Paper by Paul C. Bauer, Frederic Gerdon, Florian Keusch, Frauke Kreuter & David Vannette: “In the wake of the digital revolution and connected technologies, societies store an ever-increasing amount of data on humans, their preferences, and behavior. These modern technologies create a trust challenge, insofar as individuals have to trust data collectors such as private organizations, government institutions, and researchers that their data is not misused. Privacy regulations should increase trust because they provide laws that increase transparency and allow for punishment in cases in which the trustee violates trust. The introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018 – a wide-reaching regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy that covers millions of individuals in Europe – provides a unique setting to study the impact of privacy regulation on trust in data collectors. We collected survey panel data in Germany around the implementation date and ran a survey experiment with a GDPR information treatment. Our observational and experimental evidence does not support the hypothesis that the GDPR has positively affected trust. This finding and our discussion of the underlying reasons are relevant for the wider research field of trust, privacy, and big data….(More)”
A growing number of governments hope to clone America’s DARPA
The Economist: “Using messenger RNA to make vaccines was an unproven idea. But if it worked, the technique would revolutionise medicine, not least by providing protection against infectious diseases and biological weapons. So in 2013 America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gambled. It awarded a small, new firm called Moderna $25m to develop the idea. Eight years, and more than 175m doses later, Moderna’s covid-19 vaccine sits on the list of innovations for which DARPA can claim at least partial credit, alongside weather satellites, GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the internet.
It is the agency that shaped the modern world, and this success has spurred imitators. In America there are ARPAs for homeland security, intelligence and energy, as well as the original defence one. President Joe Biden has asked Congress for $6.5bn to set up a health version, which will, the president vows, “end cancer as we know it”. His administration also has plans for another, to tackle climate change. Germany has recently established two such agencies: one civilian (the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, or SPRIN-D) and another military (the Cybersecurity Innovation Agency). Japan’s version is called Moonshot R&D. In Britain, a bill for an Advanced Research and Invention Agency—often referred to as UK ARPA—is making its way through parliament….(More)”.
Data-driven environmental decision-making and action in armed conflict
Essay by Wim Zwijnenburg: “Our understanding of how severely armed conflicts have impacted natural resources, eco-systems, biodiversity and long-term implications on climate has massively improved over the last decade. Without a doubt, cataclysmic events such as the 1991 Gulf War oil fires contributed to raising awareness on the conflict-environment nexus, and the images of burning wells are engraved into our collective mind. But another more recent, under-examined yet major contributor to this growing cognizance is the digital revolution, which has provided us with a wealth of data and information from conflict-affected countries quickly made available through the internet. With just a few clicks, anyone with a computer or smartphone and a Wi-Fi connection can follow, often in near-real time, events shared through social media in warzones or satellite imagery showing what is unfolding on the ground.
These developments have significantly deepened our understanding of how military activities, both historically and in current conflicts, contribute to environmental damage and can impact the lives and livelihoods of civilians. Geospatial analysis through earth observation (EO) is now widely used to document international humanitarian law (IHL) violations, improve humanitarian response and inform post-conflict assessments.
These new insights on conflict-environment dynamics have driven humanitarian, military and political responses. The latter are essential for the protection of the environment in armed conflict: with knowledge and understanding also comes a responsibility to prevent, mitigate and minimize environmental damage, in line with existing international obligations. Of particular relevance, under international humanitarian law, militaries must take into account incidental environmental damage that is reasonably foreseeable based on an assessment of information from all sources available to them at the relevant time (ICRC Guidelines on the Protection of the Environment, Rule 7; Customary IHL Rule 43). Excessive harm is prohibited, and all feasible precautions must be taken to reduce incidental damage (Guidelines Rule 8, Customary IHL Rule 44).
How do we ensure that the data-driven strides forward in understanding conflict-driven environmental damage translate into proper military training and decision-making, humanitarian response and reconstruction efforts? How can this influence behaviour change and improve accountability for military actions and targeting decisions?…(More)”.
Innovating Public Service Delivery Through Crowdsourcing: What Role for The Third Sector and Civil Society?
Paper by Nathalie Colasanti, Chiara Fantauzzi, and Rocco Frondizi: “The purpose of this paper is to study the involvement of the “crowd” in designing innovative public policies, and the possibility for the Third Sector to play a role in this process. To do so, we want to answer the following research question: what is the extent to which crowdsourcing is adopted in financing and delivering public services within New Public Governance arenas? In order to answer it, we employ the following approach. First of all, we will set public innovation into the context of New Public Governance; secondly, we will analyse definitions for crowdsourcing, and thirdly, we will provide an overview and crisis of crowdsourcing examples to demonstrate their significance as novel forms of public service finance and delivery. This approach evidences the potential and the outcomes of applying crowdsourcing in the public sector, and indicates the role of the actors involved: the adoption of a leadership role by the Third Sector could facilitate crowdsourcing processes. The outcome of the application of crowdsourcing in the public sector is a greater involvement of the civil society in its relationship with the State….(More)”.
