Carnegie Mellon scientists use app to track foul odors in Pittsburgh

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ashley Murray at Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “If you smell something, say something. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University want Pittsburghers to put their collective noses to the task and report foul smells using a mobile reporting application called Smell PGH.

Since the app launched last year, more than 1,300 users have reported foul smells more than 4,300 times — most of which they’ve described as “industrial,” “sulfur” or “woodsmoke.”

The app was developed at CMU’s Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment (CREATE) Lab.

“The app is really about the community,” said Beatrice Dias, project director at the CREATE Lab. “To show that you’re not alone in your negative experiences of pollution impact.”

Smartphone users can create a “smell report” within the app, which has the capability to alert the Allegheny County Health Department.

Health department spokeswoman Melissa Wade said the agency has received and followed-up on 3,000 reports generated from the app.

Users can also view a real-time map of all smell reports in and around the city. A new feature added last month allows users to go back in time and play a time-lapse animation of little colored triangles — green, yellow and red, symbolizing varying degrees of smell — that pop up and disappear as odors were reported….

“The goal is I’m trying to predict the smell in the next few hours, like a weather forecast,” Mr. Hsu said. “Let’s say today from 12 to 1 p.m. we have 10 smell reports. I can check not only the smell reports, but the data from other sensor stations around Pittsburgh, so I know during this hour what the reading is of all the air-quality related variables, like PM 2.5, like sulfur and nitrogen oxides, [and] the wind speed, the wind direction. There are a lot of parameters we need to consider.”…

Another goal of this citizen science initiative, Mr. Hsu said, is to improve communication between the public and governmental regulation agencies, like the health department.

“Before this technology if you smelled something bad, you might not be sure if this came from ambient air, your neighborhood or just traffic issues,” Mr. Hsu said. “But if you use the app, you can see a lot of your neighbors are reporting, too. And then maybe the government can use this to see the problems in a city.”…(More)”.

Local Government in China Trials Blockchain for Public Services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Wolfie Zhao at Coin Desk: “A city district in southern China is using blockchain to streamline government services for its one million residents.

Chan Cheng District, within Foshan City in Canton province, announced during an event on 23rd June the launch of a platform called Intelligent Multifunctional Identity (IMI) that lets registered local residents avoid filling repetitive personal information for different public services, presumably providing a more simple and secured process.

The newly revealed system is seen as an upgrade, incorporated to the current all-in-one workflow in the local administration.

Since 2014, the Chan Cheng District government has operated a central hub inside the city that serves as a physical portal for residents who need tax, pension, healthcare or utility services, among others. Despite offering a single source at which residents can access these services, repetitive work is needed for multiple processes.

According to the district’s announcement, residents who are able to register on and verified by the IMI platform will have the control of their personal information and can grant access to a government service they need. Using paired public and private keys, the system is also said to be able to verify users’ identity automatically without requiring them to be physically present at a service center….(More)”.

Singapore’s ‘Uber of lifesaving’ app is a simple way to stop people from dying on the street

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ariel Schwartz for  Business Insider: “If you have a heart attack on a plane, chances are decently good that a doctor or nurse onboard can provide emergency services while you wait to land. But if you collapse on a crowded city street, you might have to wait awhile for an ambulance to arrive.

Singapore’s solution: bring the plane treatment model to the streets by crowdsourcing medical help from whoever happens to be nearby.

The city-state’s population is rapidly aging, and that’s led to an uptick in the number of calls for emergency services. Getting ambulances through clogged city streets to people in need of care within 10 minutes – the approximate amount of time someone in cardiac arrest has before their prospects of survival dim -is a struggle.

A few years ago, Singapore’s Civil Defense Force (which run the public ambulance system) started testing a solution called myResponder. It’s essentially the app version of a flight attendant saying, “Is there a doctor onboard?”

When someone calls 995 (the equivalent of 911), their call is geolocated and a notification is sent out to anyone nearby who has downloaded the app. Once someone gets a notification, they can choose whether or not to accept the call for help. The app also shows the location of any nearby defibrillator machines.

The app launched in 2015. Since then, more than 15,000 medical professionals have downloaded it….(More)”

Reinvention in Middle America

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New report by sparks & honey: “Conventional wisdom suggests that to peer into the crystal ball of America’s future, one should go to Silicon Valley to check out the latest start-up unicorns, or to New York or Los Angeles to scout emerging trends in fashion and food.
Middle America, on the other hand, is often described as if it’s on the margins of culture and innovation — “flyover country” — provincial, unsophisticated and stuck in the past. But Middle America is diverse and although it is not stuck in the past —rhetoric about it is.

