EU-funded tool to help our brain deal with big data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

EU Press Release: “Every single minute, the world generates 1.7 million billion bytes of data, equal to 360,000 DVDs. How can our brain deal with increasingly big and complex datasets? EU researchers are developing an interactive system which not only presents data the way you like it, but also changes the presentation constantly in order to prevent brain overload. The project could enable students to study more efficiently or journalists to cross check sources more quickly. Several museums in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the United States have already showed interest in the new technology.

Data is everywhere: it can either be created by people or generated by machines, such as sensors gathering climate information, satellite imagery, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, GPS signals, etc. This information is a real gold mine. But it is also challenging: today’s datasets are so huge and complex to process that they require new ideas, tools and infrastructures.

Researchers within CEEDs (@ceedsproject) are transposing big data into an interactive environment to allow the human mind to generate new ideas more efficiently. They have built what they are calling an eXperience Induction Machine (XIM) that uses virtual reality to enable a user to ‘step inside’ large datasets. This immersive multi-modal environment – located at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona – also contains a panoply of sensors which allows the system to present the information in the right way to the user, constantly tailored according to their reactions as they examine the data. These reactions – such as gestures, eye movements or heart rate – are monitored by the system and used to adapt the way in which the data is presented.

Jonathan Freeman,Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London and coordinator of CEEDs, explains: “The system acknowledges when participants are getting fatigued or overloaded with information.  And it adapts accordingly. It either simplifies the visualisations so as to reduce the cognitive load, thus keeping the user less stressed and more able to focus.  Or it will guide the person to areas of the data representation that are not as heavy in information.”

Neuroscientists were the first group the CEEDs researchers tried their machine on (BrainX3). It took the typically huge datasets generated in this scientific discipline and animated them with visual and sound displays. By providing subliminal clues, such as flashing arrows, the machine guided the neuroscientists to areas of the data that were potentially more interesting to each person. First pilots have already demonstrated the power of this approach in gaining new insights into the organisation of the brain….”

Let the games begin: how government is using ‘gamification’ to change public behaviour

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joshua Chambers at FutureGov: “Governments across the region are turning to “gamification” – otherwise known as “game science” – to help create new ways to persuade their populations.
FutureGov recently attended a session at GovCamp Australia where officials discussed the potential of this new approach. It has pulled together the best examples of successful government games, and sought advice from the private sector on building something that will achieve results.
How it works
How does gamification work? It creates an environment where people play games to win prizes or compete against one another, all while learning about about a new message or behaving in a certain, desirable manner. The approach can be used by every type of agency, and has been trialled on public sector campaigns including military recruitment, physical fitness, speeding prevention, consumer rights awareness and even making citizens engage with census data.
For example, it was used by the Department of Justice of Victoria, Australia when they wanted to make young people aware of consumer protection laws. Discussion of legal concepts did not seem particularly appealing, so they took a different tack by launching a game called Party for Your Rights. “It’s targeted at young people, teaching them their rights through the activity of going to a party. It’s very appealing, with retro 1980s graphics and music,” explained Paul Chandley, general manager of digital strategy and engagement in the Victorian Department of Justice.
Since its launch in June 2014, it has been played 23,000 times. A survey found that 96% of players surveyed said they felt either more informed of their rights or more confident about using their rights after interacting with the game.
The game proved popular in Australia and there are plenty of other examples of successful games built by government agencies – FutureGov has profiled the six best examples of gamification in government.…”
See also:

The infrastructure Africa really needs is better data reporting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nikhil Sonnad at Quartz: “This week African leaders met with officials in Washington and agreed to billions of dollars of US investments and infrastructure deals. But the terrible state of statistical reporting in most of Africa means that it will be nearly impossible to gauge how effective these deals are at making Africans, or the American investors, better off.

Data reporting on the continent is sketchy. Just look at the recent GDP revisions of large countries. How is it that Nigeria’s April GDP recalculation catapulted it ahead of South Africa, making it the largest economy in Africa overnight? Or that Kenya’s economy is actually 20% larger (paywall) than previously thought?

Indeed, countries in Africa get noticeably bad scores on the World Bank’s Bulletin Board on Statistical Capacity, an index of data reporting integrity.

