Paper by Louise Mc Grath-Lone et al: “Administrative data are a valuable research resource, but are under-utilised in the UK due to governance, technical and other barriers (e.g., the time and effort taken to gain secure data access). In recent years, there has been considerable government investment in making administrative data “research-ready”, but there is no definition of what this term means. A common understanding of what constitutes research-ready administrative data is needed to establish clear principles and frameworks for their development and the realisation of their full research potential…Overall, we screened 2,375 records and identified 38 relevant studies published between 2012 and 2021. Most related to administrative data from the UK and US and particularly to health data. The term research-ready was used inconsistently in the literature and there was some conflation with the concept of data being ready for statistical analysis. From the thematic analysis, we identified five defining characteristics of research-ready administrative data: (a) accessible, (b) broad, (c) curated, (d) documented and (e) enhanced for research purposes…
Our proposed characteristics of research-ready administrative data could act as a starting point to help data owners and researchers develop common principles and standards. In the more immediate term, the proposed characteristics are a useful framework for cataloguing existing research-ready administrative databases and relevant resources that can support their development…(More)”.
Public Data Commons: A public-interest framework for B2G data sharing in the Data Act
Policy Brief by Alek Tarkowski & Francesco Vogelezang: “It is by now a truism that data is a crucial resource in the digital era. Yet today access to data and the capacity to make use of data and to benefit from it are unevenly distributed. A new understanding of data is needed, one that takes into account a society-wide data sharing and value creation. This will solve power asymmetries related to data ownership and the capacity to use it, and fill the public value gap with regard to data-driven growth and innovation.
Public institutions are also in a unique position to safeguard the rule of law, ensure democratic control and accountability, and drive the use of data to generate non-economic value.
The “data sharing for public good” narratives have been presented for over a decade, arguing that privately-owned big data should be used for the public interest. The idea of the commons has attracted the attention of policymakers interested in developing institutional responses that can advance public interest goals. The concept of the data commons offers a generative model of property that is well-aligned with the ambitions of the European data strategy. And by employing the idea of the data commons, the public debate can be shifted beyond an opposition between treating data as a commodity or protecting it as the object of fundamental rights.
The European Union is uniquely positioned to deliver a data governance framework that ensures Business-to-Government (B2G) data sharing in the public interest. The policy vision for such a framework has been presented in the European strategy for data, and specific recommendations for a robust B2G data sharing model have been made by the Commission’s high-level expert group.
There are three connected objectives that must be achieved through a B2G data sharing framework. Firstly, access to data and the capacity to make use of it needs to be ensured for a broader range of actors. Secondly, exclusive corporate control over data needs to be reduced. And thirdly, the information power of the state and its generative capacity should be strengthened.
Yet the current proposal for the Data Act fails to meet these goals, due to a narrow B2G data sharing mandate limited only to situations of public emergency and exceptional need.
This policy brief therefore presents a model for public interest B2G data sharing, aimed to complement the current proposal. This framework would also create a robust baseline for sectoral regulations, like the recently proposed Regulation on the European Health Data Space. The proposal includes the creation of the European Public Data Commons, a body that acts as a recipient and clearinghouse for the data made available…(More)”.
Open data: The building block of 21st century (open) science
Paper by Corina Pascu and Jean-Claude Burgelman: “Given this irreversibility of data driven and reproducible science and the role machines will play in that, it is foreseeable that the production of scientific knowledge will be more like a constant flow of updated data driven outputs, rather than a unique publication/article of some sort. Indeed, the future of scholarly publishing will be more based on the publication of data/insights with the article as a narrative.
For open data to be valuable, reproducibility is a sine qua non (King2011; Piwowar, Vision and Whitlock2011) and—equally important as most of the societal grand challenges require several sciences to work together—essential for interdisciplinarity.
This trend correlates with the already ongoing observed epistemic shift in the rationale of science: from demonstrating the absolute truth via a unique narrative (article or publication), to the best possible understanding what at that moment is needed to move forward in the production of knowledge to address problem “X” (de Regt2017).
Science in the 21st century will be thus be more “liquid,” enabled by open science and data practices and supported or even co-produced by artificial intelligence (AI) tools and services, and thus a continuous flow of knowledge produced and used by (mainly) machines and people. In this paradigm, an article will be the “atomic” entity and often the least important output of the knowledge stream and scholarship production. Publishing will offer in the first place a platform where all parts of the knowledge stream will be made available as such via peer review.
The new frontier in open science as well as where most of future revenue will be made, will be via value added data services (such as mining, intelligence, and networking) for people and machines. The use of AI is on the rise in society, but also on all aspects of research and science: what can be put in an algorithm will be put; the machines and deep learning add factor “X.”
AI services for science 4 are already being made along the research process: data discovery and analysis and knowledge extraction out of research artefacts are accelerated with the use of AI. AI technologies also help to maximize the efficiency of the publishing process and make peer-review more objective5 (Table 1).
Table 1. Examples of AI services for science already being developed
Abbreviation: AI, artificial intelligence.
Source: Authors’ research based on public sources, 2021.