In this culture forecast report, we spotlight the region, looking at it not through the lens of politics, ideology or outdated clichés, but rather through innovation. Key cities from Cleveland to Nashville to Louisville are reinventing themselves by embracing innovation in manufacturing, city design, healthcare, sustainability efforts and clean energy, creatively solving problems that the entire country will eventually have to confront. And they’re imbuing this reinvention with characteristic Middle American values of community, collaboration, and concern for the social impact of their actions.

Yes, portions of Middle America may have a lot of cornfields — but drone-farming is happening there. Although Nashville is still the seat of the Grand Ole Opry, it’s also emerging as a major fashion and design hub. And in Appalachia, a coal museum is powered by solar energy and out-of-work coal miners are reinventing themselves as coders. It’s even predicted that in five years, the Midwest will have more startups than Silicon Valley.

Although it’s easy to politicize and divide America, innovation is not about moving right or left. Innovation is about moving forward…(More)”

Shaping space for civic life: Can better design help engage citizens?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Patrick Sisson at Curbed: “…The Assembly Civic Engagement Survey, a new report released yesterday by the Center for Active Design, seeks to understand the connections between the design of public spaces and buildings on public life, and eventually create a toolbox for planners and politicians to make decisions that can help improve civic pride. There’s perhaps an obvious connection between what one might consider a better-designed neighborhood and public perception of government and community, but how to design that neighborhood to directly improve public engagement—especially during an era of low voter engagement and partisan divide—is an important, and unanswered, question….

One of the most striking findings was around park signage. Respondents were shown a series of three signs, ranging from a traditional display of park rules and prohibitions to a more proactive, engaging pictograph that tells parkgoers it’s okay to give high-fives. The survey found the simple switch to more eye-catching, positive, and entertaining signage improved neighborhood pride by 11 percent and boosted the feeling that “the city cares for people in this park” by 9 percent. Similar improvements were found in surveys looking at signage on community centers.

According to Frank, the biggest revelation from the research is how a minimum of effort can make a large impact. On one hand, she says, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that transforming a formerly graffiti-covered vacant lot into a community garden can impact community trust and cohesion.

What sticks out from the study’s findings is how little is really necessary to shift attitudes and improve people’s trust in their neighborhoods and attitudes toward city government and police. Litter turned out to be a huge issue: High levels of trash eroded community pride by 10 percent, trust in police by 5 percent, and trust in local government by 4 percent. When presented with a series of seven things they could improve about their city, including crime, traffic, and noise, 23 percent of respondents chose litter.

Center for Active Design

In short, disorder erodes civic trust. The small things matter, especially when cities are formulating budgets and streetscaping plans and looking at the most effective ways of investing in community improvements….

Center for Active Design

Giving cities direction as well as data

Beyond connecting the dots, Frank wants to give planners rationale for their actions. Telling designers that placing planters in the middle of a street can beautify a neighborhood is one thing; showing that this kind of beautification increases walkability, brings more shoppers to a commercial strip, and ultimately leads to higher sales and tax revenue spurs action and innovation.

Frank gives the example of redesigning the streetscape in front of a police station. The idea of placing planters and benches may seem like a poor use of limited funds, until data and research reveals it’s a cost-effective way to encourage interactions between cops and the community and helps change the image of the department….(More)”

Index: Collective Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Hannah Pierce

By Hannah Pierce and Audrie Pirkl

The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on collective intelligence and was originally published in 2017.

The Collective Intelligence Universe

  • Amount of money that Reykjavik’s Better Neighbourhoods program has provided each year to crowdsourced citizen projects since 2012: € 2 million (Citizens Foundation)
  • Number of U.S. government challenges that people are currently participating in to submit their community solutions: 778 (Challenge.gov).
  • Percent of U.S. arts organizations used social media to crowdsource ideas in 2013, from programming decisions to seminar scheduling details: 52% (Pew Research)
  • Number of Wikipedia members who have contributed to a page in the last 30 days: over 120,000 (Wikipedia Page Statistics)
  • Number of languages that the multinational crowdsourced Letters for Black Lives has been translated into: 23 (Letters for Black Lives)
  • Number of comments in a Reddit thread that established a more comprehensive timeline of the theater shooting in Aurora than the media: 1272 (Reddit)
  • Number of physicians that are members of SERMO, a platform to crowdsource medical research: 800,000 (SERMO)
  • Number of citizen scientist projects registered on SciStarter: over 1,500 (Collective Intelligence 2017 Plenary Talk: Darlene Cavalier)
  • Entrants to NASA’s 2009 TopCoder Challenge: over 1,800 (NASA)