Bad data is not simply the result of inconsistencies or miscalculations: African governments have an incentive to produce statistics that overstate their economic development.

A recent working paper from the Center for Global Development (CGD) shows how politics influence the statistics released by many African countries…

But in the long run, dodgy statistics aren’t good for anyone. They “distort the way we understand the opportunities that are available,” says Amanda Glassman, one of the CGD report’s authors. US firms have pledged $14 billion in trade deals at the summit in Washington. No doubt they would like to know whether high school enrollment promises to create a more educated workforce in a given country, or whether its people have been immunized for viruses.

Overly optimistic indicators also distort how a government decides where to focus its efforts. If school enrollment appears to be high, why implement programs intended to increase it?

The CGD report suggests increased funding to national statistical agencies, and making sure that they are wholly independent from their governments. President Obama is talking up $7 billion into African agriculture. But unless cash and attention are given to improving statistical integrity, he may never know whether that investment has borne fruit”

How Data Scientists Are Uncovering War Crimes in Syria

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at Mashable: “For more than three years, Syria has been crippled by a bloody civil war that has laid waste to cities and exacted a heavy civilian toll. But because reporting in Syria is so dangerous, the bloodletting has largely taken place away from the media spotlight. One group of researchers, though, is determined to document every single killing.
Through painstaking data-gathering and assiduous verification, the group Syrian Tracker has tallied 111,915 deaths in the course of the conflict so far.
Syria Tracker gets reports from eyewitnesses and volunteers on the ground. Researchers also cull data from news reports.
The database has yielded some important insights such as possible war crimes committed by the Syrian regime.
Working in collaboration with researchers from the nonprofit organization SumAll.org, the researchers discovered that more women were getting killed in the conflict. In April of 2011, women made up only 1% of those killed. Today, 13% of victims are women, according to the latest data.

Syria Female Deaths

Image: SumAll

Those numbers alone don’t tell the whole story, though. Taking a closer look at how women were killed, the researchers discovered a pattern. Women weren’t random victims of bombings for example. Instead, many were killed by snipers, indicating a deliberate policy to go after female civilians, which would constitute a war crime.
Data on how children were killed suggest a similar conclusions. Of the thousands killed in the conflict, at least 700 have been summarily executed and tortured, and about 200 boys under the age of 13 have been killed by sniper fire, according to the data…”

An Infographic That Maps 2,000 Years of Cultural History in 5 Minutes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in Wired:  “…Last week in the journal Science, the researchers (led by University of Texas art historian Maximilian Schich) published a study that looked at the cultural history of Europe and North America by mapping the birth and deaths of more than 150,000 notable figures—including everyone from Leonardo Da Vinci to Ernest Hemingway. That data was turned into an amazing animated infographic that looks strikingly similar to the illustrated flight paths you find in the back of your inflight magazine. Blue dots indicate a birth, red ones means death.

The researchers used data from Freebase, which touts itself as a “community curated database of people, places and things.” This gives the data a strong western-bent. You’ll notice that many parts of Asia and the Middle East (not to mention pre-colonized North America), are almost wholly ignored in this video. But to be fair, the abstract did acknowledge that the study was focused mainly on Europe and North America.
Still, mapping the geography of cultural migration does gives you some insight about how the kind of culture we value has shifted over the centuries. It’s also a novel lens through which to view our more general history, as those migration trends likely illuminate bigger historical happenings like wars and the building of cross-country infrastructure.

