Collection

Crowdsourcing On-street Parking Space Detection

Curated on March 13, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ruizhi Liao et al in: “As the number of vehicles continues to grow, parking spaces are at a premium in city streets. Additionally, due to the lack of knowledge about street parking spaces, heuristic circling the blocks not only costs drivers’ time and fuel, but also increases city congestion. In the wake of recent trend to build convenient, green and energy-efficient smart cities, we rethink common techniques adopted by high-profile smart parking systems, and present a user-engaged (crowdsourcing) and sonar-based prototype to identify urban on-street parking spaces. The prototype includes an ultrasonic sensor, a GPS receiver and associated Arduino micro-controllers. It is mounted on the passenger side of a car to measure the distance from the vehicle to the nearest roadside obstacle. Multiple road tests are conducted around Wheatley, Oxford to gather results and emulate the crowdsourcing approach. By extracting parked vehicles’ features from the collected trace, a supervised learning algorithm is developed to estimate roadside parking occupancy and spot illegal parking vehicles. A quantity estimation model is derived to calculate the required number of sensing units to cover urban streets. The estimation is quantitatively compared to a fixed sensing solution. The results show that the crowdsourcing way would need substantially fewer sensors compared to the fixed sensing system…(More)”

Crowdsourcing Site Works to Detect Spread of Zika

Curated on March 12, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Suzanne Tracy at Scientific Computing Source: “Last month, the Flu Near You crowdsourcing tool expanded its data collection to include Zika, chikungunya and dengue symptoms, such as eye pain, yellow skin/eyes and joint/bone pain. Flu Near You is a free and anonymous Web site and mobile application that allows the public to report their health information by completing brief weekly surveys.

Created by epidemiologists at Harvard, Boston Children’s Hospital and The Skoll Global Threats Fund, the novel participatory disease surveillance tool is intended to complement existing surveillance systems by directly engaging the public in public health reporting. As such, it relies on voluntary participation from the general public, asking participants to take a few seconds each week to report whether they or their family members have been healthy or sick.

Using participant-reported symptoms, the site graphs and maps this information to provide local and national views of illness. Thousands of reports are analyzed and mapped to provide public health officials and researchers with real-time, anonymous information that could help prevent the next pandemic.

The survey, which launched in 2011, is conducted year-round for several reasons.

First, it is possible for an influenza outbreak to occur outside of the traditional flu season. For instance, the first wave of pandemic H1N1 hit in the spring of 2009. The project wants to capture any emerging outbreak, should something similar occur again.
Second, the project’s symptoms-based health forms allow it to monitor other diseases, such as the recently-added Zika, chikungunya and dengue, which may have different seasons than influenza….(More)

See also: http://flunearyou.org and video: Fight the flu. Save lives

Changing views of how to change the world

Curated on March 12, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Homi Kharas at Brookings: “World leaders concluded three large agreements last year. Each represents a vision of how to change the world. The Addis Ababa Action Agenda on financing for development agreed to move from “billions to trillions” of cross-border flows to developing countries. The agreement on universal sustainable development goals (SDGs) sets out priorities (albeit a long list) for what needs to change. The Paris Agreement on climate change endorses a shift to low-carbon (and ultimately zero carbon) economic growth trajectories.

There is a common thread to these agreements. They each reflect a new theory of how to change the world that is not made explicit but has evolved as a matter of practice. Understanding this new theory is crucial to successful implementation strategies of the three agreements.

In the past, when governments have wanted to change the world, they negotiated intergovernmentalagreements….

The new theory of how to change the world can be stripped down to three elements.

Use market forces to drive business towards scalable investments that simultaneously generate sustainable solutions to development challenges;
Create more data from more sources with more disaggregation, and make these more easily transparent and accessible, to drive towards evidence-based reforms and accountability;
Encourage innovations (technical, organizational, and business-model) to drive the world away from business-as-usual…(More)”

How the FDA aims to speed review of medical devices

Curated on March 11, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kathleen Hickey at GCN: “The Food and Drug Administration is piloting a new system to speed up the premarket review process for new medical devices.

One of the main bottlenecks in the medical device review process is finding the right expert reviewer. Currently the FDA relies on “the usual suspects” – a core group of reviewers from the FDA Office of Device Evaluation (ODE), according to a GovLab report on the pilot program. However, this pool of experts is limited and may not include those with knowledge of the specific technologies in new medical devices. Finding qualified reviewers outside this core group can take as long as nine months.

