Combine AI with citizen science to fight poverty

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nature Editorial: “Of the myriad applications of artificial intelligence (AI), its use in humanitarian assistance is underappreciated. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Togo’s government used AI tools to identify tens of thousands of households that needed money to buy food, as Nature reports in a News Feature this week. Typically, potential recipients of such payments would be identified when they apply for welfare schemes, or through household surveys of income and expenditure. But such surveys were not possible during the pandemic, and the authorities needed to find alternative means to help those in need. Researchers used machine learning to comb through satellite imagery of low-income areas and combined that knowledge with data from mobile-phone networks to find eligible recipients, who then received a regular payment through their phones. Using AI tools in this way was a game-changer for the country.Can AI help beat poverty? Researchers test ways to aid the poorest people

Now, with the pandemic over, researchers and policymakers are continuing to see how AI methods can be used in poverty alleviation. This needs comprehensive and accurate data on the state of poverty in households. For example, to be able to help individual families, authorities need to know about the quality of their housing, their children’s diets, their education and whether families’ basic health and medical needs are being met. This information is typically obtained from in-person surveys. However, researchers have seen a fall in response rates when collecting these data.

Missing data

Gathering survey-based data can be especially challenging in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In-person surveys are costly to do and often miss some of the most vulnerable, such as refugees, people living in informal housing or those who earn a living in the cash economy. Some people are reluctant to participate out of fear that there could be harmful consequences — deportation in the case of undocumented migrants, for instance. But unless their needs are identified, it is difficult to help them.Leveraging the collaborative power of AI and citizen science for sustainable development

Could AI offer a solution? The short answer is, yes, although with caveats. The Togo example shows how AI-informed approaches helped communities by combining knowledge of geographical areas of need with more-individual data from mobile phones. It’s a good example of how AI tools work well with granular, household-level data. Researchers are now homing in on a relatively untapped source for such information: data collected by citizen scientists, also known as community scientists. This idea deserves more attention and more funding.

Thanks to technologies such as smartphones, Wi-Fi and 4G, there has been an explosion of people in cities, towns and villages collecting, storing and analysing their own social and environmental data. In Ghana, for example, volunteer researchers are collecting data on marine litter along the coastline and contributing this knowledge to their country’s official statistics…(More)”.

How tax data unlocks new insights for industrial policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD article: “Value-added tax (VAT) is a consumption tax applied at each stage of the supply chain whenever value is added to goods or services. Businesses collect and remit VAT. The VAT data that are collected represent a breakthrough in studying production networks because they capture actual transactions between firms at an unprecedented level of detail. Unlike traditional business surveys or administrative data that might tell us about a firm’s size or industry, VAT records show us who does business with whom and for how much.

This data is particularly valuable because of its comprehensive coverage. In Estonia, for example, all VAT-registered businesses must report transactions above €1,000 per month, creating an almost complete picture of significant business relationships in the economy.

At least 15 countries now have such data available, including Belgium, Chile, Costa Rica, Estonia, and Italy. This growing availability creates opportunities for cross-country comparison and broader economic insights…(More)”.

Farmers Sue Over Deletion of Climate Data From Government Websites

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Karen Zraick: “Organic farmers and environmental groups sued the Agriculture Department on Monday over its scrubbing of references to climate change from its website.

The department had ordered staff to take down pages focused on climate change on Jan. 30, according to the suit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Within hours, it said, information started disappearing.

That included websites containing data sets, interactive tools and funding information that farmers and researchers relied on for planning and adaptation projects, according to the lawsuit.

At the same time, the department also froze funding that had been promised to businesses and nonprofits through conservation and climate programs. The purge then “removed critical information about these programs from the public record, denying farmers access to resources they need to advocate for funds they are owed,” it said.

The Agriculture Department referred questions about the lawsuit to the Justice Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The suit was filed by lawyers from Earthjustice, based in San Francisco, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, on behalf of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, based in Binghamton; the Natural Resources Defense Council, based in New York; and the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington. The latter two groups relied on the department website for their research and advocacy, the lawsuit said.

Peter Lehner, a lawyer for Earthjustice, said the pages being purged were crucial for farmers facing risks linked to climate change, including heat waves, droughts, floods, extreme weather and wildfires. The websites had contained information about how to mitigate dangers and adopt new agricultural techniques and strategies. Long-term weather data and trends are valuable in the agriculture industry for planning, research and business strategy.

“You can purge a website of the words climate change, but that doesn’t mean climate change goes away,” Mr. Lehner said…(More)”.