Ultimately, actionable knowledge and translation of its benefits to society will be handled by humans in the “machine era” for decades to come. But as computers are indispensable research assistants, we need to make what we publish understandable to them.
The availability of data that are “FAIR by design” and shared Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) will allow new ways of collaboration between scientists and machines to make the best use of research digital objects of any kind. The more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) data resources will become available, the more it will be possible to use AI to extract and analyze new valuable information. The main challenge is to master the interoperability and quality of research data…(More)”.
How can digital public technologies accelerate progress on the Sustainable Development Goals?
Report by George Ingram, John W. McArthur, and Priya Vora: “…There is no singular relationship between access to digital technologies and SDG outcomes. Country- and issue-specific assessments are essential. Sound approaches will frequently depend on the underlying physical infrastructure and economic systems. Rwanda, for instance, has made tremendous progress on SDG health indicators despite high rates of income poverty and internet poverty. This contrasts with Burkina Faso, which has lower income poverty and internet poverty but higher child mortality.
We draw from an OECD typology to identify three layers of a digital ecosystem: Physical infrastructure, platform infrastructure, and apps-level products. Physical and platform layers of digital infrastructure provide the rules, standards, and security guarantees so that local market innovators and governments can develop new ideas more rapidly to meet ever-changing circumstances. We emphasize five forms of DPT platform infrastructure that can play important roles in supporting SDG acceleration:
- Personal identification and registration infrastructure allows citizens and organizations to have equal access to basic rights and services;
- Payments infrastructure enables efficient resource transfer with low transaction costs;
- Knowledge infrastructure links educational resources and data sets in an open or permissioned way;
- Data exchange infrastructure enables interoperability of independent databases; and
- Mapping infrastructure intersects with data exchange platforms to empower geospatially enabled diagnostics and service delivery opportunities.
Each of these platform types can contribute directly or indirectly to a range of SDG outcomes. For example, a person’s ability to register their identity with public sector entities is fundamental to everything from a birth certificate (SDG target 16.9) to a land title (SDG 1.4), bank account (SDG 8.10), driver’s license, or government-sponsored social protection (SDG 1.3). It can also ensure access to publicly available basic services, such as access to public schools (SDG 4.1) and health clinics (SDG 3.8).
At least three levers can help “level the playing field” such that a wide array of service providers can use the physical and platform layers of digital infrastructure equally: (1) public ownership and governance; (2) public regulation; and (3) open code, standards, and protocols. In practice, DPTs are typically built and deployed through a mix of levers, enabling different public and private actors to extract benefits through unique pathways….(More)”.
Facebook-owner Meta to share more political ad targeting data
Article by Elizabeth Culliford: “Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc (FB.O) will share more data on targeting choices made by advertisers running political and social-issue ads in its public ad database, it said on Monday.
Meta said it would also include detailed targeting information for these individual ads in its “Facebook Open Research and Transparency” database used by academic researchers, in an expansion of a pilot launched last year.
“Instead of analyzing how an ad was delivered by Facebook, it’s really going and looking at an advertiser strategy for what they were trying to do,” said Jeff King, Meta’s vice president of business integrity, in a phone interview.
The social media giant has faced pressure in recent years to provide transparency around targeted advertising on its platforms, particularly around elections. In 2018, it launched a public ad library, though some researchers criticized it for glitches and a lack of detailed targeting data.Meta said the ad library will soon show a summary of targeting information for social issue, electoral or political ads run by a page….The company has run various programs with external researchers as part of its transparency efforts. Last year, it said a technical error meant flawed data had been provided to academics in its “Social Science One” project…(More)”.
The Era of Borderless Data Is Ending
David McCabe and Adam Satariano at the New York Times: “Every time we send an email, tap an Instagram ad or swipe our credit cards, we create a piece of digital data.
The information pings around the world at the speed of a click, becoming a kind of borderless currency that underpins the digital economy. Largely unregulated, the flow of bits and bytes helped fuel the rise of transnational megacompanies like Google and Amazon and reshaped global communications, commerce, entertainment and media.
Now the era of open borders for data is ending.
France, Austria, South Africa and more than 50 other countries are accelerating efforts to control the digital information produced by their citizens, government agencies and corporations. Driven by security and privacy concerns, as well as economic interests and authoritarian and nationalistic urges, governments are increasingly setting rules and standards about how data can and cannot move around the globe. The goal is to gain “digital sovereignty.”
Consider that:
- In Washington, the Biden administration is circulating an early draft of an executive order meant to stop rivals like China from gaining access to American data.
- In the European Union, judges and policymakers are pushing efforts to guard information generated within the 27-nation bloc, including tougher online privacy requirements and rules for artificial intelligence.
- In India, lawmakers are moving to pass a law that would limit what data could leave the nation of almost 1.4 billion people.
- The number of laws, regulations and government policies that require digital information to be stored in a specific country more than doubled to 144 from 2017 to 2021, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
While countries like China have long cordoned off their digital ecosystems, the imposition of more national rules on information flows is a fundamental shift in the democratic world and alters how the internet has operated since it became widely commercialized in the 1990s.
