Collection

How Big Data is Helping to Tackle Climate Change

Curated on November 18, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Bernard Marr at DataInformed: “Climate scientists have been gathering a great deal of data for a long time, but analytics technology’s catching up is comparatively recent. Now that cloud, distributed storage, and massive amounts of processing power are affordable for almost everyone, those data sets are being put to use. On top of that, the growing number of Internet of Things devices we are carrying around are adding to the amount of data we are collecting. And the rise of social media means more and more people are reporting environmental data and uploading photos and videos of their environment, which also can be analyzed for clues.

Perhaps one of the most ambitious projects that employ big data to study the environment is Microsoft’s Madingley, which is being developed with the intention of creating a simulation of all life on Earth. The project already provides a working simulation of the global carbon cycle, and it is hoped that, eventually, everything from deforestation to animal migration, pollution, and overfishing will be modeled in a real-time “virtual biosphere.” Just a few years ago, the idea of a simulation of the entire planet’s ecosphere would have seemed like ridiculous, pie-in-the-sky thinking. But today it’s something into which one of the world’s biggest companies is pouring serious money. Microsoft is doing this because it believes that analytical technology has finally caught up with the ability to collect and store data.

Another data giant that is developing tools to facilitate analysis of climate and ecological data is EMC. Working with scientists at Acadia National Park in Maine, the company has developed platforms to pull in crowd-sourced data from citizen science portals such as eBird and iNaturalist. This allows park administrators to monitor the impact of climate change on wildlife populations as well as to plan and implement conservation strategies.

Last year, the United Nations, under its Global Pulse data analytics initiative, launched the Big Data Climate Challenge, a competition aimed to promote innovate data-driven climate change projects. Among the first to receive recognition under the program is Global Forest Watch, which combines satellite imagery, crowd-sourced witness accounts, and public datasets to track deforestation around the world, which is believed to be a leading man-made cause of climate change. The project has been promoted as a way for ethical businesses to ensure that their supply chain is not complicit in deforestation.

Other initiatives are targeted at a more personal level, for example by analyzing transit routes that could be used for individual journeys, using Google Maps, and making recommendations based on carbon emissions for each route.

The idea of “smart cities” is central to the concept of the Internet of Things – the idea that everyday objects and tools are becoming increasingly connected, interactive, and intelligent, and capable of communicating with each other independently of humans. Many of the ideas put forward by smart-city pioneers are grounded in climate awareness, such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions and energy waste across urban areas. Smart metering allows utility companies to increase or restrict the flow of electricity, gas, or water to reduce waste and ensure adequate supply at peak periods. Public transport can be efficiently planned to avoid wasted journeys and provide a reliable service that will encourage citizens to leave their cars at home.

These examples raise an important point: It’s apparent that data – big or small – can tell us if, how, and why climate change is happening. But, of course, this is only really valuable to us if it also can tell us what we can do about it. Some projects, such as Weathersafe, which helps coffee growers adapt to changing weather patterns and soil conditions, are designed to help humans deal with climate change. Others are designed to tackle the problem at the root, by highlighting the factors that cause it in the first place and showing us how we can change our behavior to minimize damage….(More)”

Data protection in a big data society. Ideas for a future regulation

Curated on November 18, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alessandro Mantelero and Giuseppe Vaciago at Digital Investigation: “Big data society has changed the traditional forms of data analysis and created a new predictive approach to knowledge and investigation. In this light, it is necessary to consider the impact of this new paradigm on the traditional notion of data protection and its regulation.

