The use of AI for improving energy security

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rand Report: “Electricity systems around the world are under pressure due to aging infrastructure, rising demand for electricity and the need to decarbonise energy supplies at pace. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have potential to help address these pressures and increase overall energy security. For example, AI applications can reduce peak demand through demand response, improve the efficiency of wind farms and facilitate the integration of large numbers of electric vehicles into the power grid. However, the widespread deployment of AI applications could also come with heightened cybersecurity risks, the risk of unexplained or unexpected actions, or supplier dependency and vendor lock-in. The speed at which AI is developing means many of these opportunities and risks are not yet well understood.

The aim of this study was to provide insight into the state of AI applications for the power grid and the associated risks and opportunities. Researchers conducted a focused scan of the scientific literature to find examples of relevant AI applications in the United States, the European Union, China and the United Kingdom…(More)”.

The Behavioral Scientists Working Toward a More Peaceful World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview by Heather Graci: “…Nation-level data doesn’t help us understand community-level conflict. Without understanding community-level conflict, it becomes much harder to design policies to prevent it.

Cikara: “So much of the data that we have is at the level of the nation, when our effects are all happening at very local levels. You see these reports that say, “In Germany, 14 percent of the population is immigrants.” It doesn’t matter at the national level, because they’re not distributed evenly across the geography. That means that some communities are going to be at greater risk for conflict than others. But that sort of local variation and sensitivity to it, at least heretofore, has really been missing from the conversation on the research side. Even when you’re in the same place, in the same country within the same state, the same canton, there can still be a ton of variation from neighborhood to neighborhood. 

“The other thing that we know matters a lot is not just the diversity of these neighborhoods but the segregation of them. It turns out that these kinds of prejudices and violence are less likely to break out in those places where it’s both diverse and people are interdigitated with how they live. So it’s not just the numbers, it’s also the spatial organization. 

“For example, in Singapore, because so much of the real estate is state-owned, they make it so that people who are coming from different countries can’t cluster together because they assign them to live separate from one another in order to prevent these sorts of enclaves. All these structural and meta-level organizational features have really, really important inputs for intergroup dynamics and psychology.”..(More)”.

Why policy failure is a prerequisite for innovation in the public sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Philipp Trein and Thenia Vagionaki: “In our article entitled, “Why policy failure is a prerequisite for innovation in the public sector,” we explore the relationship between policy failure and innovation within public governance. Drawing inspiration from the “Innovator’s Dilemma,”—a theory from the management literature—we argue that the very nature of policymaking, characterized by myopia of voters, blame avoidance by decisionmakers, and the complexity (ill-structuredness) of societal challenges, has an inherent tendency to react with innovation only after failure of existing policies.  

Our analysis implies that we need to be more critical of what the policy process can achieve in terms of public sector innovation. Cognitive limitations tend to lead to a misperception of problems and inaccurate assessment of risks by decision makers according to the “Innovator’s Dilemma”.  This problem implies that true innovation (non-trivial policy changes) are unlikely to happen before an existing policy has failed visibly. However, our perspective does not want to paint a gloomy picture for public policy making but rather offers a more realistic interpretation of what public sector innovation can achieve. As a consequence, learning from experts in the policy process should be expected to correct failures in public sector problem-solving during the political process, rather than raise expectations beyond what is possible. 

The potential impact of our findings is profound. For practitioners and policymakers, this insight offers a new lens through which to evaluate the failure and success of public policies. Our work advocates a paradigm shift in how we perceive, manage, and learn from policy failures in the public sector, and for the expectations we have towards learning and the use of evidence in policymaking. By embracing the limitations of innovation in public policy, we can better manage expectations and structure the narrative regarding the capacity of public policy to address collective problems…(More)”.


