Opportunities and Challenges of Emerging Technologies for the Refugee System

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Research Paper by Roya Pakzad: “Efforts are being made to use information and communications technologies (ICTs) to improve accountability in providing refugee aid. However, there remains a pressing need for increased accountability and transparency when designing and deploying humanitarian technologies. This paper outlines the challenges and opportunities of emerging technologies, such as machine learning and blockchain, in the refugee system.

The paper concludes by recommending the creation of quantifiable metrics for sharing information across both public and private initiatives; the creation of the equivalent of a “Hippocratic oath” for technologists working in the humanitarian field; the development of predictive early-warning systems for human rights abuses; and greater accountability among funders and technologists to ensure the sustainability and real-world value of humanitarian apps and other digital platforms….(More)”

We’ll soon know the exact air pollution from every power plant in the world. That’s huge.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Roberts at Vox: “A nonprofit artificial intelligence firm called WattTime is going to use satellite imagery to precisely track the air pollution (including carbon emissions) coming out of every single power plant in the world, in real time. And it’s going to make the data public.

This is a very big deal. Poor monitoring and gaming of emissions data have made it difficult to enforce pollution restrictions on power plants. This system promises to effectively eliminate poor monitoring and gaming of emissions data….

The plan is to use data from satellites that make theirs publicly available (like the European Union’s Copernicus network and the US Landsat network), as well as data from a few private companies that charge for their data (like Digital Globe). The data will come from a variety of sensors operating at different wavelengths, including thermal infrared that can detect heat.

The images will be processed by various algorithms to detect signs of emissions. It has already been demonstrated that a great deal of pollution can be tracked simply through identifying visible smoke. WattTime says it can also use infrared imaging to identify heat from smokestack plumes or cooling-water discharge. Sensors that can directly track NO2 emissions are in development, according to WattTime executive director Gavin McCormick.

Between visible smoke, heat, and NO2, WattTime will be able to derive exact, real-time emissions information, including information on carbon emissions, for every power plant in the world. (McCormick says the data may also be used to derive information about water pollutants like nitrates or mercury.)

Google.org, Google’s philanthropic wing, is getting the project off the ground (pardon the pun) with a $1.7 million grant; it was selected through the Google AI Impact Challenge….(More)”.

The State of Open Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book edited by Tim Davies, Stephen B. Walker, Mor Rubinstein and Fernando Perini: “It’s been ten years since open data first broke onto the global stage. Over the past decade, thousands of programmes and projects around the world have worked to open data and use it to address a myriad of social and economic challenges. Meanwhile, issues related to data rights and privacy have moved to the centre of public and political discourse. As the open data movement enters a new phase in its evolution, shifting to target real-world problems and embed open data thinking into other existing or emerging communities of practice, big questions still remain. How will open data initiatives respond to new concerns about privacy, inclusion, and artificial intelligence? And what can we learn from the last decade in order to deliver impact where it is most needed? 

The State of Open Data brings together over 60 authors from around the world to address these questions and to take stock of the real progress made to date across sectors and around the world, uncovering the issues that will shape the future of open data in the years to come….(More)”.

The future of work? Work of the future!

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission: “While historical evidence suggests that previous waves of automation have been overwhelmingly positive for the economy and society, AI is in a different league, with the potential to be much more disruptive. It builds upon other digital technologies but also brings about and amplifies major socioeconomic changes of its own.

What do recent technological developments in AI and robotisation mean for the economy, businesses and jobs? Should we be worried or excited? Which jobs will be destroyed and which new ones created? What should education systems, businesses, governments and social partners do to manage the coming transition successfully?
These are some of the questions considered by Michel Servoz, Senior Adviser on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and the Future of Labour, in this in-depth study requested by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker….(More)”.

The EU Wants to Build One of the World’s Largest Biometric Databases. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Grace Dobush at Fortune: “China and India have built the world’s largest biometric databases, but the European Union is about to join the club.

The Common Identity Repository (CIR) will consolidate biometric data on almost all visitors and migrants to the bloc, as well as some EU citizens—connecting existing criminal, asylum, and migration databases and integrating new ones. It has the potential to affect hundreds of millions of people.

The plan for the database, first proposed in 2016 and approved by the EU Parliament on April 16, was sold as a way to better track and monitor terrorists, criminals, and unauthorized immigrants.