To combat the issue, the Department of Health and Human Services is creating a network database of experts — HHS Profiles — based on a customized version of theHarvard Profiles Research Networking Software, a National Institutes of Health-funded open source tool for finding researchers with specific areas of expertise.

Potential expert reviewers create profiles in the system describing their skills and experience. The software then imports and analyzes reviewer contact information, publications and other data sources to create and maintain a searchable library of electronic resumes of HHS experts. Representatives of the Office for Device Evaluation can then search the profiles to identify the most qualified individuals to participate in the regulatory review of a given medical device.

The pilot will compare the efficacy of picking expert reviewers from profiles versus the current methods, including determining whether matching individuals based on their published articles and academic degrees is the best method for finding the right reviewer; the time required for the panel to meet and review a device; and safety outcomes – e.g. product recalls and adverse event reports.

The FDA anticipates the new platform will increase the speed and effectiveness of the medical device regulatory review process and expand the pool of reviewers. Currently the premarket approval review process, done exclusively by internal staff, takes an average of 266 days. Reviewing unique devices takes an average of 18 months.

The pilot program is being conducted this year in partnership with GovLab and its MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance. Funding is provided by the General Services Administration from its The Great Pitch investment contest….(More)”

Accelerating Discovery with New Tools and Methods for Next Generation Social Science

Curated on March 11, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

DARPA: “The explosive growth of global digital connectivity has opened new possibilities for designing and conducting social science research. Once limited by practical constraints to experiments involving just a few dozen participants—often university students or other easily available groups—or to correlational studies of large datasets without any opportunity for determining causation, scientists can now engage thousands of diverse volunteers online and explore an expanded range of important topics and questions. If new tools and methods for harnessing virtual or alternate reality and massively distributed platforms could be developed and objectively validated, many of today’s most important and vexing challenges in social science—such as identifying the primary drivers of social cooperation, instability and resilience—might be made more tractable, with benefits for domains as broad as national security, public health, and economics.

To begin to assess the research opportunities provided by today’s web-connected world and advanced technologies, DARPA today launched its Next Generation Social Science (NGS2) program. The program aims to build and evaluate new methods and tools to advance rigorous, reproducible social science studies at scales necessary to develop and validate causal models of human social behaviors. The program will draw upon and build across a wide array of disciplines—including social sciences like sociology, economics, political science, anthropology, and psychology, as well as information and computer sciences, physics, biology and math.

As an initial focus, NGS2 will challenge researchers to develop and use these new tools and methods to identify causal mechanisms of “collective identity” formation—how a group of individuals becomes a unified whole, and how under certain circumstances that community breaks down into a chaotic mix of disconnected individuals.

“Social science has done a remarkable job of helping us understand ourselves as the highly social creatures we are, but the field has long acknowledged and rued some frustrating research limitations, including technical and logistical limits to experimentally studying large, representative populations and the challenges of replicating key studies to better understand the limits of our knowledge,” said Adam Russell, DARPA program manager. “As a result, it’s been difficult for social scientists to determine what variables matter most in explaining their observations of human social systems and to move from documenting correlation to identifying causation.”

On top of those methodological and analytic limitations, Russell said, the field is inherently challenged because of its subject matter: human beings, with all their complex variability and seeming unpredictability. “Physicists have joked about how much more difficult their field would be if atoms or electrons had personalities, but that’s exactly the situation faced by social scientists,” he said.

By developing and applying new methods and models to larger, more diverse, and more representative groups of individuals—such as through web-based global gaming and alternate reality platforms—NGS2 seeks to validate new tools that may empower social science in the same way that sophisticated telescopes and microscopes have helped advance astronomy and biology….(More)”

Don’t know where to go when the volcano blows? Crowdsource it.

Curated on March 10, 2016October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Frances Johnson in ThrivingEarthExchange: “In the shadow of a rumbling volcano, Quito, Ecuador solicits just-in-time advice from the world’s disaster experts…

Cotopaxi’s last large-scale eruption was in 1877, and the volcano’s level of activity suggests another one is inevitable. In addition to spewing lava, a major eruption would melt Cotopaxi’s glaciers and send a large flow of material barreling down the mountain, posing an immediate risk to people and potentially causing rivers to overflow their banks. Some 120,000 people living in the valley beneath the volcano would have a mere 12 minutes to escape the lava’s path, and more than 325,000 other area residents would have only slightly more time to evacuate. An eruption could also create significant long-term challenges across a broad area, including dangerous air quality and disruptions to infrastructure, food systems and water supplies.

