Making data for good better

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Caroline Buckee, Satchit Balsari, and Andrew Schroeder: “…Despite the long standing excitement about the potential for digital tools, Big Data and AI to transform our lives, these innovations–with some exceptions–have so far had little impact on the greatest public health emergency of our time.

Attempts to use digital data streams to rapidly produce public health insights that were not only relevant for local contexts in cities and countries around the world, but also available to decision makers who needed them, exposed enormous gaps across the translational pipeline. The insights from novel data streams which could help drive precise, impactful health programs, and bring effective aid to communities, found limited use among public health and emergency response systems. We share here our experience from the COVID-19 Mobility Data Network (CMDN), now Crisis Ready (crisisready.io), a global collaboration of researchers, mostly infectious disease epidemiologists and data scientists, who served as trusted intermediaries between technology companies willing to share vast amounts of digital data, and policy makers, struggling to incorporate insights from these novel data streams into their decision making. Through our experience with the Network, and using human mobility data as an illustrative example, we recognize three sets of barriers to the successful application of large digital datasets for public good.

First, in the absence of pre-established working relationships with technology companies and data brokers, the data remain primarily confined within private circuits of ownership and control. During the pandemic, data sharing agreements between large technology companies and researchers were hastily cobbled together, often without the right kind of domain expertise in the mix. Second, the lack of standardization, interoperability and information on the uncertainty and biases associated with these data, necessitated complex analytical processing by highly specialized domain experts. And finally, local public health departments, understandably unfamiliar with these novel data streams, had neither the bandwidth nor the expertise to sift noise from signal. Ultimately, most efforts did not yield consistently useful information for decision making, particularly in low resource settings, where capacity limitations in the public sector are most acute…(More)”.

What Works? Developing a global evidence base for public engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Reema Patel and Stephen Yeo: “…the Wellcome Trust commissioned OTT Consulting to recommend the best approach for enabling public engagement communities to share and gather evidence on public engagement practice globally, and in particular to assess the suitability of an approach adapted from the UK ‘What Works Centres’. This report is the output from that commission. It draws from a desk-based literature review, workshops in India, Peru and the UK, and a series of stakeholder interviews with international organisations.

The key themes that emerged from stakeholder interviews and workshops were that, in order for evidence about public engagement to help inform and shape public engagement practice, and for public engagement to be used and deployed effectively, there has to be an approach that can: understand the audiences, broaden out how ‘evidence’ is understood and generated, think strategically about how evidence affects and informs practice and understand the complexity of the system dynamics within which public engagement (and evidence about public engagement) operates….(More)”.

Trove of unique health data sets could help AI predict medical conditions earlier

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Madhumita Murgia at the Financial Times: “…Ziad Obermeyer, a physician and machine learning scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, launched Nightingale Open Science last month — a treasure trove of unique medical data sets, each curated around an unsolved medical mystery that artificial intelligence could help to solve.

The data sets, released after the project received $2m of funding from former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, could help to train computer algorithms to predict medical conditions earlier, triage better and save lives.

The data include 40 terabytes of medical imagery, such as X-rays, electrocardiogram waveforms and pathology specimens, from patients with a range of conditions, including high-risk breast cancer, sudden cardiac arrest, fractures and Covid-19. Each image is labelled with the patient’s medical outcomes, such as the stage of breast cancer and whether it resulted in death, or whether a Covid patient needed a ventilator.

Obermeyer has made the data sets free to use and mainly worked with hospitals in the US and Taiwan to build them over two years. He plans to expand this to Kenya and Lebanon in the coming months to reflect as much medical diversity as possible.

“Nothing exists like it,” said Obermeyer, who announced the new project in December alongside colleagues at NeurIPS, the global academic conference for artificial intelligence. “What sets this apart from anything available online is the data sets are labelled with the ‘ground truth’, which means with what really happened to a patient and not just a doctor’s opinion.”…

The Nightingale data sets were among dozens proposed this year at NeurIPS.

Other projects included a speech data set of Mandarin and eight subdialects recorded by 27,000 speakers in 34 cities in China; the largest audio data set of Covid respiratory sounds, such as breathing, coughing and voice recordings, from more than 36,000 participants to help screen for the disease; and a data set of satellite images covering the entire country of South Africa from 2006 to 2017, divided and labelled by neighbourhood, to study the social effects of spatial apartheid.

Elaine Nsoesie, a computational epidemiologist at the Boston University School of Public Health, said new types of data could also help with studying the spread of diseases in diverse locations, as people from different cultures react differently to illnesses.

She said her grandmother in Cameroon, for example, might think differently than Americans do about health. “If someone had an influenza-like illness in Cameroon, they may be looking for traditional, herbal treatments or home remedies, compared to drugs or different home remedies in the US.”