The Character of Consent

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Meg Leta Jones about The History of Cookies and the Future of Technology Policy: “Consent pop-ups continually ask us to download cookies to our computers, but is this all-too-familiar form of privacy protection effective? No, Meg Leta Jones explains in The Character of Consent, rather than promote functionality, privacy, and decentralization, cookie technology has instead made the internet invasive, limited, and clunky. Good thing, then, that the cookie is set for retirement in 2024. In this eye-opening book, Jones tells the little-known story of this broken consent arrangement, tracing it back to the major transnational conflicts around digital consent over the last twenty-five years. What she finds is that the policy controversy is not, in fact, an information crisis—it’s an identity crisis.

Instead of asking how people consent, Jones asks who exactly is consenting and to what. Packed into those cookie pop-ups, she explains, are three distinct areas of law with three different characters who can consent. Within (mainly European) data protection law, the data subject consents. Within communication privacy law, the user consents. And within consumer protection law, the privacy consumer consents. These areas of law have very different histories, motivations, institutional structures, expertise, and strategies, so consent—and the characters who can consent—plays a unique role in those areas of law….(More)”.

Can Artificial Intelligence Bring Deliberation to the Masses?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Hélène Landemore: “A core problem in deliberative democracy is the tension between two seemingly equally important conditions of democratic legitimacy: deliberation, on the one hand, and mass participation, on the other. Might artificial intelligence help bring quality deliberation to the masses? The answer is a qualified yes. The chapter first examines the conundrum in deliberative democracy around the trade-off between deliberation and mass participation by returning to the seminal debate between Joshua Cohen and Jürgen Habermas. It then turns to an analysis of the 2019 French Great National Debate, a low-tech attempt to involve millions of French citizens in a two-month-long structured exercise of collective deliberation. Building on the shortcomings of this process, the chapter then considers two different visions for an algorithm-powered form of mass deliberation—Mass Online Deliberation (MOD), on the one hand, and Many Rotating Mini-publics (MRMs), on the other—theorizing various ways artificial intelligence could play a role in them. To the extent that artificial intelligence makes the possibility of either vision more likely to come to fruition, it carries with it the promise of deliberation at the very large scale….(More)”

A Generation of AI Guinea Pigs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Caroline Mimbs Nyce: “This spring, the Los Angeles Unified School District—the second-largest public school district in the United States—introduced students and parents to a new “educational friend” named Ed. A learning platform that includes a chatbot represented by a small illustration of a smiling sun, Ed is being tested in 100 schools within the district and is accessible at all hours through a website. It can answer questions about a child’s courses, grades, and attendance, and point users to optional activities.

As Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho put it to me, “AI is here to stay. If you don’t master it, it will master you.” Carvalho says he wants to empower teachers and students to learn to use AI safely. Rather than “keep these assets permanently locked away,” the district has opted to “sensitize our students and the adults around them to the benefits, but also the challenges, the risks.” Ed is just one manifestation of that philosophy; the school district also has a mandatory Digital Citizenship in the Age of AI course for students ages 13 and up.

Ed is, according to three first graders I spoke with this week at Alta Loma Elementary School, very good. They especially like it when Ed awards them gold stars for completing exercises. But even as they use the program, they don’t quite understand it. When I asked them if they know what AI is, they demurred. One asked me if it was a supersmart robot…(More)”.

Handbook of Public Participation in Impact Assessment

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Book edited by Tanya Burdett and A. John Sinclair: “… provides a clear overview of how to achieve meaningful public participation in impact assessment (IA). It explores conceptual elements, including the democratic core of public participation in IA, as well as practical challenges, such as data sharing, with diverse perspectives from 39 leading academics and practitioners.

Critically examining how different engagement frameworks have evolved over time, this Handbook underlines the ways in which tokenistic approaches and wider planning and approvals structures challenge the implementation of meaningful public participation. Contributing authors discuss the impact of international agreements, legislation and regulatory regimes, and review commonly used professional association frameworks such as the International Association for Public Participation core values for practice. They demonstrate through case studies what meaningful public participation looks like in diverse regional contexts, addressing the intentions of being purposeful, inclusive, transformative and proactive. By emphasising the strength of community engagement, the Handbook argues that public participation in IA can contribute to enhanced democracy and sustainability for all…(More)”.

