Artificial Intelligence: A Threat to Climate Change, Energy Usage and Disinformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Today, partners in the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition released a report that maps the risks that artificial intelligence poses to the climate crisis.

Topline points:

  • AI systems require an enormous amount of energy and water, and consumption is expanding quickly. Estimates suggest a doubling in 5-10 years.
  • Generative AI has the potential to turbocharge climate disinformation, including climate change-related deepfakes, ahead of a historic election year where climate policy will be central to the debate. 
  • The current AI policy landscape reveals a concerning lack of regulation on the federal level, with minor progress made at the state level, relying on voluntary, opaque and unenforceable pledges to pause development, or provide safety with its products…(More)”.

A Plan to Develop Open Science’s Green Shoots into a Thriving Garden

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Greg Tananbaum, Chelle Gentemann, Kamran Naim, and Christopher Steven Marcum: “…As it’s moved from an abstract set of principles about access to research and data into the realm of real-world activities, the open science movement has mirrored some of the characteristics of the open source movement: distributed, independent, with loosely coordinated actions happening in different places at different levels. Globally, many things are happening, often disconnected, but still interrelated: open science has sowed a constellation of thriving green shoots, not quite yet a garden, but all growing rapidly on arable soil.

Streamlining research processes, reducing duplication of efforts, and accelerating scientific discoveries could ensure that the fruits of open science processes and products are more accessible and equitably distributed.

It is now time to consider how much faster and farther the open science movement could go with more coordination. What efficiencies might be realized if disparate efforts could better harmonize across geographies, disciplines, and sectors? How would an intentional, systems-level approach to aligning incentives, infrastructure, training, and other key components of a rationally functioning research ecosystem advance the wider goals of the movement? Streamlining research processes, reducing duplication of efforts, and accelerating scientific discoveries could ensure that the fruits of open science processes and products are more accessible and equitably distributed…(More)”

UNESCO’s Quest to Save the World’s Intangible Heritage

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Julian Lucas: “For decades, the organization has maintained a system that protects everything from Ukrainian borscht to Jamaican reggae. But what does it mean to “safeguard” living culture?…On December 7th, at a safari resort in Kasane, Botswana, Ukraine briefed the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on an endangered national treasure. It wasn’t a monastery menaced by air strikes. Nor was it any of the paintings, rare books, or other antiquities seized by Russian troops. It was borscht, a beet soup popular for centuries across Eastern Europe. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, in February, 2022—as fields burned, restaurants shuttered, and expert cooks fled their homes—Kyiv successfully petitioned UNESCO to add its culture of borscht-making to the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. Now, despite setbacks on the battlefield, the state of the soup was strong. A Ukrainian official reported on her government’s new borscht-related initiatives, such as hosting gastronomic festivals and inventorying vulnerable recipes. She looked forward to borscht’s graduation from Urgent Safeguarding to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (I.C.H.) of Humanity—which grew, that session, to include Italian opera singing, Bangladeshi rickshaw painting, Angolan sand art, and Peruvian ceviche…(More)”.

Scaling Up Development Impact

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Isabel Guerrero with Siddhant Gokhale and Jossie Fahsbender: “Today, nearly one billion people lack electricity, over three billion lack clean water, and 750 million lack basic literacy skills. Many of these challenges could be solved with existing solutions, and technology enables us to reach the last mile like never before. Yet, few solutions attain the necessary scale to match the size of these challenges. Scaling Up Development Impact offers an analytical framework, a set of practical tools, and adaptive evaluation techniques to accompany the scaling process. It presents rich organizational experiences that showcase real-world journeys toward increased impact…(More)”.

Evaluation in the Post-Truth World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Mita Marra, Karol Olejniczak, and Arne Paulson:”…explores the relationship between the nature of evaluative knowledge, the increasing demand in decision-making for evaluation and other forms of research evidence, and the post-truth phenomena of antiscience sentiments combined with illiberal tendencies of the present day. Rather than offer a checklist on how to deal with post-truth, the experts found herein wish to raise awareness and reflection throughout policy circles on the factors that influence our assessment and policy-related work in such a challenging environment. Journeying alongside the editor and contributors, readers benefit from three guiding questions to help identify specific challenges but tools to deal with such challenges: How are policy problems conceptualized in the current political climate? What is the relationship between expertise and decision-making in today’s political circumstances? How complex has evaluation become as a social practice? Evaluation in the Post-Truth World will benefit evaluation practitioners at the program and project levels, as well as policy analysts and scholars interested in applications of evaluation in the public policy domain…(More)”.

Societal challenges and big qualitative data require a new era of methodological pragmatism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Alex Gillespie, Vlad Glăveanu, and Constance de Saint-Laurent: “The ‘classic’ methods we use today in psychology and the social sciences might seem relatively fixed, but they are the product of collective responses to concerns within a historical context. The 20th century methods of questionnaires and interviews made sense in a world where researchers did not have access to what people did or said, and even if they did, could not analyse it at scale. Questionnaires and interviews were suited to 20th century concerns (shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and the ideological battles of the Cold War) for understanding, classifying, and mapping opinions and beliefs.

However, what social scientists are faced with today is different due to the culmination of two historical trends. The first has to do with the nature of the problems we face. Inequalities, the climate emergency and current wars are compounded by a general rise in nationalism, populism, and especially post-truth discourses and ideologies. Nationalism and populism are not new, but the scale and sophistication of misinformation threatens to undermine collective responses to collective problems.

It is often said that we live in the age of ‘big data’, but what is less often said is that this is in fact the age of ‘big qualitative data’.