Computer scientists Serena Yeung and Joaquin Vanschoren, who proposed that research to build new data sets should be exchanged at NeurIPS, pointed out that the vast majority of the AI community still cannot find good data sets to evaluate their algorithms. This meant that AI researchers were still turning to data that were potentially “plagued with bias”, they said. “There are no good models without good data.”…(More)”.

The Biden Administration Embraces “Democracy Affirming Technologies”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Marc Rotenberg: “…But amidst the ongoing struggle between declining democracies and emerging authoritarian governments, the Democracy Summit was notable for at least one new initiative – the support for democracy affirming technology. According to the White House, the initiative “aims to galvanize worldwide a new class of technologies” that can support democratic values.  The White House plan is to bring together innovators, investors, researchers, and entrepreneurs to “embed democratic values.”  The President’s top science advisor Eric Lander provided more detail. Democratic values, he said, include “privacy, freedom of expression, access to information, transparency, fairness, inclusion, and equity.”

In order to spur more rapid technological progress the White House Office of Science and Technology announced three Grand Challenges for Democracy-Affirming Technologies. They are:

  • A collaboration between U.S. and UK agencies to promote “privacy enhancing technologies” that “harness the power of data in a secure manner that protects privacy and intellectual property, enabling cross-border and cross-sector collaboration to solve shared challenges.”
  • Censorship circumvention tools, based on peer-to-peer techniques that enable content-sharing and communication without an Internet or cellular connection. The Open Technology Fund, an independent NGO, will invite international participants to compete on promising P2P technologies to counter Internet shutdowns.
  • A Global Entrepreneurship Challenge will seek to identify entrepreneurs who build and advance democracy-affirming technologies through a set of regional startup and scaleup competitions in countries spanning the democratic world. According to the White House, specific areas of innovation may include: data for policymaking, responsible AI and machine learning, fighting misinformation, and advancing government transparency and accessibility of government data and services.

USAID Administrator Samantha Powers said her agency would spend 20 million annually to expand digital democracy work. “We’ll use these funds to help partner nations align their rules governing the use of technology with democratic principles and respect for human rights,” said the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Notably, Powers also said the U.S. will take a closer look at export practices to “prevent technologies from falling into hands that would misuse them.” The U.S., along with Denmark, Norway, and Australia, will launch a new Export Controls and Human Rights Initiative. Powers also seeks to align surveillance practices of democratic nations with the Universal Declaration for Human Rights….(More)”.

Economists Pin More Blame on Tech for Rising Inequality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steve Lohr at the New York Times: “Daron Acemoglu, an influential economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been making the case against what he describes as “excessive automation.”

The economywide payoff of investing in machines and software has been stubbornly elusive. But he says the rising inequality resulting from those investments, and from the public policy that encourages them, is crystal clear.

Half or more of the increasing gap in wages among American workers over the last 40 years is attributable to the automation of tasks formerly done by human workers, especially men without college degrees, according to some of his recent research…

Mr. Acemoglu, a wide-ranging scholar whose research makes him one of most cited economists in academic journals, is hardly the only prominent economist arguing that computerized machines and software, with a hand from policymakers, have contributed significantly to the yawning gaps in incomes in the United States. Their numbers are growing, and their voices add to the chorus of criticism surrounding the Silicon Valley giants and the unchecked advance of technology.

Paul Romer, who won a Nobel in economic science for his work on technological innovation and economic growth, has expressed alarm at the runaway market power and influence of the big tech companies. “Economists taught: ‘It’s the market. There’s nothing we can do,’” he said in an interview last year. “That’s really just so wrong.”

Anton Korinek, an economist at the University of Virginia, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel economist at Columbia University, have written a paper, “Steering Technological Progress,” which recommends steps from nudges for entrepreneurs to tax changes to pursue “labor-friendly innovations.”

Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Stanford, is a technology optimist in general. But in an essay to be published this spring in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he warns of “the Turing trap.” …(More)”

Surveillance Publishing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Working paper by Jefferson D. Pooley: “…This essay lingers on a prediction too: Clarivate’s business model is coming for scholarly publishing. Google is one peer, but the company’s real competitors are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and SAGE. Elsevier, in particular, has been moving into predictive analytics for years now. Of course the publishing giants have long profited off of academics and our university employers— by packaging scholars’ unpaid writing-and-editing labor only to sell it back to us as usuriously priced subscriptions or APCs. That’s a lucrative business that Elsevier and the others won’t give up. But they’re layering another business on top of their legacy publishing operations, in the Clarivate mold. The data trove that publishers are sitting on is, if anything, far richer than the citation graph alone. Why worry about surveillance publishing? One reason is the balance-sheet, since the companies’ trading in academic futures will further pad profits at the expense of taxpayers and students. The bigger reason is that our behavior—once alienated from us and abstracted into predictive metrics—will double back onto our work lives. Existing biases, like male academics’ propensity for selfcitation, will receive a fresh coat of algorithmic legitimacy. More broadly, the academic reward system is already distorted by metrics. To the extent that publishers’ tallies and indices get folded into grant-making, tenure-and-promotion, and other evaluative decisions, the metric tide will gain power. The biggest risk is that scholars will internalize an analytics mindset, one already encouraged by citation counts and impact factors….(More)”.

