The geography of AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Mark Muro and Sifan Liu: “Much of the U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) discussion revolves around futuristic dreams of both utopia and dystopia. From extreme to extreme, the promises range from solutions to global climate change to a “robot apocalypse.”

However, it bears remembering that AI is also becoming a real-world economic fact with major implications for national and regional economic development as the U.S. crawls out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Based on advanced uses of statistics, algorithms, and fast computer processing, AI has become a focal point of U.S. innovation debates. Even more, AI is increasingly viewed as the next great “general purpose technology”—one that has the power to boost the productivity of sector after sector of the economy.

All of which is why state and city leaders are increasingly assessing AI for its potential to spur economic growth. Such leaders are analyzing where their regions stand and what they need to do to ensure their locations are not left behind.

In response to such questions, this analysis examines the extent, location, and concentration of AI technology creation and business activity in U.S. metropolitan areas.

Employing seven basic measures of AI capacity, the report benchmarks regions on the basis of their core AI assets and capabilities as they relate to two basic dimensions: AI research and AI commercialization. In doing so, the assessment categorizes metro areas into five tiers of regional AI involvement and extracts four main findings reflecting that involvement…(More)”.

Kansas City expands civic engagement with data stories, virtual ‘lunch-and-learns’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ryan Johnston at Statescoop: “…The city is currently running a series of virtual “lunch-and-learns,” as well as publishing data-driven “stories” using Socrata software to improve civic engagement, said Kate Bender, a senior management analyst in the city’s data division.

The work is especially important in reaching residents that aren’t equipped with digital literacy or data analysis skills, Bender said. The free lunch-and-learns — managed under the new Office of Citizen Engagement — teaches residents how to use digital tools like the city’s open data portal and 311 mobile app.

New data stories, meanwhile, published on the city’s open data portal, allow residents to see the context behind raw data around COVID-19, 311 requests or city hiring practices that they might not otherwise be able to parse themselves. They’re both part of an effort to reach residents that aren’t already plugged in to the city’s digital channels, Bender said.

“Knowing that we have more digital options and we have good engagement, how can we open up residents’ exposure to other things, and specifically tools, that we make available, that we put on our website or that we tweet about?” Bender said. “Unless you’re already pretty engaged, you might not know or think to download the city’s 311 app, or you might have heard of open data, but not really know how it pertains to you. So that was our concept.”

Bender’s office, DataKC, has “always been pretty closely aligned in working with 311 and advising on citizen engagement,” Bender said. But when COVID-19 hit and people could no longer gather in-person for citizen engagement events, like the city’s “Community Engagement University,” a free, 8-week, in-person program that taught residents about how various city agencies work, Bender and her team decided to take the education component virtual….(More)”.

The “Onion Model”: A Layered Approach to Documenting How the Third Wave of Open Data Can Provide Societal Value

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog post by Andrew Zahuranec, Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst: “There’s a lot that goes into data-driven decision-making. Behind the datasets, platforms, and analysts is a complex series of processes that inform what kinds of insight data can produce and what kinds of ends it can achieve. These individual processes can be hard to understand when viewed together but, by separating the stages out, we can not only track how data leads to decisions but promote better and more impactful data management.

Earlier this year, The Open Data Policy Lab published the Third Wave of Open Data Toolkit to explore the elements of data re-use. At the center of this toolkit was an abstraction that we call the Open Data Framework. Divided into individual, onion-like layers, the framework shows all the processes that go into capitalizing on data in the third wave, starting with the creation of a dataset through data collaboration, creating insights, and using those insights to produce value.

This blog tries to re-iterate what’s included in each layer of this data “onion model” and demonstrate how organizations can create societal value by making their data available for re-use by other parties….(More)”.

What – and who – is a city for?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Gabriella Gómez-Mont: “…One of the most important lessons of the pandemic is that cities need to go beyond a logic of economics and efficiency, and instead have public purpose and civics at their core. Of course, economically healthy cities are fundamental, but a shift in priorities is necessary. Until recently, it was easy to think that democracy was on an inevitably progressive arch (if slower than some of us wished). But recent events have shown us that the global reality is more complicated than that.

This shows that there is much work to be done in rethinking civic capital, urban commons and public value, plus the role of the state in this. For starters, on an urban acupuncture level: using small-scale interventions to transform the larger urban context; determining what new types of public and civic spaces could be part of the urban repertoire; creating an imaginative symbiosis between physical infrastructure and novel ways of creating social relationships and horizontal ties with different purposes?

If we thought about feminist cities, care cities, playful cities, eco-cities (for example) what new urban forms could we imagine? The built environment can have the capacity to shape community coalitions, to organize social energy in different ways, to become reminders of different urban capacities that support diverse ways of being and belonging, of coming together.

This has historically been the role of places such as libraries, playgrounds, public schools. More recently, we have also seen the creation of food forests, community kitchens, maker spaces. But why has the repertoire of possibilities not been expanded and increased exponentially in recent decades? This is one of the themes I am in the midst of researching (and soon prototyping in several cities such as Helsinki and Da Nang).