Focussing on the individual and communal dimension of data use, encompassing digital investigations, the authors outline the challenges that big data poses for individual information self-determination, reasonable suspicion and collective interests. Therefore, the article suggests some innovative proposals that may update the existing data protection legal framework and contribute to make it respondent to the present algorithmic society….(More)”

The Behavioral Divide: A Critique of the Differential Implementation of Behavioral Law and Economics in the US and the EU

Curated on November 18, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Philipp Hacker at the European Review of Contract Law: “A behavioral divide cuts across the Atlantic. Despite the recent surge of behavioral analysis in European academia, a scrutiny of decisions by courts and regulatory agencies in the US and the EU reveals striking differences. While in the US rulings by courts and regulatory agencies progressively take insights from behavioral economics into account, EU courts and agencies still, and even increasingly, cling to the rational actor model. These inverse trends can be uncovered in the interpretation of legal concepts of human agency, ie, of those elements in a legal order which refer, implicitly or explicitly, to a model of rationality of human actors. More particularly, this paper reviews the concepts of consumers and of users, in consumer law and product liability respectively, to underscore the claim of the behavioral divide. Importantly, the divergence between EU and US private law practice calls for a normative evaluation. In the face of empirical uncertainty about the existence, direction and intensity of biases, the most attractive legal concept of human agency is a pluralistic one, assuming the simultaneous presence of boundedly and fully rational actors. In concrete applications, this paper shows that a pluralistic perspective urges a revision of the concept of the reasonable consumer, both in US and EU consumer law. Furthermore, such a view leads to the adoption of a more boundedly rational user concept in product liability. The pluralistic, yet more boundedly rational concepts thus have far-reaching consequences both for private law theory and its concomitant case law….(More)”

Anonymous hackers could be Islamic State’s online nemesis

Curated on November 18, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Athina Karatzogianni at the Conversation: “One of the key issues the West has had to face in countering Islamic State (IS) is the jihadi group’s mastery of online propaganda, seen in hundreds of thousands of messages celebrating the atrocities against civilians and spreading the message of radicalisation. It seems clear that efforts to counter IS online are missing the mark.

A US internal State Department assessment noted in June 2015 how the violent narrative of IS had “trumped” the efforts of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations. Meanwhile in Europe, Interpol was to track and take down social media accounts linked to IS, as if that would solve the problem – when in fact doing so meant potentially missing out on intelligence gathering opportunities.

Into this vacuum has stepped Anonymous, a fragmented loose network of hacktivists that has for years launched occasional cyberattacks against government, corporate and civil society organisations. The group announced its intention to take on IS and its propaganda online, using its networks to crowd-source the identity of IS-linked accounts. Under the banner of #OpIsis and #OpParis, Anonymous published lists of thousands of Twitter accounts claimed to belong to IS members or sympathisers, claiming more than 5,500 had been removed.

The group pursued a similar approach following the attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine in January 2015, with @OpCharlieHebdo taking down more than 200 jihadist Twitter acounts, bringing down the website Ansar-Alhaqq.net and publishing a list of 25,000 accounts alongside a guide on how to locate pro-IS material online….

Anonymous has been prosecuted for cyber attacks in many countries under cybercrime laws, as their activities are not seen as legitimate protest. It is worth mentioning the ethical debate around hacktivism, as some see cyber attacks that take down accounts or websites as infringing on others’ freedom of expression, while others argue that hacktivism should instead create technologies to circumvent censorship, enable digital equality and open access to information….(More)”

Public Participation Organizations and Open Policy

Curated on November 18, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Helen Pallett at Science Communication: “This article builds on work in Science and Technology Studies and cognate disciplines concerning the institutionalization of public engagement and participation practices. It describes and analyses ethnographic qualitative research into one “organization of participation,” the UK government–funded Sciencewise program. Sciencewise’s interactions with broader political developments are explored, including the emergence of “open policy” as a key policy object in the UK context. The article considers what the new imaginary of openness means for institutionalized forms of public participation in science policymaking, asking whether this is illustrative of a “constitutional moment” in relations between society and science policymaking….(More)“

The War on Campus Sexual Assault Goes Digital

Curated on November 17, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Natasha Singer in the New York Times: “As the problem of sexual assault on college campuses has become a hot-button issue for school administrators and federal education regulators, one question keeps coming up: Why don’t more students report attacks?

According to a recent study of 27 schools, about one-quarter of female undergraduates and students who identified as queer or transgender said they had experienced nonconsensual sex or touching since entering college, but most of the students said they did not report it to school officials or support services.

Some felt the incidents weren’t serious enough. Others said they did not think anyone would believe them or they feared negative social consequences. Some felt it would be too emotionally difficult.

