New Data Tools Connect American Workers to Education and Job Opportunities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Department of Commerce: “These are the real stories of the people that recently participated in the Census Bureau initiative called The Opportunity Project—a novel, collaborative effort between government agencies, technology companies, and nongovernment organizations to translate government open data into user-friendly tools that solve real world problems for families, communities, and businesses nationwide.  On March 1, they came together to share their projects at The Opportunity Project’s Demo Day. Projects like theirs help veterans, aspiring technologists, and all Americans connect with the career and educational opportunities, like Bryan and Olivia did.

One barrier for many American students and workers is the lack of clear data to help match them with educational opportunities and jobs.  Students want information on the best courses that lead to high paying and high demand jobs. Job seekers want to find the jobs that best match their skills, or where to find new skills that open up career development opportunities.  Despite the increasing availability of big data and the long-standing, highly regarded federal statistical system, there remain significant data gaps about basic labor market questions.

  • What is the payoff of a bachelor’s degree versus an apprenticeship, 2-year degree, industry certification, or other credential?
  • What are the jobs of the future?  Which jobs of today also will be the jobs of the future? What skills and experience do companies value most?

The Opportunity Project brings government, communities, and companies like IBM, the veteran-led Shift.org, and Nepris together to create tools to answer simple questions related to education, employment, health, transportation, housing, and many other matters that are critical to helping Americans advance in their lives and careers….(More)”.

Nearly Half of Canadian Consumers Willing to Share Significant Personal Data with Banks and Insurers in Exchange for Lower Pricing, Accenture Study Finds

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Nearly half of Canadian consumers would be willing to share significant personal information, such as location data and lifestyle information, with their bank and insurer in exchange for lower pricing on products and services, according to a new report from Accenture (NYSE: ACN).

Consumers willing to share personal data in select scenarios. (CNW Group/Accenture)
Consumers willing to share personal data in select scenarios. (CNW Group/Accenture)

Accenture’s global Financial Services Consumer Study, based on a survey of 47,000 consumers in 28 countries which included 2,000 Canadians, found that more than half of consumers would share that data for benefits including more-rapid loan approvals, discounts on gym memberships and personalized offers based on current location.

At the same time, however, Canadian consumers believe that privacy is paramount, with nearly three quarters (72 per cent) saying they are very cautious about the privacy of their personal data. In fact, data security breaches were the second-biggest concern for consumers, behind only increasing costs, when asked what would make them leave their bank or insurer.

“Canadian consumers are willing to sharing their personal data in instances where it makes their lives easier but remain cautious of exactly how their information is being used,” said Robert Vokes, managing director of financial services at Accenture in Canada. “With this in mind, banks and insurers need to deliver hyper-relevant and highly convenient experience in order to remain relevant, retain trust and win customer loyalty in a digital economy.”

Consumers globally showed strong support for personalized insurance premiums, with 64 per cent interested in receiving adjusted car insurance premiums based on safe driving and 52 per cent in exchange for life insurance premiums tied to a healthy lifestyle. Four in five consumers (79 per cent) would provide personal data, including income, location and lifestyle habits, to their insurer if they believe it would help reduce the possibility of injury or loss.

In banking, 81 per cent of consumers would be willing to share income, location and lifestyle habit data for rapid loan approval, and 76 per cent would do so to receive personalized offers based on their location, such as discounts from a retailer. Approximately two-fifths (42 per cent) of Canadian consumers specifically, want their bank to provide updates on how much money they have based on spending that month and 46 per cent want savings tips based on their spending habits.  

Appetite for data sharing differs around the world

Appetite for sharing significant personal data with financial firms was highest in China, with 67 per cent of consumers there willing to share more data for personalized services. Half (50 per cent) of consumers in the U.S. said they were willing to share more data for personalized services, and in Europe — where the General Data Protection Regulation took effect in May — consumers were more skeptical. For instance, only 40 per cent of consumers in both the U.K. and Germany said they would be willing to share more data with banks and insurers in return for personalized services…(More)”,

Privacy’s not dead. It’s just not evenly distributed

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alex Pasternack in Fast Company: “In the face of all the data abuse, many of us have, quite reasonably, thrown up our hands. But privacy didn’t die. It’s just been beaten up, sold, obscured, diffused unevenly across society. What privacy is and why it matters increasingly depends upon who you are, your age, your income, gender, ethnicity, where you’re from, and where you live. To borrow William Gibson’s famous quote about the future and its unevenness and inequalities, privacy is alive—it’s just not evenly distributed. And while we don’t all care about it the same way—we’re even divided on what exactly privacy is—its harms are still real. Even when our own privacy isn’t violated, privacy violations can still hurt us.