Investing in Data Saves Lives
Mark Lowcock and Raj Shah at Project Syndicate: “…Our experience of building a predictive model, and its use by public-health officials in these countries, showed that this approach could lead to better humanitarian outcomes. But it was also a reminder that significant data challenges, regarding both gaps and quality, limit the viability and accuracy of such models for the world’s most vulnerable countries. For example, data on the prevalence of cardiovascular diseases was 4-7 years old in several poorer countries, and not available at all for Sudan and South Sudan.
Globally, we are still missing about 50% of the data needed to respond effectively in countries experiencing humanitarian emergencies. OCHA and The Rockefeller Foundation are cooperating to provide early insight into crises, during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. But realizing the full potential of our approach depends on the contributions of others.
So, as governments, development banks, and major humanitarian and development agencies reflect on the first year of the pandemic response, as well as on discussions at the recent World Bank Spring Meetings, they must recognize the crucial role data will play in recovering from this crisis and preventing future ones. Filling gaps in critical data should be a top priority for all humanitarian and development actors.
Governments, humanitarian organizations, and regional development banks thus need to invest in data collection, data-sharing infrastructure, and the people who manage these processes. Likewise, these stakeholders must become more adept at responsibly sharing their data through open data platforms and that maintain rigorous interoperability standards.
Where data are not available, the private sector should develop new sources of information through innovative methods such as using anonymized social-media data or call records to understand population movement patterns….(More)”.
Big Tech platforms in health research: Re-purposing big data governance in light of the General Data Protection Regulation’s research exemption
Paper by Luca Marelli, Giuseppe Testa, and Ine van Hoyweghen: “The emergence of a global industry of digital health platforms operated by Big Tech corporations, and its growing entanglements with academic and pharmaceutical research networks, raise pressing questions on the capacity of current data governance models, regulatory and legal frameworks to safeguard the sustainability of the health research ecosystem. In this article, we direct our attention toward the challenges faced by the European General Data Protection Regulation in regulating the potentially disruptive engagement of Big Tech platforms in health research. The General Data Protection Regulation upholds a rather flexible regime for scientific research through a number of derogations to otherwise stricter data protection requirements, while providing a very broad interpretation of the notion of “scientific research”. Precisely the breadth of these exemptions combined with the ample scope of this notion could provide unintended leeway to the health data processing activities of Big Tech platforms, which have not been immune from carrying out privacy-infringing and socially disruptive practices in the health domain. We thus discuss further finer-grained demarcations to be traced within the broadly construed notion of scientific research, geared to implementing use-based data governance frameworks that distinguish health research activities that should benefit from a facilitated data protection regime from those that should not. We conclude that a “re-purposing” of big data governance approaches in health research is needed if European nations are to promote research activities within a framework of high safeguards for both individual citizens and society….(More)”.
Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life
Book by Gillian Tett: “Amid severe digital disruption, economic upheaval, and political flux, how can we make sense of the world? Leaders today typically look for answers in economic models, Big Data, or artificial intelligence platforms. Gillian Tett points to anthropology—the study of human culture. Anthropologists train to get inside the minds of other people, helping them not only to understand other cultures but also to appraise their own environment with fresh perspective as an insider-outsider, gaining lateral vision.
Today, anthropologists are more likely to study Amazon warehouses than remote Amazon tribes; they have done research into institutions and companies such as General Motors, Nestlé, Intel, and more, shedding light on practical questions such as how internet users really define themselves; why corporate projects fail; why bank traders miscalculate losses; how companies sell products like pet food and pensions; why pandemic policies succeed (or not). Anthropology makes the familiar seem unfamiliar and vice versa, giving us badly needed three-dimensional perspective in a world where many executives are plagued by tunnel vision, especially in fields like finance and technology. Lively, lucid, and practical, Anthro-Vision offers a revolutionary new way for understanding the behavior of organizations, individuals, and markets in today’s ever-evolving world….(More)”
Deepfake Maps Could Really Mess With Your Sense of the World
Will Knight at Wired: “Satellite images showing the expansion of large detention camps in Xinjiang, China, between 2016 and 2018 provided some of the strongest evidence of a government crackdown on more than a million Muslims, triggering international condemnation and sanctions.
Other aerial images—of nuclear installations in Iran and missile sites in North Korea, for example—have had a similar impact on world events. Now, image-manipulation tools made possible by artificial intelligence may make it harder to accept such images at face value.
In a paper published online last month, University of Washington professor Bo Zhao employed AI techniques similar to those used to create so-called deepfakes to alter satellite images of several cities. Zhao and colleagues swapped features between images of Seattle and Beijing to show buildings where there are none in Seattle and to remove structures and replace them with greenery in Beijing.
Zhao used an algorithm called CycleGAN to manipulate satellite photos. The algorithm, developed by researchers at UC Berkeley, has been widely used for all sorts of image trickery. It trains an artificial neural network to recognize the key characteristics of certain images, such as a style of painting or the features on a particular type of map. Another algorithm then helps refine the performance of the first by trying to detect when an image has been manipulated….(More)”.