Now, in an effort to give students additional options — and to provide schools with more concrete data — a nonprofit software start-up in San Francisco called Sexual Health Innovations has developed an online reporting system for campus sexual violence.

Students at participating colleges can use its site, called Callisto, to record details of an assault anonymously. The site saves and time-stamps those records. That allows students to decide later whether they want to formally file reports with their schools — identifying themselves by their school-issued email addresses — or download their information and take it directly to the police. The site also offers a matching system in which a user can elect to file a report with the school electronically only if someone else names the same assailant.

Callisto’s hypothesis is that some college students — who already socialize, study and shop online — will be more likely initially to document a sexual assault on a third-party site than to report it to school officials on the phone or in person.

“If you have to walk into a building to report, you can only go at certain times of day and you’re not certain who you have to talk to, how many people you have to talk to, what they will ask,” Jessica Ladd, the nonprofit’s founder and chief executive, said in a recent interview in New York. “Whereas online, you can fill out a form at any time of day or night from anywhere and push a button.”

Callisto is part of a wave of apps and sites that tackle different facets of the sexual assault problem on campus. Some colleges and universities have introduced third-party mobile apps that enable students to see maps of local crime hot spots, report suspicious activity, request a ride from campus security services or allow their friends to track their movements virtually as they walk home. Many schools now ask students to participate in online or in-person training programs that present different situations involving sexual assault, relationship violence and issues of consent…..(More)”

Looking for Open Data from a different country? Try the European Data portal

Curated on November 16, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Wendy Carrara in DAE blog: “The Open Data movement is reaching all countries in Europe. Data Portals give you access to re-usable government information. But have you ever tried to find Open Data from another country whose language you do not speak? Or have you tried to see whether data from one country exist also in a similar way in another? The European Data Portal that we just launched can help you….

The European Data Portal project main work streams is the development of a new pan-European open data infrastructure. Its goal is to be a gateway offering access to data published by administrations in countries across Europe, from the EU and beyond.
The portal is launched during the European Data Forum in Luxembourg.

Additionally we will support public administrations in publishing more data as open data and have targeted actions to stimulate re-use. By taking a look at the data released by other countries and made available on the European Data Portal, governments can also be inspired to publish new data sets they had not though about in the first place.

The re-use of Open Data will further boost the economy. The benefits of Open Data are diverse and range from improved performance of public administrations and economic growth in the private sector to wider social welfare. The economic studyconducted by the European Data Portal team estimates that between 2016 and 2020, the market size of Open Data is expected to increase by 36.9% to a value of 75.7 bn EUR in 2020.

For data to be re-used, it has to be accessible

Currently, the portal includes over 240.000 datasets from 34 European countries. Information about the data available is structured into thirteen different categories ranging from agriculture to transport, including science, justice, health and so on. This enables you to quickly browse through categories and feel inspired by the data made accessible….(More)”

The promise and perils of predictive policing based on big data

Curated on November 16, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

H. V. Jagadish in the Conversation: “Police departments, like everyone else, would like to be more effective while spending less. Given the tremendous attention to big data in recent years, and the value it has provided in fields ranging from astronomy to medicine, it should be no surprise that police departments are using data analysis to inform deployment of scarce resources. Enter the era of what is called “predictive policing.”

Some form of predictive policing is likely now in force in a city near you.Memphis was an early adopter. Cities from Minneapolis to Miami have embraced predictive policing. Time magazine named predictive policing (with particular reference to the city of Santa Cruz) one of the 50 best inventions of 2011. New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton recently said that predictive policing is “the wave of the future.”

The term “predictive policing” suggests that the police can anticipate a crime and be there to stop it before it happens and/or apprehend the culprits right away. As the Los Angeles Times points out, it depends on “sophisticated computer analysis of information about previous crimes, to predict where and when crimes will occur.”