Privacy is personal, from the creepy feeling that our phones are literally listening to the endless parade of data breaches that test our ability to care anymore. It’s the unsettling feeling of giving “consent” without knowing what that means, “agreeing” to contracts we didn’t read with companies we don’t really trust. (Forget about understanding all the details; researchers have shown that most privacy policies surpass the reading level of the average person.)

It’s the data about us that’s harvested, bought, sold, and traded by an obscure army of data brokers without our knowledge, feeding marketers, landlords, employers, immigration officials, insurance companies, debt collectors, as well as stalkers and who knows who else. It’s the body camera or the sports arena or the social network capturing your face for who knows what kind of analysis. Don’t think of personal data as just “data.” As it gets more detailed and more correlated, increasingly, our data is us.

And “privacy” isn’t just privacy. It’s also tied up with security, freedom, social justice, free speech, and free thought. Privacy harms aren’t only personal, but societal. It’s not just the multibillion-dollar industry that aims to nab you and nudge you, but the multibillion-dollar spyware industry that helps governments nab dissidents and send them to prison or worse. It’s the supposedly fair and transparent algorithms that aren’t, turning our personal data into risk scores that can help perpetuate race, class, and gender divides, often without our knowing it.

Privacy is about dark ads bought with dark money and the micro-targeting of voters by overseas propagandists or by political campaigns at home. That kind of influence isn’t just the promise of a shadowy Cambridge Analytica or state-run misinformation campaigns, but also the premise of modern-day digital ad campaigns. (Note that Facebook’s research division later hired one of the researchers behind the Cambridge app.) And as the micro-targeting gets more micro, the tech giants that deal in ads are only getting more macro….(More)”

(This story is part of The Privacy Divide, a series that explores the fault lines and disparities–economic, cultural, philosophical–that have developed around digital privacy and its impact on society.)

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Carl Benedikt Frey: “From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, The Technology Trap takes a sweeping look at the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society’s members. As Carl Benedikt Frey shows, the Industrial Revolution created unprecedented wealth and prosperity over the long run, but the immediate consequences of mechanization were devastating for large swaths of the population. Middle-income jobs withered, wages stagnated, the labor share of income fell, profits surged, and economic inequality skyrocketed. These trends, Frey documents, broadly mirror those in our current age of automation, which began with the Computer Revolution.

Just as the Industrial Revolution eventually brought about extraordinary benefits for society, artificial intelligence systems have the potential to do the same. But Frey argues that this depends on how the short term is managed. In the nineteenth century, workers violently expressed their concerns over machines taking their jobs. The Luddite uprisings joined a long wave of machinery riots that swept across Europe and China. Today’s despairing middle class has not resorted to physical force, but their frustration has led to rising populism and the increasing fragmentation of society. As middle-class jobs continue to come under pressure, there’s no assurance that positive attitudes to technology will persist.
The Industrial Revolution was a defining moment in history, but few grasped its enormous consequences at the time. The Technology Trap demonstrates that in the midst of another technological revolution, the lessons of the past can help us to more effectively face the present….(More)”.

How AI Can Cure the Big Idea Famine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Saahil Jayraj Dama at JoDS: “Today too many people are still deprived of basic amenities such as medicine, while current patent laws continue to convolute and impede innovation. But if allowed, AI can provide an opportunity to redefine this paradigm and be the catalyst for change—if….

Which brings us to the most befitting answer: No one owns the intellectual property rights to AI-generated creations, and these creations fall into the public domain. This may seem unpalatable at first, especially since intellectual property laws have played such a fundamental role in our society so far. We have been conditioned to a point where it seems almost unimaginable that some creations should directly enter the public domain upon their birth.

But, doctrinally, this is the only proposition that stays consistent to extant intellectual property laws. Works created by AI have no rightful owner because the application of mind to generate the creation, along with the actual generation of the creation, would entirely be done by the AI system. Human involvement is ancillary and is limited to creating an environment within which such a creation can take form.