Infrastructure

  • Number of submissions for Block Holm (a digital platform that allows citizens to build “Minecraft” ideas on vacant city lots) within the first six months: over 10,000 (OpenLearn)
  • Number of people engaged to The Participatory Budgeting Project in the U.S.: over 300,000. (Participatory Budgeting Project)
  • Amount of money allocated to community projects through this initiative: $238,000,000

Health

  • Percentage of Internet-using adults with chronic health conditions that have gone online within the US to connect with others suffering from similar conditions: 23% (Pew Research)
  • Number of posts to Patient Opinion, a UK based platform for patients to provide anonymous feedback to healthcare providers: over 120,000 (Nesta)
    • Percent of NHS health trusts utilizing the posts to improve services in 2015: 90%
    • Stories posted per month: nearly 1,000 (The Guardian)
  • Number of tumors reported to the English National Cancer Registration each year: over 300,000 (Gov.UK)
  • Number of users of an open source artificial pancreas system: 310 (Collective Intelligence 2017 Plenary Talk: Dana Lewis)

Government

  • Number of submissions from 40 countries to the 2017 Open (Government) Contracting Innovation Challenge: 88 (The Open Data Institute)
  • Public-service complaints received each day via Indonesian digital platform Lapor!: over 500 (McKinsey & Company)
  • Number of registered users of Unicef Uganda’s weekly, SMS poll U-Report: 356,468 (U-Report)
  • Number of reports regarding government corruption in India submitted to IPaidaBribe since 2011: over 140,000 (IPaidaBribe)

Business

  • Reviews posted since Yelp’s creation in 2009: 121 million reviews (Statista)
  • Percent of Americans in 2016 who trust online customer reviews as much as personal recommendations: 84% (BrightLocal)
  • Number of companies and their subsidiaries mapped through the OpenCorporates platform: 60 million (Omidyar Network)

Crisis Response

Public Safety

  • Number of sexual harassment reports submitted to from 50 cities in India and Nepal to SafeCity, a crowdsourcing site and mobile app: over 4,000 (SafeCity)
  • Number of people that used Facebook’s Safety Check, a feature that is being used in a new disaster mapping project, in the first 24 hours after the terror attacks in Paris: 4.1 million (Facebook)

Examining the Mistrust of Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Proceedings of a National Academies Workshop: “The Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable held a meeting on February 28 and March 1, 2017, to explore trends in public opinion of science, examine potential sources of mistrust, and consider ways that cross-sector collaboration between government, universities, and industry may improve public trust in science and scientific institutions in the future. The keynote address on February 28 was given by Shawn Otto, co-founder and producer of the U.S. Presidential Science Debates and author of The War on Science.

“There seems to be an erosion of the standing and understanding of science and engineering among the public,” Otto said. “People seem much more inclined to reject facts and evidence today than in the recent past. Why could that be?” Otto began exploring that question after the candidates in the 2008 presidential election declined an invitation to debate science-driven policy issues and instead chose to debate faith and values.

“Wherever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. Now, some 240 years later, science is so complex that it is difficult even for scientists and engineers to understand the science outside of their particular fields. Otto argued,

“The question is, are people still well-enough informed to be trusted with their own government? Of the 535 members of Congress, only 11—less than 2 percent—have a professional background in science or engineering. By contrast, 218—41 percent—are lawyers. And lawyers approach a problem in a fundamentally different way than a scientist or engineer. An attorney will research both sides of a question, but only so that he or she can argue against the position that they do not support. A scientist will approach the question differently, not starting with a foregone conclusion and arguing towards it, but examining both sides of the evidence and trying to make a fair assessment.”

According to Otto, anti-science positions are now acceptable in public discourse, in Congress, state legislatures and city councils, in popular culture, and in presidential politics. Discounting factually incorrect statements does not necessarily reshape public opinion in the way some trust it to. What is driving this change? “Science is never partisan, but science is always political,” said Otto. “Science takes nothing on faith; it says, ‘show me the evidence and I’ll judge for myself.’ But the discoveries that science makes either confirm or challenge somebody’s cherished beliefs or vested economic or ideological interests. Science creates knowledge—knowledge is power, and that power is political.”…(More)”.