The second trend refers to technology and its accelerated development, especially the unprecedented accumulation of naturally occurring data (digital footprints) combined with increasingly powerful methods for data analysis (traditional and generative AI). It is often said that we live in the age of ‘big data’, but what is less often said is that this is in fact the age of ‘big qualitative data’. The biggest datasets are unstructured qualitative data (each minute adds 2.5 million Google text searches, 500 thousand photos on Snapchat, 500 hours of YouTube videos) and the most significant AI advances leverage this qualitative data and make it tractable for social research.

These two trends have been fuelling the rise in mixed methods research…(More)” (See also their new book ‘Pragmatism and Methodology’ (open access)

Generative AI: Navigating Intellectual Property

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Factsheet by WIPO: “Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools are rapidly being adopted by many businesses and organizations for the purpose of content generation. Such tools represent both a substantial opportunity to assist business operations and a significant legal risk due to current uncertainties, including intellectual property (IP) questions.

Many organizations are seeking to put guidance in place to help their employees mitigate these risks. While each business situation and legal context will be unique, the following Guiding Principles and Checklist are intended to assist organizations in understanding the IP risks, asking the right questions, and considering potential safeguards…(More)”.

Data Must Speak: Positive Deviance Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by UNICEF: “Despite the global learning crisis, even in the most difficult contexts, there are some “positive deviant” schools that outperform others in terms of learning, gender equality, and retention. Since 2019, in line with UNICEF’s Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Programme, Data Must Speak (DMS) research identifies these positive deviant schools, explores which behaviours and practices make them outperform others, and investigates how these could be implemented in lower performing schools in similar contexts. DMS research uses a sequential, participatory, mixed-methods approach to improve uptake, replicability, and sustainability. The research is being undertaken in 14 countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America…(More)”.

The 5 Stages of Data Must Speak Research

Can AI mediate conflict better than humans?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Virginia Pietromarchi: “Diplomats whizzing around the globe. Hush-hush meetings, often never made public. For centuries, the art of conflict mediation has relied on nuanced human skills: from elements as simple as how to make eye contact and listen carefully to detecting shifts in emotions and subtle signals from opponents.

Now, a growing set of entrepreneurs and experts are pitching a dramatic new set of tools into the world of dispute resolution – relying increasingly on artificial intelligence (AI).

“Groundbreaking technological advancements are revolutionising the frontier of peace and mediation,” said Sama al-Hamdani, programme director of Hala System, a private company using AI and data analysis to gather unencrypted intelligence in conflict zones, among other war-related tasks.

“We are witnessing an era where AI transforms mediators into powerhouses of efficiency and insight,” al-Hamdani said.

The researcher is one of thousands of speakers participating in the Web Summit in Doha, Qatar, where digital conflict mediation is on the agenda. The four-day summit started on February 26 and concludes on Thursday, February 29.

Already, say experts, digital solutions have proven effective in complex diplomacy. At the peak of the COVID-19 restrictions, mediators were not able to travel for in-person meetings with their interlocutors.

The solution? Use remote communication software Skype to facilitate negotiations, as then-United States envoy Zalmay Khalilzad did for the Qatar-brokered talks between the US and the Taliban in 2020.

For generations, power brokers would gather behind doors to make decisions affecting people far and wide. Digital technologies can now allow the process to be relatively more inclusive.

This is what Stephanie Williams, special representative of the United Nations’ chief in Libya, did in 2021 when she used a hybrid model integrating personal and digital interactions as she led mediation efforts to establish a roadmap towards elections. That strategy helped her speak to people living in areas deemed too dangerous to travel to. The UN estimates that Williams managed to reach one million Libyans.

However, practitioners are now growing interested in the use of technology beyond online consultations…(More)”

Why Do Universities Ignore Good Ideas?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jeffrey Funk: “Here is a recent assessment of 2023 Nobel Prize Winner Katalin Kariko:

“Eight current and former colleagues of Karikó told The Daily Pennsylvanian that — over the course of three decades — the university repeatedly shunned Karikó and her research, despite its groundbreaking potential.”

Another article claims that this occurred because she could not get the financial support to continue her research.

Why couldn’t she get financial support? “You’re more likely to get grants if you’re a tenured faculty member, but you’re more likely to get promoted to tenure if you get grants,” said Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist at the New England Complex Systems Institute and a former faculty member and researcher at Harvard Medical School. “There is a vicious cycle,” he says.

Interesting. So, the idea doesn’t matter. What matters to funding agencies is that you have previously obtained funding or are a tenured professor. Really? Are funding agencies this narrow-minded?

Mr. Feigl-Ding also said, “Universities also tend to look at how much a researcher publishes, or how widely covered by the media their work is, as opposed to how innovative the research is.” But why couldn’t Karikó get published?

Science magazine tells the story of her main paper with Drew Weismann in 2005. After being rejected by Nature within 24 hours: “It was similarly rejected by Science and by Cell, and the word incremental kept cropping up in the editorial staff comments.”

Incremental? There are more than two million papers published each year, and this research, for which Karikó and Weismann won a Nobel Prize, was deemed incremental? If it had been rejected for methods or for the contents being impossible to believe, I think most people could understand the rejection. But incremental?

Obviously, most of the two million papers published each year are really incremental. Yet one of the few papers that we can all agree was not incremental, gets rejected because it was deemed incremental.

Furthermore, this is happening in a system of science in which even Nature admits “disruptive science has declined,” few science-based technologies are being successfully commercialized, and Nature admits that it doesn’t understand why…(More)”.