The system will target the fingerprints and identity data for visitors and immigrants initially, and represents the first step towards building a truly EU-wide citizen database. At the same time, though, critics argue its mere existence will increase the potential for hacks, leaks, and law enforcement abuse of the information….

The European Parliament and the European Council have promised to address those concerns, through “proper safeguards” to protect personal privacy and to regulate officers’ access to data. In 2016, they passed a law regarding law enforcement’s access to personal data, alongside General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR.

But total security is a tall order. Germany is currently dealing with multipleinstances of police officers allegedly leaking personal information to far-right groups. Meanwhile, a Swedish hacker went to prison for hacking into Denmark’s public records system in 2012 and dumping online the personal data of hundreds of thousands of citizens and migrants….(More)”.


Facebook will open its data up to academics to see how it impacts elections

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MIT Technology Review: “More than 60 researchers from 30 institutions will get access to Facebook user data to study its impact on elections and democracy, and how it’s used by advertisers and publishers.

A vast trove: Facebook will let academics see which websites its users linked to from January 2017 to February 2019. Notably, that means they won’t be able to look at the platform’s impact on the US presidential election in 2016, or on the Brexit referendum in the UK in the same year.

Despite this slightly glaring omission, it’s still hard to wrap your head around the scale of the data that will be shared, given that Facebook is used by 1.6 billion people every day. That’s more people than live in all of China, the most populous country on Earth. It will be one of the largest data sets on human behavior online to ever be released.

The process: Facebook didn’t pick the researchers. They were chosen by the Social Science Research Council, a US nonprofit. Facebook has been working on this project for over a year, as it tries to balance research interests against user privacy and confidentiality.

Privacy: In a blog post, Facebook said it will use a number of statistical techniques to make sure the data set can’t be used to identify individuals. Researchers will be able to access it only via a secure portal that uses a VPN and two-factor authentication, and there will be limits on the number of queries they can each run….(More)”.

Revisiting the causal effect of democracy on long-run development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog post by Markus Eberhardt: “In a recent paper, Acemoglu et al. (2019), henceforth “ANRR”, demonstrated a significant and large causal effect of democracy on long-run growth. By adopting a simple binary indicator for democracy, and accounting for the dynamics of development, these authors found that a shift to democracy leads to a 20% higher level of development in the long run.1

The findings are remarkable in three ways: 

  1. Previous research often emphasised that a simple binary measure for democracy was perhaps “too blunt a concept” (Persson and Tabellini 2006) to provide robust empirical evidence.
  2.  Positive effects of democracy on growth were typically only a “short-run boost” (Rodrik and Wacziarg 2005). 
  3. The empirical findings are robust across a host of empirical estimators with different assumptions about the data generating process, including one adopting a novel instrumentation strategy (regional waves of democratisation).

ANRR’s findings are important because, as they highlight in a column on Vox, there is “a belief that democracy is bad for economic growth is common in both academic political economy as well as the popular press.” For example, Posner (2010) wrote that “[d]ictatorship will often be optimal for very poor countries”. 

The simplicity of ANRR’s empirical setup, the large sample of countries, the long time horizon (1960 to 2010), and the robust positive – and remarkably stable – results across the many empirical methods they employ send a very powerful message against such doubts that democracy does cause growth.

I agree with their conclusion, but with qualifications. …(More)”.

Data Pools: Wi-Fi Geolocation Spoofing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

AH Projects: “DataPools is a Wi-Fi geolocation spoofing project that virtually relocates your phone to the latitudes and longitudes of Silicon Valley success. It includes a catalog and a SkyLift device with 12 pre-programmed locations. DataPools was produced for the Tropez summer art event in Berlin and in collaboration with Anastasia Kubrak.

DataPools catalog pool index

DataPools catalog pool index

Weren’t invited to Jeff Bezos’s summer pool party? No problem. DataPools uses the SkyLift device to mimick the Wi-Fi network infrastructure at 12 of the top Silicon Valley CEOs causing your phone to show up, approximately, at their pool. Because Wi-Fi spoofing affects the core geolocation services of iOS and Android smartphones, all apps on phone and the metadata they generate, will be located in the spoofed location…

Data Pools is a metaphor for a store of wealth that is private. The luxurious pools and mansions of Silicon Valley are financed by the mechanisms of economic surveillance and ownership of our personal information. Yet, the geographic locations of these premises are often concealed, hidden, and removed from open source databases. What if we could reverse this logic and plunge into the pools of ludicrous wealth, both virtually and physically? Could we apply the same methods of data extraction to highlight the ridiculous inequalities between CEOs and platform users?