What Bhutanese hazelnuts tell us about using data for good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño at WEForum: “How are we going to close the $2.5 trillion/year finance gap to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? Whose money? What business model? How to scale it that much? If you read the recent development economics scholar literature, or Jim Kim’s new financing approach of the World Bank, you might hear the benefits of “blended finance” or “triple bottom lines.” I want to tell you instead about a real case that makes a dent. I want to tell you about Sonam.

Sonam is a 60-year old farmer in rural Bhutan. His children left for the capital, Thimphu, like many are doing nowadays. Four years ago, he decided to plant 2 acres of hazelnuts on an unused rocky piece of his land. Hazelnut saplings, training, and regular supervision all come from “Mountain Hazelnuts”, Bhutan’s only 100% foreign invested company. They fund the costs of the trees and helps him manage his orchard. In return, when the nuts come, he will sell his harvest to them above the guaranteed floor price, which will double his income; in a time when he will be too old to work in his rice field.

You could find similar impact stories for the roughly 10,000 farmers participating in this operation across the country, where the farmers are carefully selected to ensure productivity, maximize social and environmental benefits, such as vulnerable households, or reducing land erosion.

But Sonam also gets a visit from Kinzang every month. This is Kinzang’s first job. Otherwise, he would have moved to the city in hopes of finding a low paying job, but more likely joining the many unemployed youth from the countryside. Kinzang carefully records data on his smart-phone, talks to Sonam and digitally transmits the data back to the company HQ. There, if a problem is recorded with irrigation, pests, or there is any data anomaly, a team of experts (locally trained agronomists) will visit his orchard to figure out a solution.

The whole system of support, monitoring, and optimization live on a carefully crafted data platform that feeds information to and from the farmers, the monitors, the agronomist experts, and local government authorities. It ensures that all 10 million trees are healthy and productive, minimizes extra costs, tests and tracks effectiveness of new treatments….

This is also a story which demonstrates how “Data is the new oil” is not the right approach. If Data is the new oil, you extract value from the data, without much regard to feeding back value to the source of the data. However, in this system, “Data is the new soil.” Data creates a higher ground in which value flows back and forth. It lifts the source of the data -the farmers- into new income generation, it enables optimized operations; and it also helps the whole country: Much of the data (such as road quality used by the monitors) is made open for the benefit of the Bhutanese people, without contradiction or friction with the business model….(More)”.

The Age of Customer.gov: Can the Tech that Drives 311 Help Government Deliver an Amazon-like Experience?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tod Newcombe  at GovTech: “The Digital Communities Special … June 2017 report explores the idea that the tech that drives 311 can help government deliver an Amazon-like experience.

PART 1: 311: FROM A HOTLINE TO A PLATFORM FOR CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT

PART 2: CLOUD 311 POPULARITY GROWS AS CITIES OF ALL SIZES MOVE TO REMOTELY HOSTED CRM

PART 3: THE FUTURE OF CRM AND CUSTOMER SERVICE: LOOK TO BOSTON

PART 4: CRM USE IS GAINING TRACTION IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT — HERE ARE THE NUMBERS TO PROVE IT…(More)”.

Inside the Algorithm That Tries to Predict Gun Violence in Chicago

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeff Asher and Rob Arthur at the New York Times: “Gun violence in Chicago has surged since late 2015, and much of the news media attention on how the city plans to address this problem has focused on the Strategic Subject List, or S.S.L.

The list is made by an algorithm that tries to predict who is most likely to be involved in a shooting, either as perpetrator or victim. The algorithm is not public, but the city has now placed a version of the list — without names — online through its open data portal, making it possible for the first time to see how Chicago evaluates risk.

We analyzed that information and found that the assigned risk scores — and what characteristics go into them — are sometimes at odds with the Chicago Police Department’s public statements and cut against some common perceptions.

■ Violence in the city is less concentrated at the top — among a group of about 1,400 people with the highest risk scores — than some public comments from the Chicago police have suggested.

■ Gangs are often blamed for the devastating increase in gun violence in Chicago, but gang membership had a small predictive effect and is being dropped from the most recent version of the algorithm.

■ Being a victim of a shooting or an assault is far more predictive of future gun violence than being arrested on charges of domestic violence or weapons possession.

■ The algorithm has been used in Chicago for several years, and its effectiveness is far from clear. Chicago accounted for a large share of the increase in urban murders last year….(More)”.