This can be better understood through a hypothetical example: If an AI system were to invent a groundbreaking pharmaceutical ingredient which completely treats balding, then the system would likely begin by understanding the problem and state of prior art. It would undertake research on causes of balding, existing cures, problems with existing cures, and whether its proposed cure would have any harmful side effects. It would also possibly combine research and knowledge across various domains, which could range from Ayurveda to modern-day biochemistry, before developing its invention.

The developer can lay as much stake to this invention as the team behind AlphaGo for beating Lee Sedol at Go. The user is even further detached from the exercise of ingenuity: She would be the person who first thought, “We should build a Go playing AI system,” and direct the AI system to learn Go by watching certain videos and playing against itself. Despite the intervention of all these entities, the fact remains that the victory only belongs to AlphaGo itself.

Doctrinal issues aside, this solution ties in with what people need from intellectual property laws: more openness and accessibility. The demands for improved access to medicines and knowledge, fights against cultural monopolies, and brazen violations of unjust intellectual property laws are all symptomatic of the growing public discontent against strong intellectual property laws. Through AI, we can design legal systems which address these concerns and reform the heavy handed approach that has been adopted toward intellectual property rights so far.

Tying the Threads Together

For the above to materialize, governments and legislators need to accept that our present intellectual property system is broken and inconsistent with what people want. Too many people are being deprived of basic amenities such as medicines, patent trolls and patent thickets are slowing innovation, educational material is still outside the reach of most people, and culture is not spreading as widely as it should. AI can provide an opportunity for us to redefine this paradigm—it can lead to a society that draws and benefits from an enriched public domain.

However, this approach does come with built-in cynicism because it contemplates an almost complete overhaul of the system. One could argue that if open access for AI-generated creations does become the norm, then innovation and creativity would suffer as people would no longer have the incentive to create. People may even refuse to use their AI systems, and instead stick to producing inventions and creative works by themselves. This would be detrimental to scientific and cultural progress and would also slow adoption of AI systems in society.

Yet, judging by the pace at which these systems have progressed so far and what they can currently do, it is easy to imagine a reality where humans developing inventions and producing creative works almost becomes an afterthought. If a machine can access all the world’s publicly available knowledge and information to develop an invention, or study a user’s likes and dislikes while producing a new musical composition, it is easy to see how humans would, eventually, be pushed out of the loop. AI-generated creations are, thus, inevitable.

The incentive theory will have to be reimagined, too. Constant innovation coupled with market forces will change the system from “incentive-to-create” to “incentive-to-create-well.” While every book, movie, song, and invention is treated at par under the law, only the best inventions and creative works will thrive under the new model. If a particular developer’s AI system can write incredible dialogue for a comedy film or invent the most efficient car engines, the market would want more of these AI systems. Thus incentive will not be eliminated, it will just take a different form.

It is true that writing about such grand schemes is significantly tougher than practically implementing them. But, for any idea to succeed, it must start with a discussion such as this one. Admittedly, we are still a moonshot away from any country granting formal recognition to open access as the basis of its intellectual property laws. And even if a country were to do this, it faces a plethora of hoops to jump through, such as conducting feasibility-testing and dealing with international and internal pressure. Despite these issues, facilitating better access through AI systems remains an objective worth achieving for any society that takes pride in being democratic and equal….(More)”.

Transparency, Fairness, Data Protection, Neutrality: Data Management Challenges in the Face of New Regulation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Serge Abiteboul and Julia Stoyanovich: “The data revolution continues to transform every sector of science, industry and government. Due to the incredible impact of data-driven technology on society, we are becoming increasingly aware of the imperative to use data and algorithms responsibly — in accordance with laws and ethical norms. In this article we discuss three recent regulatory frameworks: the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the New York City Automated Decisions Systems (ADS) Law, and the Net Neutrality principle, that aim to protect the rights of individuals who are impacted by data collection and analysis. These frameworks are prominent examples of a global trend: Governments are starting to recognize the need to regulate data-driven algorithmic technology. 


Our goal in this paper is to bring these regulatory frameworks to the attention of the data management community, and to underscore the technical challenges they raise and which we, as a community, are well-equipped to address. The main .take-away of this article is that legal and ethical norms cannot be incorporated into data-driven systems as an afterthought. Rather, we must think in terms of responsibility by design, viewing it as a systems requirement….(More)”

Democracy vs. Disinformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ana Palacio at Project Syndicate: “These are difficult days for liberal democracy. But of all the threats that have arisen in recent years – populism, nationalism, illiberalism – one stands out as a key enabler of the rest: the proliferation and weaponization of disinformation.