The repercussions for business operations, privacy and how law enforcement and intelligence agencies investigate crimes and run surveillance programs are far-reaching. Microsoft, Amazon and Google are offering new services to let companies store records and information within a certain territory. And the movement of data has become part of geopolitical negotiations, including a new pact for sharing information across the Atlantic that was agreed to in principle in March…(More)”.
Pandemic X Infodemic: How States Shaped Narratives During COVID-19
Report by Innovation for Change – East Asia (I4C-EA): “The COVID-19 pandemic has left many unprecedented records in the history of the world. The coronavirus crisis was the first large-scale pandemic that began in a time when the internet and social media connect people to each other. It provided the latest information to respond to the COVID-19 and the technology to ask about each other’s well-being. Yet, it spread and amplified disinformation and misinformation that made the situation worse in real-time.
In addition, some countries have had opaque communications with the public about the COVID-19, and some government officials have aided in the dissemination of unconfirmed information. Other countries also created their own narratives on the COVID-19 and were reluctant to disclose important information to the public. This has led to restrictions on freedom of expression. Activists and journalists who tell the different stories from the state-shaped narrative were arrested.
To strengthen civil society’s effort to empower the public with better access to the truth, the Innovation for Change – East Asia Hub initiated “Pandemic X Infodemic: How States Shaped Narratives During COVID-19“; a research to track East Asian governments’ information, disinformation, and misinformation efforts in their respective policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020-21. This research covered four countries – China, Myanmar, Indonesia, and the Philippines – with one thematic focus on migrants in the receiving countries of Thailand and Singapore…(More)”.
Social Engineering: How Crowdmasters, Phreaks, Hackers, and Trolls Created a New Form of Manipulative Communication
Open Access book by Robert W. Gehl, and Sean T Lawson: “Manipulative communication—from early twentieth-century propaganda to today’s online con artistry—examined through the lens of social engineering. The United States is awash in manipulated information about everything from election results to the effectiveness of medical treatments. Corporate social media is an especially good channel for manipulative communication, with Facebook a particularly willing vehicle for it. In Social Engineering, Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson show that online misinformation has its roots in earlier techniques: mass social engineering of the early twentieth century and interpersonal hacker social engineering of the 1970s, converging today into what they call “masspersonal social engineering.” As Gehl and Lawson trace contemporary manipulative communication back to earlier forms of social engineering, possibilities for amelioration become clearer.
The authors show how specific manipulative communication practices are a mixture of information gathering, deception, and truth-indifferent statements, all with the instrumental goal of getting people to take actions the social engineer wants them to. Yet the term “fake news,” they claim, reduces everything to a true/false binary that fails to encompass the complexity of manipulative communication or to map onto many of its practices. They pay special attention to concepts and terms used by hacker social engineers, including the hacker concept of “bullshitting,” which the authors describe as a truth-indifferent mix of deception, accuracy, and sociability. They conclude with recommendations for how society can undermine masspersonal social engineering and move toward healthier democratic deliberation…(More)”.
The Frontlines of Artificial Intelligence Ethics
Book edited by Andrew J. Hampton, and Jeanine A. DeFalco: “This foundational text examines the intersection of AI, psychology, and ethics, laying the groundwork for the importance of ethical considerations in the design and implementation of technologically supported education, decision support, and leadership training.
AI already affects our lives profoundly, in ways both mundane and sensational, obvious and opaque. Much academic and industrial effort has considered the implications of this AI revolution from technical and economic perspectives, but the more personal, humanistic impact of these changes has often been relegated to anecdotal evidence in service to a broader frame of reference. Offering a unique perspective on the emerging social relationships between people and AI agents and systems, Hampton and DeFalco present cutting-edge research from leading academics, professionals, and policy standards advocates on the psychological impact of the AI revolution. Structured into three parts, the book explores the history of data science, technology in education, and combatting machine learning bias, as well as future directions for the emerging field, bringing the research into the active consideration of those in positions of authority.
Exploring how AI can support expert, creative, and ethical decision making in both people and virtual human agents, this is essential reading for students, researchers, and professionals in AI, psychology, ethics, engineering education, and leadership, particularly military leadership…(More)”.
Wicked Problems in Public Policy: Understanding and Responding to Complex Challenges
Book by Brian W. Head: “…offers the first overview of the ‘wicked problems’ literature, often seen as complex, open-ended, and intractable, with both the nature of the ‘problem’ and the preferred ‘solution’ being strongly contested. It contextualises the debate using a wide range of relevant policy examples, explaining why these issues attract so much attention.
There is an increasing interest in the conceptual and practical aspects of how ‘wicked problems’ are identified, understood and managed by policy practitioners. The standard public management responses to complexity and uncertainty (including traditional regulation and market-based solutions) are insufficient. Leaders often advocate and implement ideological ‘quick fixes’, but integrative and inclusive responses are increasingly being utilised to recognise the multiple interests and complex causes of these problems. This book uses examples from a wide range of social, economic and environmental fields in order to develop new insights about better solutions, and thus gain broad stakeholder acceptance for shared strategies for tackling ‘wicked problems’…(More)”.