In the future, these spaces could be part of a networked civics infrastructure, an infrastructure for the imagination. In the short term, these new types of places to gather could also recognize the importance of community ties. As Noreena Hertz wrote in The Lonely Century: Coming Together in a World that’s Pulling Apart, we should not underestimate the effects of loneliness: social isolation is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It is also costing taxpayers billions a year.

This, and the crisis of democracy we are living through, makes a good case for the need to reimagine and expand opportunities for participation in collective life.

Can a city offer its citizens different ways of gathering around shared visions or common questions? How is a society prompted to imagine a life together, to jointly explore alternatives and possibilities that can enhance collective well-being?…(More)”.

A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Shannon Mattern: “Computational models of urbanism—smart cities that use data-driven planning and algorithmic administration—promise to deliver new urban efficiencies and conveniences. Yet these models limit our understanding of what we can know about a city. A City Is Not a Computer reveals how cities encompass myriad forms of local and indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions, arguing that these resources are a vital supplement and corrective to increasingly prevalent algorithmic models.

Shannon Mattern begins by examining the ethical and ontological implications of urban technologies and computational models, discussing how they shape and in many cases profoundly limit our engagement with cities. She looks at the methods and underlying assumptions of data-driven urbanism, and demonstrates how the “city-as-computer” metaphor, which undergirds much of today’s urban policy and design, reduces place-based knowledge to information processing. Mattern then imagines how we might sustain institutions and infrastructures that constitute more diverse, open, inclusive urban forms. She shows how the public library functions as a steward of urban intelligence, and describes the scales of upkeep needed to sustain a city’s many moving parts, from spinning hard drives to bridge repairs.

Incorporating insights from urban studies, data science, and media and information studies, A City Is Not a Computer offers a visionary new approach to urban planning and design….(More)”.

Innovative Data for Urban Planning: The Opportunities and Challenges of Public-Private Data Partnerships

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

GSMA Report: “Rapid urbanisation will be one of the most pressing and complex challenges in low-and-middle income countries (LMICs) for the next several decades. With cities in Africa and Asia expected to add more than one billion people, urban populations will represent two-thirds of the world population by 2050. This presents LMICs with an interesting opportunity and challenge, where rapid urbanisation can both contribute to economic or poverty growth.

The rapid pace and unequal character of urbanisation in LMICs has meant that not enough data has been generated to support urban planning solutions and the effective provision of urban utility services. Data-sharing partnerships between the public and private sector can bridge this data gap and open up an opportunity for governments to address urbanisation challenges with data-driven decisions. Innovative data sources such as mobile network operator data, remote sensing data, utility services data and other digital services data, can be applied to a range of critical urban planning and service provision use cases.

This report identifies challenges and enablers for public-private data-sharing partnerships (PPPs) that relate to the partnership engagement model, data and technology, regulation and ethics frameworks and evaluation and sustainability….(More)”

Whose Streets? Our Streets!

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Rebecca Williams: “The extent to which “smart city” technology is altering our sense of freedom in public spaces deserves more attention if we want a democratic future. Democracy–the rule of the people–constitutes our collective self-determination and protects us against domination and abuse. Democracy requires safe spaces, or commons, for people to organically and spontaneously convene regardless of their background or position to campaign for their causes, discuss politics, and protest. In these commons, where anyone can take a stand and be noticed is where a notion of collective good can be developed and communicated. Public spaces, like our streets, parks, and squares, have historically played a significant role in the development of democracy. We should fight to preserve the freedoms intrinsic to our public spaces because they make democracy possible.

Last summer, approximately 15 to 26 million people participated in Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd making it the largest mass movement in U.S. history. In June, the San Diego Police Department obtained footage of Black Lives Matter protesters from “smart streetlight” cameras, sparking shock and outrage from San Diego community members. These “smart streetlights” were promoted as part of citywide efforts to become a “smart city” to help with traffic control and air quality monitoring. Despite discoverable documentation about the streetlight’s capabilities and data policies on their website, including a data-sharing agreement about how they would share data with the police, the community had no expectation that the streetlights would be surveilling protestors. After media coverage and ongoing advocacy from the Transparent and Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology San Diego (TRUSTSD) coalition, the City Council, set aside the funding for the streetlights4 until a surveillance technology ordinance was considered and the Mayor ordered the 3,000+ streetlight cameras off. Due to the way power was supplied to the cameras, they remained on, but the city reported it no longer had access to the data it collected. In November, the City Council voted unanimously in favor of a surveillance ordinance and to establish a Privacy Advisory Board.In May, it was revealed that the San Diego Police Department had previously (in 2017) held back materials to Congress’ House Committee on Oversight and Reform about their use facial recognition technology. This story, with its mission creep and mishaps, is representative of a broader set of “smart city” cautionary trends that took place in the last year. These cautionary trends call us to question if our public spaces become places where one fears punishment, how will that affect collective action and political movements?