Comparison of wealth distribution among top Silicon Valley CEOs

Comparison of wealth distribution among top Silicon Valley CEOs

Data

Technically, DataPools uses a Wi-Fi microcontroller programmed with the BSSIDs and SSIDs from the target locations, which were all obtained using openly published information from web searches and wigle.net. This data is then programmed onto the firmware of the SkyLift device. One SkyLift device contains all 12 pool locations. However, throughout the installation improvements were made and the updated firmware now uses one main location with multiple sub-locations to cover a larger area during installations. This method was more effective at spoofing many phones in large area and is ideal for installations….(More)”.

Reconnecting citizens with EU decision-making is possible – and needs to happen now

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Opinion piece by Anthony Zacharzewski: “Maybe it’s the Brexit effect, or perhaps the memories of the great recession are fading, but in poll after poll, Europe’s citizens are saying that they feel more European and strongly supportive of EU membership. …

While sighs of relief can be heard from Schuman to Strasbourg, after a decade where the EU has bounced from crisis to crisis, the new Parliament and Commission will inherit a fragile and fractious Europe this year. One of their most important tasks will immediately be to connect EU citizens more closely to the institutions and their decision making….

The new European Commission and Parliament have the chance to change that, by adopting an ambitious open government agenda that puts citizen participation in decision making at its heart.

There are three things on our wish list for doing this.

The first thing on our list is an EU-wide commitment to policy making “in the open.” Built on a renewed commitment to transparency, it would set a unified approach to consultation, as well as identifying major policy areas where citizen involvement is both valuable and where citizens are likely to want to be involved. This could include issues such as migration and climate change. Member states, particularly those who are in the Open Government Partnership, have already had a lot of good practice which can help to inform this while the Open Government Network for Europe, which brings together civil society and government voices, is ready to help.

Secondly, the connection to civil society and citizens also needs to be made beyond the European level, supporting and making use of the rapidly growing networks of democratic innovation at local level. We are seeing an increasing shift from citizen participation as one-off events into a part of the governing system, and as such, the European institutions need to listen to local conversations and support them with better information. Public Square, our own project run in partnership with mySociety and funded by Luminate, is a good example. It is working with local government and citizens to understand how meaningful citizen participation can become an everyday part of the way all local decision-making happens.

The last item on our wish list would be greater coherence between the institutions in Brussels and Strasbourg to better involve citizens. While the European Parliament, Commission and Council all have their different roles and prerogatives, without a co-ordinated approach, the attention and resources they have will be dissipated across multiple conversations. Most importantly, it will be harder to demonstrate to citizens that their contributions have made a difference….(More)”.

The Blockchain Game: A great new tool for your classroom

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

IBM Blockchain Blog: “Blockchain technology can be a game-changer for accounting, supply chain, banking, contract law, and many other fields. But it will only be useful if lots and lots of non-technical managers and leaders trust and adopt it. And right now, just understanding what blockchain is, can be difficult to understand even for the brightest in these fields. Enter The Blockchain Game, a hands-on exercise that explains blockchain’s core principals, and serves as a launching pad for discussion of blockchain’s real-world applications.

In The Blockchain Game students act as nodes and miners on a blockchain network for storing student grades at a university. Participants record the grade and course information, and then “build the block” by calculating a unique identifier (a hash) to secure the grade ledger, and miners get rewarded for their work. As the game is played, the audience learns about hashes, private keys, and what uses are appropriate for a blockchain ledger.

Basics of the Game

  • A hands-on simulation centering around a blockchain for academic scores, including a discussion at the end of the simulation regarding if storing grades would be a good application for blockchain.
  • No computers. Participants are the computors and calculate blocks.
  • The game seeks to teach core concepts about a distributed ledger but can be modified to whichever use case the educator wishes to use — smart contracts, supply chain, applications and others.
  • Additional elements can be added if instructors want to facilitate the game on a computer….(More)”.