As danger looms, a city gets coaching from the crowd

Aware that the city was underprepared for a significant eruption, The Governance Lab, a program of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, volunteered its time and expertise to help local officials accelerate preparation efforts. The GovLab, which helps governments and other institutions work collaboratively to solve problems, teamed up with Linq, the city’s innovation agency.

“We were very aware that this was a time-sensitive matter—we needed experts, and we needed them fast,” explained Dinorah Cant ú-Pedraza, a human rights lawyer and Research Fellow at The GovLab who collaborated on the project. “So that’s why we decided to create online sessions focused on how innovations can solve specific problems facing the city.”…

GovLab’s “fail-fast, learn-by-doing” approach is crucial to its projects’ success in remaining responsive to the problems at hand. “That was a central element in how we worked with our partners and improved the approach as we went forward,” said Cantú-Pedraza.

To help translate the Cotopaxi crowdsourcing model for other circumstances, GovLab is working to build a network of innovators and experts that can be tapped on short notice to address problems as they emerge around the world. Although we can hope for the best in Quito and elsewhere, the reality is that we must plan for the worst…(More)

Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation

Curated on March 10, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Dietmar Harhoff and Karim R. Lakhani: “The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process that emphasizes users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation approaches to solve important technological and organizational problems. This view of innovation, pioneered by the economist Eric von Hippel, counters the dominant paradigm, which cast the profit-seeking incentives of firms as the main driver of technical change. In a series of influential writings, von Hippel and colleagues found empirical evidence that flatly contradicted the producer-centered model of innovation. Since then, the study of user-driven innovation has continued and expanded, with further empirical exploration of a distributed model of innovation that includes communities and platforms in a variety of contexts and with the development of theory to explain the economic underpinnings of this still emerging paradigm. This volume provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary view of the field of user and open innovation, reflecting advances in the field over the last several decades.

The contributors—including many colleagues of Eric von Hippel—offer both theoretical and empirical perspectives from such diverse fields as economics, the history of science and technology, law, management, and policy. The empirical contexts for their studies range from household goods to financial services. After discussing the fundamentals of user innovation, the contributors cover communities and innovation; legal aspects of user and community innovation; new roles for user innovators; user interactions with firms; and user innovation in practice, describing experiments, toolkits, and crowdsourcing, and crowdfunding…(More)”

The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations

Curated on March 9, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ben Shneiderman: “The problems we face in the 21st century require innovative thinking from all of us. Be it students, academics, business researchers of government policy makers. Hopes for improving our healthcare, food supply, community safety and environmental sustainability depend on the pervasive application of research solutions.

The research heroes who take on the immense problems of our time face bigger than ever challenges, but if they adopt potent guiding principles and effective research lifecycle strategies, they can produce the advances that will enhance the lives of many people. These inspirational research leaders will break free from traditional thinking, disciplinary boundaries, and narrow aspirations. They will be bold innovators and engaged collaborators, who are ready to lead, yet open to new ideas, self-confident, yet empathetic to others.

In this book, Ben Shneiderman recognizes the unbounded nature of human creativity, the multiplicative power of teamwork, and the catalytic effects of innovation. He reports on the growing number of initiatives to promote more integrated approaches to research so as to promote the expansion of these efforts. It is meant as a guide to students and junior researchers, as well as a manifesto for senior researchers and policy makers, challenging widely-held beliefs about how applied innovations evolve and how basic breakthroughs are made, and to help plotting the course towards tomorrow’s great advancements….(More)”

Guidance for Developing a Local Digital Response Network

Curated on March 9, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Guide by Jenny Phillips and Andrej Verity: “…Beyond the obvious desire to create the guidance document, we had three objectives when drafting:

Cover the core aspect. Six pages of concrete questions, answers and suggestions are designed to help ensure that start-up activities are well informed.
Keep it as simple and light as possible. We wanted something that an individual could quickly consume, yet find a valuable resource.
Feed into larger projects. By creating something concrete, we hope that it would feed into larger initiatives like Heather Leason and Willow Brugh’s effort to build out a Digital Responders Handbook.

So, are you a passionate individual who wants to help harness local digitally-enabled volunteers or groups in response to emergencies? Would you like to become a central figure and coordinate these groups so that any response is more than the sum of all its parts? If this describes your desire and you answered the questions positively, then this guidance is for you! Create a local Digital Response Network. And, welcome to the world of digital humanitarian response…(More)”