Collective Genius

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback in HBR Review: “Google’s astonishing success in its first decade now seems to have been almost inevitable. But step inside its systems infrastructure group, and you quickly learn otherwise. The company’s meteoric growth depended in large part on its ability to innovate and scale up its infrastructure at an unprecedented pace. Bill Coughran, as a senior vice president of engineering, led the group from 2003 to 2011. His 1,000-person organization built Google’s “engine room,” the systems and equipment that allow us all to use Google and its many services 24/7. “We were doing work that no one else in the world was doing,” he says. “So when a problem happened, we couldn’t just go out and buy a solution. We had to create it.”
Coughran joined Google in 2003, just five years after its founding. By then it had already reinvented the way it handled web search and data storage multiple times. His group was using Google File System (GFS) to store the massive amount of data required to support Google searches. Given Google’s ferocious appetite for growth, Coughran knew that GFS—once a groundbreaking innovation—would have to be replaced within a couple of years. The number of searches was growing dramatically, and Google was adding Gmail and other applications that needed not just more storage but storage of a kind different from what GFS had been optimized to handle.
Building the next-generation system—and the next one, and the one after that—was the job of the systems infrastructure group. It had to create the new engine room, in-house, while simultaneously refining the current one. Because this was Coughran’s top priority—and given that he had led the storied Bell Labs and had a PhD in computer science from Stanford and degrees in mathematics from Caltech—one might expect that he would first focus on developing a technical solution for Google’s storage problems and then lead his group through its implementation.
But that’s not how Coughran proceeded. To him, there was a bigger problem, a perennial challenge that many leaders inevitably come to contemplate: How do I build an organization capable of innovating continually over time? Coughran knew that the role of a leader of innovation is not to set a vision and motivate others to follow it. It’s to create a community that is willing and able to generate new ideas…”

The Emergence of Government Innovation Teams

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hollie Russon Gilman at TechTank: “A new global currency is emerging.  Governments understand that people at home and abroad evaluate them based on how they use technology and innovative approaches in their service delivery and citizen engagement.  This raises opportunities, and critical questions about the role of innovation in 21st century governance.
Bloomberg Philanthropies and Nesta, the UK’s Innovation foundation, recently released a global report highlighting 20 government innovation teams.  Importantly, the study included teams that were established and funded by all levels of government (city, regional and national), and aims to find creative solutions to seemingly intractable solutions. This report features 20 teams across six continents and features some basic principles and commonalities that are instructive for all types of innovators, inside and outside, of government.
Using Government to Locally Engage
One of the challenges of representational democracy is that elected officials and government officials spend time in bureaucracies isolated from the very people they aim to serve.  Perhaps there can be different models.  For example, Seoul’s Innovation Bureau is engaging citizens to re-design and re-imagine public services.  Seoul is dedicated to becoming a Sharing City; including Tool Kit Centers where citizens can borrow machinery they would rarely use that would also benefit the whole community. This approach puts citizens at the center of their communities and leverages government to work for the people…
As I’ve outlined in a earlier TechTank post, there are institutional constraints for governments to try the unknown.  There are potential electoral costs, greater disillusionment, and gaps in vital service delivery. Yet, despite all of these barriers there are a variety of promising tools. For example, Finland has Sitra, an Innovation fund, whose mission is to foster experimentation to transform a diverse set of policy issues including sustainable energy and healthcare. Sitra invests in both the practical research and experiments to further public sector issues as well as invest in early stage companies.
We need a deeper understanding of the opportunities, and challenges, of innovation in government.    Luckily there are many researchers, think-tanks, and organizations beginning analysis.  For example, Professor and Associate Dean Anita McGahan, of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, calls for a more strategic approach toward understanding the use of innovation, including big data, in the public sector…”

Using technology, data and crowdsourcing to hack infrastructure problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Courtney M. Fowler at CAFWD.ORG: “Technology has become a way of life for most Americans, not just for communication but also for many daily activities. However, there’s more that can be done than just booking a trip or crushing candy. With a majority of Americans now owning smartphones, it’s only becoming more obvious that there’s room for governments to engage the public and provide more bang for their buck via technology.
CA Fwd has been putting on an “Open Data roadshow” around the state to highlight ways the marriage of tech and info can make government more efficient and transparent.
Jurisdictions have also been discovering that using technology and smartphone apps can be beneficial in the pursuit of improving infrastructure. Saving any amount of money on such projects is especially important for California, where it’s been estimated the state will only have half of the $765 billion needed for infrastructure investments over the next decade.
One of the best examples of applying technology to infrastructure problems comes from South Carolina, where an innovative bridge-monitoring system is producing real savings, despite being in use on only eight bridges.
Girder sensors are placed on each bridge so that they can measure its carrying capacity and can be monitored 24/7. Although, the monitors don’t eliminate the need for inspections, the technology does make the need for them significantly less frequent. Data from the monitors also led the South Carolina Department of Transportation to correct one bridge’s problems with a $100,000 retrofit, rather than spending $800,000 to replace it…”
In total, having the monitors on just eight bridges, at a cost of about $50,000 per bridge, saved taxpayers $5 million.
That kind of innovation and savings is exactly what California needs to ensure that infrastructure projects happen in a more timely and efficient fashion in the future. It’s also what is driving civic innovators to bring together technology and crowdsourcing and make sure infrastructure projects also are results oriented.