Legal study on Government access to data in third countries

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Report commissioned by the European Data Protection Board: “The present report is part of a study analysing the implications for the work of the European Union (EU)/ European Economic Area (EEA) data protection supervisory authorities (SAs) in relation to transfers of personal data to third countries after the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) judgment C- 311/18 on Data Protection Commissioner v. Facebook Ireland Ltd, Maximilian Schrems (Schrems II). Data controllers and processors may transfer personal data to third countries or international organisations only if the controller or processor has provided appropriate safeguards, and on the condition that enforceable data subject rights and effective legal remedies for data subjects are available.

Whereas it is the primary responsibility of data exporters and data importers to assess that the legislation of the country of destination enables the data importer to comply with any of the appropriate safeguards, SAs will play a key role when issuing further decisions on transfers to third countries. Hence, this report provides the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and the SAs in the EEA/EU with information on the legislation and practice in China, India and Russia on their governments’ access to personal data processed by economic operators. The report contains an overview of the relevant information in order for the SAs to assess whether and to what extent legislation and practices in the abovementioned countries imply massive and/or indiscriminate access to personal data processed by economic operators…(More)”.

Technology and the Global Struggle for Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Manuel Muniz: “The commemoration of the first anniversary of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump showed that the extreme political polarization that fueled the riot also frames Americans’ interpretations of it. It would, however, be gravely mistaken to view what happened as a uniquely American phenomenon with uniquely American causes. The disruption of the peaceful transfer of power that day was part of something much bigger.

As part of the commemoration, President Joe Biden said that a battle is being fought over “the soul of America.” What is becoming increasingly clear is that this is also true of the international order: its very soul is at stake. China is rising and asserting itself. Populism is widespread in the West and major emerging economies. And chauvinistic nationalism has re-emerged in parts of Europe. All signs point to increasing illiberalism and anti-democratic sentiment around the world.

Against this backdrop, the US hosted in December a (virtual) “Summit for Democracy” that was attended by hundreds of national and civil-society leaders. The message of the gathering was clear: democracies must assert themselves firmly and proactively. To that end, the summit devoted numerous sessions to studying the digital revolution and its potentially harmful implications for our political systems.

Emerging technologies pose at least three major risks for democracies. The first concerns how they structure public debate. Social networks balkanize public discourse by segmenting users into ever smaller like-minded communities. Algorithmically-driven information echo chambers make it difficult to build social consensus. Worse, social networks are not liable for the content they distribute, which means they can allow misinformation to spread on their platforms with impunity…(More)”.

A data ‘black hole’: Europol ordered to delete vast store of personal data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Apostolis Fotiadis, Ludek Stavinoha, Giacomo Zandonini, Daniel Howden: “…The EU’s police agency, Europol, will be forced to delete much of a vast store of personal data that it has been found to have amassed unlawfully by the bloc’s data protection watchdog. The unprecedented finding from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) targets what privacy experts are calling a “big data ark” containing billions of points of information. Sensitive data in the ark has been drawn from crime reports, hacked from encrypted phone services and sampled from asylum seekers never involved in any crime.

According to internal documents seen by the Guardian, Europol’s cache contains at least 4 petabytes – equivalent to 3m CD-Roms or a fifth of the entire contents of the US Library of Congress. Data protection advocates say the volume of information held on Europol’s systems amounts to mass surveillance and is a step on its road to becoming a European counterpart to the US National Security Agency (NSA), the organisation whose clandestine online spying was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden….(More)”.

Citizen Power Europe. The Making of a European Citizens’ Assembly

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alberto Alemanno and Kalypso Nicolaïdis: “This article argues that if the EU is to recover its dented popularity among European publics, we need to build a European democratic ecosystem to nurture, scale and ultimate accommodate the daily competing claims of Europe’s citizens. To attain this objective, it presents and discusses three big ideas that are at the heart of the renewed EU ecosystem that we are calling for. These are: participation beyond voting; a transnational and inclusive public space; and, a democratic panopticon for greater accountability. Promisingly enough, these ideas already find reflection in the first batch of the citizens’ recommendations emerging from the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE). Even if these recommendations still need to be refined through deliberation by the plenary of the CoFoE, they add up a clear and urgent message: let’s tap into our collective intelligence and democratic imagination to construct a pan-European public sphere by enhancing mutual connections, knowledge and empowerment between citizens across borders…(More)”.