How European Governments Can Help Spur Innovations for the Public Good
Essay by By Marieke Huysentruyt: “…The stakes are high. In many OECD countries, inequality is at its highest levels in decades, and people are taking to the streets to express their discontent and demand change (in some cases at great personal risk). Only governments—with their uniquely broad scope of functions and mandates—can spur innovations for the public good in so many different domains simultaneously. Ideally, governments will step up and act collectively. After all, so many of today’s most pressing societal problems are global problems, beyond the scope of any single nation.
We Need a New Kind of Legal Framework to Activate and Transform Dormant Knowledge Into Innovations for the Public Good
Tremendous untapped potential lies dormant in knowledge and technology currently being used only for commercial purposes, but which could be put to significant social use. Consider the example of a cooling system currently being developed by Colruyt Group, a large Belgian retail group, to keep produce cool for up to three days without consuming electricity: such a technology could be applied elsewhere to great effect. For example, to help African farmers transport their milk or distribute vaccines over long (unelectrified) distances. Colruyt Group is therefore always looking for cases to implement their technology, so that it does not become dormant knowledge.
To facilitate this activation of dormant knowledges like these, we need a legal framework encouraging the development of “social impact licenses.” This would allow, for example, a technology holder to grant time-bounded permission to bring an intellectual property, a technology, a product, or a service to a predefined market for societal value creation at preferred rates or reduced costs. Another important step would be for EU governments to mandate that recipients of their innovation grants be required to give others access to their research, so it can be leveraged for practical, social purposes. Putting these sorts of measures in place would not only influence the next generation of researchers but could encourage businesses (who hold a great deal of intellectual property) to think more ambitiously about the positive societal impact that they can make.
We Need Better Information to Activate People to Search for the Public Good
Most of us lack a clear understanding of the societal problems at hand or have flawed mental models of pressing societal issues. Complexity and ambiguity tend to put people off, so governments must provide citizens with better and more reliable information about today’s most pressing societal challenges and solutions. The circular economy, greenhouse effects, the ecological transition, the global refugee problem, for example, can be difficult to grasp, and for this reason, access to non-partisan information is all the more important.
Sharing information about feasible solutions (as well as about solutions that have been tested and abandoned) can hugely accelerate discovery, as demonstrated by the joint efforts to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, shared across many labs. And just as they have played a key role in the development of the Internet and aviation technologies, governments can and should play a major role in building the technological and data infrastructure for sharing information about what works and what doesn’t. Again, because the problems are global, coordinating efforts across national boundaries could help reduce the costs and increase the benefits of such knowledge infrastructure.
Another essential tool in governments’ toolbox is fostering the development of other-regarding preferences: the more people care about others’ well-being, the more willing they are to contribute to search for the public good. For example, in a recent large-scale experiment in Germany, second-grade children were matched with mentors—potential prosocial role models—who spent one afternoon per week in one-to-one interactions with the children, doing things like visiting a zoo, museum, or playground, cooking, ice-skating, or simply having a conversation. After two years, the kids who had been assigned to mentors revealed a significant and persistent increase in prosociality, as captured through choice experiments and survey measures. Evaluations of this large-scale experiment suggest that prosociality is malleable, and that early childhood interventions of this type have the potential to systematically affect character formation, with possible long-term benefits….(More)”.
Next-generation nowcasting to improve decision making in a crisis
Frank Gerhard, Marie-Paule Laurent, Kyriakos Spyrounakos, and Eckart Windhagen at McKinsey: “In light of the limitations of the traditional models, we recommend a modified approach to nowcasting that uses country- and industry-specific expertise to boil down the number of variables to a selected few for each geography or sector, depending on the individual economic setting. Given the specific selection of each core variable, the relationships between the variables will be relatively stable over time, even during a major crisis. Admittedly, the more variables used, the easier it is to explain an economic shift; however, using more variables also means a greater chance of a break in some of the statistical relationships, particularly in response to an exogenous shock.
This revised nowcasting model will be more flexible and robust in periods of economic stress. It will provide economically intuitive outcomes, include the consideration of complementary, high-frequency data, and offer access to economic insights that are at once timely and unique.
For example, consumer spending can be estimated in different US cities by combining data such as wages from business applications and footfall from mobility trend reports. As a more complex example: eurozone capitalization rates are, at the time of the writing of this article, available only through January 2021. However, a revamped nowcasting model can estimate current capitalization rates in various European countries by employing a handful of real-time and high-frequency variables for each, such as retail confidence indicators, stock-exchange indices, price expectations, construction estimates, base-metals prices and output, and even deposits into financial institutions. The choice of variable should, of course, be guided by industry and sector experts.
Similarly, published figures for gross value added (GVA) at the sector level in Europe are available only up to the second quarter of 2020. However, by utilizing selected variables, the new approach to nowcasting can provide an estimate of GVA through the first quarter of 2021. It can also highlight the different experiences of each region and industry sector in the recent recovery. Note that the sectors reliant on in-person interactions and of a nonessential nature have been slow to recover, as have the countries more reliant on international markets (exhibit)….(More)”.