In Tests, Scientists Try to Change Behaviors

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Wall Street Journal: “Behavioral scientists look for environmental ‘nudges’ to influence how people act. Pelle Guldborg Hansen, a behavioral scientist, is trying to figure out how to board passengers on a plane with less fuss.
The goal is to make plane-boarding more efficient by coaxing passengers to want to be more orderly, not by telling them they must. It is one of many projects in which Dr. Hansen seeks to encourage people, when faced with options, to make better choices. Among these: prompting people to properly dispose of cigarette butts outside of bars and clubs and inducing hospital workers to use hand sanitizers.
Dr. Hansen, 37 years old, is director of the Initiative for Science, Society & Policy, a collaboration of the University of Southern Denmark and Roskilde University. The concept behind his work is known commonly as a nudge, dubbed such because of the popular 2008 book of the same name by U.S. academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein that examined how people make decisions.
At the Copenhagen airport, Dr. Hansen recently deployed a team of three young researchers to mill about a gate in terminal B. The trio was dressed casually in jeans and wore backpacks. They blended in with the passengers, except for the badges they wore displaying airport credentials, and the clipboards and pens they carried to record how the boarding process unfolds.
Thirty-five minutes before a flight departed, the team got into position. Andreas Rathmann Jensen stood in one corner, then moved to another, so he could survey the entire gate area. He mapped where people were sitting and where they placed their bags. This behavior can vary depending, for example, if people are flying alone, with a partner or in a group.
Johannes Schuldt-Jensen circulated among the rows and counted how many bags were blocking seats and how many seats were empty as boarding time approached. He wore headphones, though he wasn’t listening to music, because people seem less suspicious of behavior when a person has headphones on, he says. Another researcher, Kasper Hulgaard, counted how many people were standing versus sitting.
The researchers are mapping out gate-seating patterns for a total of about 500 flights. Some early observations: The more people who are standing, the more chaotic boarding tends to be. Copenhagen airport seating areas are designed for groups, even though most travelers come solo or in pairs. Solo flyers like to sit in a corner and put their bag on an adjacent seat. Pairs of travelers tend to perch anywhere as long as they can sit side-by-side….”

The Data Act's unexpected benefit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Adam Mazmanian at FCW: “The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act sets an aggressive schedule for creating governmentwide financial standards. The first challenge belongs to the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget. They must come up with a set of common data elements for financial information that will cover just about everything the government spends money on and every entity it pays in order to give oversight bodies and government watchdogs a top-down view of federal spending from appropriation to expenditure. Those data elements are scheduled for completion by May 2015, one year after the act’s passage.
Two years after those standards are in place, agencies will be required to report their financial information following Data Act guidelines. The government currently supports more than 150 financial management systems but lacks a common data dictionary, so there are not necessarily agreed-upon definitions of how to classify and track government programs and types of expenditures.
“As far as systems today and how we can get there, they don’t necessarily map in the way that the act described,” U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel said in June. “It’s going to be a journey to get to where the act aspires for us to be.”
However, an Obama administration initiative to encourage agencies to share financial services could be part of the solution. In May, OMB and Treasury designated four financial shared-services providers for government agencies: the Agriculture Department’s National Finance Center, the Interior Department’s Interior Business Center, the Transportation Department’s Enterprise Services Center and Treasury’s Administrative Resource Center.
There are some synergies between shared services and data standardization, but shared financial services alone will not guarantee Data Act compliance, especially considering that the government expects the migration to take 10 to 15 years. Nevertheless, the discipline required under the Data Act could boost agency efforts to prepare financial data when it comes time to move to a shared service….”