At a very basic level, it’s easy for anyone to read a crime map and identify neighborhoods with higher crime rates. It’s also easy to recognize that burglars tend to target businesses at night, when they are unoccupied, and to target homes during the day, when residents are away at work. The challenge is to take a combination of dozens of such factors to determine where crimes are more likely to happen and who is more likely to commit them. Predictive policing algorithms are getting increasingly good at such analysis. Indeed, such was the premise of the movie Minority Report, in which the police can arrest and convict murderers before they commit their crime.

Predicting a crime with certainty is something that science fiction can have a field day with. But as a data scientist, I can assure you that in reality we can come nowhere close to certainty, even with advanced technology. To begin with, predictions can be only as good as the input data, and quite often these input data have errors.

But even with perfect, error-free input data and unbiased processing, ultimately what the algorithms are determining are correlations. Even if we have perfect knowledge of your troubled childhood, your socializing with gang members, your lack of steady employment, your wacko posts on social media and your recent gun purchases, all that the best algorithm can do is to say it is likely, but not certain, that you will commit a violent crime. After all, to believe such predictions as guaranteed is to deny free will….

What data can do is give us probabilities, rather than certainty. Good data coupled with good analysis can give us very good estimates of probability. If you sum probabilities over many instances, you can usually get a robust estimate of the total.

For example, data analysis can provide a probability that a particular house will be broken into on a particular day based on historical records for similar houses in that neighborhood on similar days. An insurance company may add this up over all days in a year to decide how much to charge for insuring that house….(More)”

E-Gov’s Untapped Potential for Cutting the Public Workforce

Curated on November 16, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Robert D. Atkinson at Governing: “Since the flourishing of the Internet in the mid-1990s, e-government advocates have promised that information technology not only would make it easier to access public services but also would significantly increase government productivity and lower costs. Compared to the private sector, however, this promise has remained largely unfulfilled, in part because of a resistance to employing technology to replace government workers.

It’s not surprising, then, that state budget directors and budget committees usually look at IT as a cost rather than as a strategic investment that can produce a positive financial return for taxpayers. Until governments make a strong commitment to using IT to increase productivity — including as a means of workforce reduction — it will remain difficult to bring government into the 21st-century digital economy.

The benefits can be sizeable. My organization, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, estimates that if states focus on using IT to drive productivity, they stand to save more than $11 billion over the next five years. States can achieve these productivity gains in two primary ways:

First, they can use e-government to substitute for person-to-person interactions. For example, by moving just nine state services online — from one-stop business registration to online vehicle-license registration — Utah reduced the need for government employees to interact with citizens, saving an average of $13 per transaction.

And second, they can use IT to optimize performance and cut costs. In 2013, for example, Pennsylvania launched a mobile app to streamline the inspection process for roads and bridges, reducing the time it took for manual data entry. Inspectors saved about 15 minutes per survey, which added up to a savings of over $550,000 in 2013.

So if technology can cut costs, why has e-government not lived up to its original promise? One key reason is that most state governments have focused first and foremost on using IT to improve service quality and access rather than to increase productivity. In part, this is because boosting productivity involves reducing headcount, and state chief information officers and other policymakers often are unwilling to openly advocate for using technology in this way for fear that it will generate opposition from government workers and their unions. This is why replacing labor with modern IT tools has long been the third rail for the public-sector IT community.

This is not necessarily the case in some other nations that have moved to aggressively deploy IT to reduce headcount. The first goal of the Danish Agency for Digitisation’s strategic plan is “a productive and efficient public sector.” To get there, the agency plans to focus on automation of public administrative procedures. Denmark even introduced a rule in which all communications with government need to be done electronically, eliminating telephone receptionists at municipal offices. Likewise, the United Kingdom’s e-government strategy set a goal of increasing productivity by 2.5 percent, including through headcount cuts.

Another reason e-government has not lived up to its full promise is that many state IT systems are woefully out of date, especially compared to the systems the corporate sector uses. But if CIOs and other advocates of modern digital government are going to be able to make their case effectively for resources to bring their technology into the 21st century, they will need to make a more convincing bottom-line case to appropriators. This argument should be about saving money, including through workforce reduction.

Policymakers should base this case not just on savings for government but also for the state’s businesses and citizens….(More)”