This report is an urgent warning of where we are headed if we maintain our current trajectory of augmenting our public space with trackers of all kinds. In this report, I outline how current “smart city” technologies can watch you. I argue that all “smart city” technology trends toward corporate and state surveillance and that if we don’t stop and blunt these trends now that totalitarianism, panopticonism, discrimination, privatization, and solutionism will challenge our democratic possibilities. This report examines these harms through cautionary trends supported by examples from this last year and provides 10 calls to action for advocates, legislatures, and technology companies to prevent these harms. If we act now, we can ensure the technology in our public spaces protect and promote democracy and that we do not continue down this path of an elite few tracking the many….(More)”

The Place of Local Government Law in the Urban Digital Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Beatriz Botero Arcila: “A central theme of local government law scholarship is how local government law shapes urban policymaking. Local government law is the body of law that establishes the formal authority of cities and, as such, it creates the limited legal framework in which municipalities operate. Consequently, it shapes the potential economic development strategies of cities. In the digital economy, the rise of digital technology firms that provide urban services and services for city governments promises to entice local innovation and business opportunities and represent important economic development opportunities. Nevertheless, the implementation and deployment of these technologies in cities have also become regulatory challenges for cities and have raised important concerns about their potential to increase urban inequality and corporate power while entrenching surveillance in the city-fabric.

However, the literature that warns on these risks rarely addresses how the legal system and, in particular local government law, shapes the form of these technologies and creates incentives for local governments and the companies themselves to adopt, regulate and design these technologies in particular ways. This Essay presents an analysis of how local government law participates in shaping the present form of the urban digital information economy….(More)”.

Exploring city digital twins as policy tools: A task-based approach to generating synthetic data on urban mobility

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Gleb Papyshev and Masaru Yarime: “This article discusses the technology of city digital twins (CDTs) and its potential applications in the policymaking context. The article analyzes the history of the development of the concept of digital twins and how it is now being adopted on a city-scale. One of the most advanced projects in the field—Virtual Singapore—is discussed in detail to determine the scope of its potential domains of application and highlight challenges associated with it. Concerns related to data privacy, availability, and its applicability for predictive simulations are analyzed, and potential usage of synthetic data is proposed as a way to address these challenges. The authors argue that despite the abundance of urban data, the historical data are not always applicable for predictions about the events for which there does not exist any data, as well as discuss the potential privacy challenges of the usage of micro-level individual mobility data in CDTs. A task-based approach to urban mobility data generation is proposed in the last section of the article. This approach suggests that city authorities can establish services responsible for asking people to conduct certain activities in an urban environment in order to create data for possible policy interventions for which there does not exist useful historical data. This approach can help in addressing the challenges associated with the availability of data without raising privacy concerns, as the data generated through this approach will not represent any real individual in society….(More)”.

Proposal for a European Interoperability Framework for Smart Cities and Communities (EIF4SCC) published

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Nóirín Ní Earcáin: “In recognition of the importance of interoperability and the specific challenges it presents in a city context, The Commission (DG DIGIT and DG CONNECT) appointed Deloitte and KU Leven to prepare a “Proposal for a European Interoperability Framework for Smart Cities and Communities”. While an EIF for eGovernment has been in place since 2010, this is the first time the concepts and ideas developed there have been adapted to the local context.

The aim of the EIF4SCC is to provide EU local administration leaders with definitions, principles, recommendations, practical use cases drawn from cities and communities from around Europe and beyond, and a common model to facilitate delivery of services to the public across domains, cities, regions and borders.

The framework was developed by building on and finding complementarities with previous and ongoing initiatives, such as the Living-in.EU movement, the 2017 European Interoperability Framework (EIF), the Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms (MIMs Plus) and the outcomes of EU funded initiatives (e.g.Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Digital Building Blocks, Smart Cities Marketplace, Intelligent Cities Challenge, Digital Transition Partnership under the Urban Agenda) and EU funded projects (Synchronicity, Triangulum, etc.).

Why do cities and communities need interoperability?

The EIF4SCC is targeted at EU local administration leaders and aims to provide a generic framework of interoperability of all types, and how it can contribute to the development of a Smart(er) City/Community. This will pave the way for services for citizens and business to be offered not only in a single city, but also across cities, regions and across borders.

European Interoperability Framework for Smart Cities and Communities

The EIF4SCC includes three concepts (interoperability, smart city or community, EIF4SCC), five principles (drawing on the Living-in.EU declaration), and seven elements (consisting of the five components of interoperability, one cross-cutting layer – Integrated Service Governance, and a foundational layer of Interoperability Governance)….The European Commission encourages local administrations at regional, city and community level to review the Proposed EIF4SCC, and the accompanying Final Study Report which details the methodology, literature review, and stakeholder engagement process undertaken. It will be discussed through the Living-in.EU community and other fora, with a view to its adoption as an official Commission document, based on users’ and stakeholders’ feedback…(More)”.