tools for unscrupulous targeting.”
The warning is needed, but may be too late. What Nix described in his presentation involved carefully crafted messages aimed at his target personalities. His messages pulled subtly on various psychological strings to manipulate us, and they obeyed no boundary of truth, but they required humans to create them. The next phase will be the gradual replacement of human “craftsmanship” with machine learning algorithms that can supply targeted voters with a steady stream of content (from whatever source, true or false) designed to elicit desired behavior. Cognizant of the Pandora’s box that data scientists have opened, the scholarly journal Big Data has issued a call for papers for a future issue devoted to “Computational Propaganda.”…(More)”
Open Government Data in Africa: A preference elicitation analysis of media practitioners
Democracy at Work: Moving Beyond Elections to Improve Well-Being
Michael Touchton, Natasha Borges Sugiyama and Brian Wampler in the American Political Science Review: “How does democracy work to improve well-being? In this article, we disentangle the component parts of democratic practice—elections, civic participation, expansion of social provisioning, local administrative capacity—to identify their relationship with well-being. We draw from the citizenship debates to argue that democratic practices allow citizens to gain access to a wide range of rights, which then serve as the foundation for improving social well-being. Our analysis of an original dataset covering over 5,550 Brazilian municipalities from 2006 to 2013 demonstrates that competitive elections alone do not explain variation in infant mortality rates, one outcome associated with well-being. We move beyond elections to show how participatory institutions, social programs, and local state capacity can interact to buttress one another and reduce infant mortality rates. It is important to note that these relationships are independent of local economic growth, which also influences infant mortality. The result of our thorough analysis offers a new understanding of how different aspects of democracy work together to improve a key feature of human development….(More)”.
Playing (with) Democracy: A Review of Gamified Participation Approaches
Sarah-Kristin Thiel, Michaela Reisinger, Kathrin Röderer, Peter Fröhlich in the Journal of Democracy and Open Government: “Albeit a wide range of e-participation platforms being already available, the level of public participation remains low. Governments around the world as well as academia are currently exploring new ways to design participation methods that are more engaging to use and will foster participation. One of the strategies is gamification. By adding game elements to e-participation platforms it is hoped to motivate for citizens to engage. This paper reviewed a large number of e-participation platforms, seeking to provide an overview of the current state of the art of so-called gamified participation initiatives. Our results show that while about half of the review projects can be categorized as game-related, only a small amount employs gamification. Moreover, current gamified participation initiatives seem to focus on reward-based gamification, a strategy which is said to come with risks. In this paper we further provide recommendations for future gamified participation projects….(More)”
Handbook of Big Data Technologies
Handbook by Albert Y. Zomaya and Sherif Sakr: “…offers comprehensive coverage of recent advancements in Big Data technologies and related paradigms. Chapters are authored by international leading experts in the field, and have been reviewed and revised for maximum reader value. The volume consists of twenty-five chapters organized into four main parts. Part one covers the fundamental concepts of Big Data technologies including data curation mechanisms, data models, storage models, programming models and programming platforms. It also dives into the details of implementing Big SQL query engines and big stream processing systems. Part Two focuses on the semantic aspects of Big Data management including data integration and exploratory ad hoc analysis in addition to structured querying and pattern matching techniques. Part Three presents a comprehensive overview of large scale graph processing. It covers the most recent research in large scale graph processing platforms, introducing several scalable graph querying and mining mechanisms in domains such as social networks. Part Four details novel applications that have been made possible by the rapid emergence of Big Data technologies such as Internet-of-Things (IOT), Cognitive Computing and SCADA Systems. All parts of the book discuss open research problems, including potential opportunities, that have arisen from the rapid progress of Big Data technologies and the associated increasing requirements of application domains.
Designed for researchers, IT professionals and graduate students, this book is a timely contribution to the growing Big Data field. Big Data has been recognized as one of leading emerging technologies that will have a major contribution and impact on the various fields of science and varies aspect of the human society over the coming decades. Therefore, the content in this book will be an essential tool to help readers understand the development and future of the field….(More)”
Innovation in Education Through Crowdsourcing
Meghna Tare in TriplePundit: “….UNESCO tapped into online crowdsourcing to help achieve Education for All. The project on crowdsourcing girls’ education in Ethiopia and Tanzania launched in July 2011 took a community-based approach to lowering drop-out rates in secondary schools in those countries.
Funded by the Packard Foundation, within the framework of UNESCO’s global partnership for girls’ and women’s education, it encouraged girls and their communities to propose solutions to obstacles preventing girls from completing secondary education. The process introduced a fresh approach to designing education policies
One of the groups that benefits tremendously from crowdsourcing in education is the faculty. Teachers and professors can share lesson plans with each other and find new and innovative ways to share material with students. They can brainstorm together to create a database of resources and best practices that benefit their institution – and then share that information with other schools as well. They can give feedback and offer assistance in further developing curriculum. Finally, faculty can use peer evaluations to help with grading practices and to receive feedback on their teaching styles
Crowdsourcing is also an important method to improve the way education is conducted by teachers and received by students. With crowdsourcing projects, colleges and universities can use collective brainpower and energy to complete what they can’t do on their own, going beyond their budgets and time constraints.
From transcribing ancient documents and increasing class participation to collecting data for research and documenting campus crime, these college crowdsourcing projects are downright awe-inspiring.
- Columbia University used crowdsourcing of ideas to dramatically enhance the student experience. By allowing students to suggest ideas in the “What to Fix Colombia” community, the school received feedback and implemented changes that made a significant difference in how students operate at school. Some of the low-hanging fruit ideas included small things like revised gate hours and a new mailbox notification system….(More)”
Disinformation campaigns target tech-enabled citizen journalists
Steven Livingston at Brookings: “Governments hoping to evade responsibility for war crimes and rights abuses are having a much tougher time of it these days. Denying entry to nettlesome investigators is still standard while many places are simply too dangerous to investigate. But even where investigators cannot go, digital technologies can sometimes overcome barriers to investigation. A recent Harvard Kennedy School report published by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy underscores how various digital technologies undermine attempts to hide abuses and war crimes. Commercial high-resolution remote sensing satellites, some capable of distinguishing objects on the ground as small as 30-cm across, allow human rights groups to document military forces deployments, mass graves, forced population displacements, and damage to physical infrastructure…(More)”