The threat is not a new one. Governments, lobby groups, and other interests have long relied on disinformation as a tool of manipulation and control.

What is new is the ease with which disinformation can be produced and disseminated. Advances in technology allow for the increasingly seamless manipulation or fabrication of video and audio, while the pervasiveness of social media enables false information to be rapidly amplified among receptive audiences.

Beyond introducing falsehoods into public discourse, the spread of disinformation can undermine the possibility of discourse itself, by calling into question actual facts. This “truth decay” – apparent in the widespread rejection of experts and expertise – undermines the functioning of democratic systems, which depend on the electorate’s ability to make informed decisions about, say, climate policy or the prevention of communicable diseases.

The West has been slow to recognize the scale of this threat. It was only after the 2016 Brexit referendum and US presidential election that the power of disinformation to reshape politics began to attract attention. That recognition was reinforced in 2017, during the French presidential election and the illegal referendum on Catalan independence.

Now, systematic efforts to fight disinformation are underway. So far, the focus has been on tactical approaches, targeting the “supply side” of the problem: unmasking Russia-linked fake accounts, blocking disreputable sources, and adjusting algorithms to limit public exposure to false and misleading news. Europe has led the way in developing policy responses, such as soft guidelines for industry, national legislation, and strategic communications.

Such tactical actions – which can be implemented relatively easily and bring tangible results quickly – are a good start. But they are not nearly enough.

To some extent, Europe seems to recognize this. Early this month, the Atlantic Council organized #DisinfoWeek Europe, a series of strategic dialogues focused on the global challenge of disinformation. And more ambitious plans are already in the works, including French President Emmanuel Macron’s recently proposed European Agency for the Protection of Democracies, which would counter hostile manipulation campaigns.

But, as is so often the case in Europe, the gap between word and deed is vast, and it remains to be seen how all of this will be implemented and scaled up. In any case, even if such initiatives do get off the ground, they will not succeed unless they are accompanied by efforts that tackle the demand side of the problem: the factors that make liberal democratic societies today so susceptible to manipulation….(More)”.

The Governance of Digital Technology, Big Data, and the Internet: New Roles and Responsibilities for Business

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to Special Issue of Business and Society by Dirk Matten, Ronald Deibert & Mikkel Flyverbom: “The importance of digital technologies for social and economic developments and a growing focus on data collection and privacy concerns have made the Internet a salient and visible issue in global politics. Recent developments have increased the awareness that the current approach of governments and business to the governance of the Internet and the adjacent technological spaces raises a host of ethical issues. The significance and challenges of the digital age have been further accentuated by a string of highly exposed cases of surveillance and a growing concern about issues of privacy and the power of this new industry. This special issue explores what some have referred to as the “Internet-industrial complex”—the intersections between business, states, and other actors in the shaping, development, and governance of the Internet…(More)”.

The Palgrave Handbook of Global Health Data Methods for Policy and Practice

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Book edited by Sarah B. Macfarlane and Carla AbouZahr: “This handbook compiles methods for gathering, organizing and disseminating data to inform policy and manage health systems worldwide. Contributing authors describe national and international structures for generating data and explain the relevance of ethics, policy, epidemiology, health economics, demography, statistics, geography and qualitative methods to describing population health. The reader, whether a student of global health, public health practitioner, programme manager, data analyst or policymaker, will appreciate the methods, context and importance of collecting and using global health data….(More)”.

Negotiating Internet Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

(Open Access) Book by Roxana Radu: “… provides an incisive analysis of the emergence and evolution of global Internet governance, revealing its mechanisms, key actors and dominant community practices. Based on extensive empirical analysis covering more than four decades, it presents the evolution of Internet regulation from the early days of networking to more recent debates on algorithms and artificial intelligence, putting into perspective its politically-mediated system of rules built on technical features and power differentials. 

For anyone interested in understanding contemporary global developments, this book is a primer on how norms of behaviour online and Internet regulation are renegotiated in numerous fora by a variety of actors – including governments, businesses, international organisations, civil society, technical and academic experts – and what that means for everyday users….(More)”.