Paper by Thomas Margoni, Charlotte Ducuing and Luca Schirru: “The Data Act proposal of February 2022 constitutes a central element of a broader and ambitious initiative of the European Commission (EC) to regulate the data economy through the erection of a new general regulatory framework for data and digital markets. The resulting framework may be represented as a model of governance between a pure market-driven model and a fully regulated approach, thereby combining elements that traditionally belong to private law (e.g., property rights, contracts) and public law (e.g., regulatory authorities, limitation of contractual freedom). This article discusses the role... (More >)
Africa fell in love with crypto. Now, it’s complicated
Article by Martin K.N Siele: “Chiamaka, a former product manager at a Nigerian cryptocurrency startup, has sworn off digital currencies. The 22-year-old has weathered a layoff and lost savings worth 4,603,500 naira ($9,900) after the collapse of FTX in November 2022. She now works for a corporate finance company in Lagos, earning a salary that is 45% lower than her previous job. “I used to be bullish on crypto because I believed it could liberate Africans financially,” Chiamaka, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym as she was concerned about breaching her contract with her current employer, told... (More >)
The Citizens’ Panel proposes 23 recommendations for fair and human-centric virtual worlds in the EU
European Commission: “From 21 to 23 April, the Commission hosted the closing session of the European Citizens’ Panel on Virtual Months in Brussels, which allowed citizens to make recommendations on values and actions to create attractive and fair European virtual worlds. These recommendations will support the Commission’s work on virtual worlds and the future of the Internet. After three weekends of deliberations, the panel, composed of around 150 citizens randomly chosen to represent the diversity of the European population, made 23 recommendations on citizens’ expectations for the future, principles and actions to ensure that virtual worlds in the EU... (More >)
Speaking in Tongues — Teaching Local Languages to Machines
Report by DIAL: “…Machines learn to talk to people by digesting digital content in languages people speak through a technique called Natural Language Processing (NLP). As things stand, only about 85 of the world’s approximately 7500 languages are represented in the major NLPs — and just 7 languages, with English being the most advanced, comprise the majority of the world’s digital knowledge corpus. Fortunately, many initiatives are underway to fill this knowledge gap. My new mini-report with Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) highlights a few of them from Serbia, India, Estonia, and Africa. The examples in the report are just... (More >)
AI translation is jeopardizing Afghan asylum claims
Article by Andrew Deck: “In 2020, Uma Mirkhail got a firsthand demonstration of how damaging a bad translation can be. A crisis translator specializing in Afghan languages, Mirkhail was working with a Pashto-speaking refugee who had fled Afghanistan. A U.S. court had denied the refugee’s asylum bid because her written application didn’t match the story told in the initial interviews. In the interviews, the refugee had first maintained that she’d made it through one particular event alone, but the written statement seemed to reference other people with her at the time — a discrepancy large enough for a judge... (More >)
The Coming Age of AI-Powered Propaganda
Essay by Josh A. Goldstein and Girish Sastry: “In the seven years since Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, in part by posing as Americans in thousands of fake social media accounts, another technology with the potential to accelerate the spread of propaganda has taken center stage: artificial intelligence, or AI. Much of the concern has focused on the risks of audio and visual “deepfakes,” which use AI to invent images or events that did not actually occur. But another AI capability is just as worrisome. Researchers have warned for years that generative AI systems trained... (More >)
Harnessing Data Innovation for Migration Policy: A Handbook for Practitioners
Report by IOM: “The Practitioners’ Handbook provides first-hand insights into why and how non-traditional data sources can contribute to better understanding migration-related phenomena. The Handbook aims to (a) bridge the practical and technical aspects of using data innovations in migration statistics, (a) demonstrate the added value of using new data sources and innovative methodologies to analyse key migration topics that may be hard to fully grasp using traditional data sources, and (c) identify good practices in addressing issues of data access and collaboration with multiple stakeholders (including the private sector), ethical standards, and security and data protection issues... (More >)
What AI Means For Animals
Article by Peter Singer and Tse Yip Fai: “The ethics of artificial intelligence has attracted considerable attention, and for good reason. But the ethical implications of AI for billions of nonhuman animals are not often discussed. Given the severe impacts some AI systems have on huge numbers of animals, this lack of attention is deeply troubling. As more and more AI systems are deployed, they are beginning to directly impact animals in factory farms, zoos, pet care and through drones that target animals. AI also has indirect impacts on animals, both good and bad — it can be used... (More >)
Including the underrepresented
Paper by FIDE: “Deliberative democracy is based on the premise that all voices matter and that we can equally participate in decision-making. However, structural inequalities might prevent certain groups from being recruited for deliberation, skewing the process towards the socially privileged. Those structural inequalities are also present in the deliberation room, which can lead to unconscious (or conscious) biases that hinder certain voices while amplifying others. This causes particular perspectives to influence decision-making unequally. This paper presents different methods and strategies applied in previous processes to increase the inclusion of underrepresented groups. We distinguish strategies for the two critical... (More >)
The Surveillance Ad Model Is Toxic — Let’s Not Install Something Worse
Article by Elizabeth M. Renieris: “At this stage, law and policy makers, civil society and academic researchers largely agree that the existing business model of the Web — algorithmically targeted behavioural advertising based on personal data, sometimes also referred to as surveillance advertising — is toxic. They blame it for everything from the erosion of individual privacy to the breakdown of democracy. Efforts to address this toxicity have largely focused on a flurry of new laws (and legislative proposals) requiring enhanced notice to, and consent from, users and limiting the sharing or sale of personal data by third parties... (More >)