Misuse versus Missed use — the Urgent Need for Chief Data Stewards in the Age of AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan Verhulst and Richard Benjamins: “In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), the need for and importance of Chief AI Officers (CAIO) are receiving increasing attention. One prominent example came in a recent memo on AI policy, issued by Shalanda Young, Director of the United States Office of Management and Budget. Among the most important — and prominently featured — recommendations were a call, “as required by Executive Order 14110,” for all government agencies to appoint a CAIO within 60 days of the release of the memo.

In many ways, this call is an important development; not even the EU AI Act is requiring this of public agencies. CAIOs have an important role to play in the search for a responsible use of AI for public services that would include guardrails and help protect the public good. Yet while acknowledging the need for CAIOs to safeguard a responsible use of AI, we argue that the duty of Administrations is not only to avoid negative impact, but also to create positive impact. In this sense, much work remains to be done in defining the CAIO role and considering their specific functions. In pursuit of these tasks, we further argue, policymakers and other stakeholders might benefit from looking at the role of another emerging profession in the digital ecology–that of Chief Data Stewards (CDS), which is focused on creating such positive impact for instance to help achieve the UN’s SDGs. Although the CDS position is itself somewhat in flux, we suggest that CDS can nonetheless provide a useful template for the functions and roles of CAIOs.

Image courtesy of Advertising Week

We start by explaining why CDS are relevant to the conversation over CAIOs; this is because data and data governance are foundational to AI governance. We then discuss some particular functions and competencies of CDS, showing how these can be equally applied to the governance of AI. Among the most important (if high-level) of these competencies is an ability to proactively identify opportunities in data sharing, and to balance the risks and opportunities of our data age. We conclude by exploring why this competency–an ethos of positive data responsibility that avoids overly-cautious risk aversion–is so important in the AI and data era…(More)”

Green Light

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Google Research: “Road transportation is responsible for a significant amount of global and urban greenhouse gas emissions. It is especially problematic at city intersections where pollution can be 29 times higher than on open roads.  At intersections, half of these emissions come from traffic accelerating after stopping. While some amount of stop-and-go traffic is unavoidable, part of it is preventable through the optimization of traffic light timing configurations. To improve traffic light timing, cities need to either install costly hardware or run manual vehicle counts; both of these solutions are expensive and don’t provide all the necessary information. 

Green Light uses AI and Google Maps driving trends, with one of the strongest understandings of global road networks, to model traffic patterns and build intelligent recommendations for city traffic engineers to optimize traffic flow. Early numbers indicate a potential for up to 30% reduction in stops and 10% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (1). By optimizing each intersection, and coordinating between adjacent intersections, we can create waves of green lights and help cities further reduce stop-and-go traffic. Green Light is now live in 70 intersections in 12 cities, 4 continents, from Haifa, Israel to Bangalore, India to Hamburg, Germany – and in these intersections we are able to save fuel and lower emissions for up to 30M car rides monthly. Green Light reflects Google Research’s commitment to use AI to address climate change and improve millions of lives in cities around the world…(More)”

Artificial Intelligence Applications for Social Science Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Megan Stubbs-Richardson et al: “Our team developed a database of 250 Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications useful for social science research. To be included in our database, the AI tool had to be useful for: 1) literature reviews, summaries, or writing, 2) data collection, analysis, or visualizations, or 3) research dissemination. In the database, we provide a name, description, and links to each of the AI tools that were current at the time of publication on September 29, 2023. Supporting links were provided when an AI tool was found using other databases. To help users evaluate the potential usefulness of each tool, we documented information about costs, log-in requirements, and whether plug-ins or browser extensions are available for each tool. Finally, as we are a team of scientists who are also interested in studying social media data to understand social problems, we also documented when the AI tools were useful for text-based data, such as social media. This database includes 132 AI tools that may have use for literature reviews or writing; 146 tools that may have use for data collection, analyses, or visualizations; and 108 that may be used for dissemination efforts. While 170 of the AI tools within this database can be used for general research purposes, 18 are specific to social media data analyses, and 62 can be applied to both. Our database thus offers some of the recently published tools for exploring the application of AI to social science research…(More)”