Governing in the Age of AI: Building Britain’s National Data Library

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change: “The United Kingdom should lead the world in artificial-intelligence-driven innovation, research and data-enabled public services. It has the data, the institutions and the expertise to set the global standard. But without the right infrastructure, these advantages are being wasted.

The UK’s data infrastructure, like that of every nation, is built around outdated assumptions about how data create value. It is fragmented and unfit for purpose. Public-sector data are locked in silos, access is slow and inconsistent, and there is no system to connect and use these data effectively, or any framework for deciding what additional data would be most valuable to collect given AI’s capabilities.

As a result, research is stalled, AI adoption is held back, and the government struggles to plan services, target support and respond to emerging challenges. This affects everything from developing new treatments to improving transport, tackling crime and ensuring economic policies help those who need them. While some countries are making progress in treating existing data as strategic assets, none have truly reimagined data infrastructure for an AI-enabled future…(More)”

On the Shoulders of Others: The Importance of Regulatory Learning in the Age of AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Urs Gasser and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger: “…International harmonization of regulation is the right strategy when the appropriate regulatory ends and means are sufficiently clear to reap efficiencies of scale and scope. When this is not the case, a push for efficiency through uniformity is premature and may lead to a suboptimal regulatory lock-in: the establishment of a rule framework that is either inefficient in the use of its means to reach the intended goal, or furthers the wrong goal, or both.


A century ago, economist Joseph Schumpeter suggested that companies have two distinct strategies to achieve success. The first is to employ economies of scale and scope to lower their cost. It’s essentially a push for improved efficiency. The other strategy is to invent a new product (or production process) that may not, at least initially, be hugely efficient, but is nevertheless advantageous because demand for the new product is price inelastic. For Schumpeter this was the essence of innovation. But, as Schumpeter also argued, innovation is not a simple, linear, and predictable process. Often, it happens in fits and starts, and can’t be easily commandeered or engineered.


As innovation is hard to foresee and plan, the best way to facilitate it is to enable a wide variety of different approaches and solutions. Public policies in many countries to foster startups and entrepreneurship stems from this view. Take, for instance, the policy of regulatory sandboxing, i.e. the idea that for a limited time certain sectors should not or only lightly be regulated…(More)”.

The Preventative Shift: How can we embed prevention and achieve long term missions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Demos (UK): “Over the past two years Demos has been making the case for a fundamental shift in the purpose of government away from firefighting in public services towards preventing problems arriving. First, we set out the case for The Preventative State, to rebuild local, social and civic foundations; then, jointly with The Health Foundation, we made the case to change treasury rules to ringfence funding for prevention. By differentiating between everyday spending, and preventative spending, the government could measure what really matters.

There has been widespread support for this – but also concerns about both the feasibility of measuring preventative spending accurately and appropriately but also that ring-fencing alone may not lead to the desired improvements in outcomes and value for money.

In response we have developed two practical approaches, covered in two papers:

  • Our first paper, Counting What Matters, explores the challenge of measurement and makes a series of recommendations, including the passage of a “Public Investment Act”, to show how this could be appropriately achieved.
  • This second paper, The Preventative Shift, looks at how to shift the culture of public bodies to think ‘prevention first’ and target spending at activities which promise value for money and improve outcomes…(More)”.

In Online Democracy, Fun Is Imperative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Joe Mathews: “Governments around the world, especially those at the subnational and local levels, find themselves stuck in a vise. Planetary problems like climate change, disease, and technological disruption are not being addressed adequately by national governments. Everyday people, whose lives have been disrupted by those planetary problems, press the governments closer to them to step up and protect them. But those governments lack the technical capacity and popular trust to act effectively against bigger problems.

To build trust and capacity, many governments are moving governance into the digital world and asking their residents to do more of the work of government themselves. Some cities, provinces, and political institutions have tried to build digital platforms and robust digital environments where residents can improve service delivery and make government policy themselves.

However, most of these experiments have been failures. The trouble is that most of these platforms cannot keep the attention of the people who are supposed to use them. Too few of the platforms are designed to make online engagement compelling. So, figuring out how to make online engagement in government fun is actually a serious question for governments seeking to work more closely with their people.

What does fun look like in this sphere? I first witnessed a truly fun and engaging digital tool for citizen governance in Rome in 2018. While running a democracy conference with Mayor Virginia Raggi and her team, they were always on their phones, and not just to answer emails or texts. They were constantly on a digital environment called Rousseau.

Rousseau was named after Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century philosopher and author of The Social Contract. In that 1762 book, Rousseau argued that city-states (like his hometown of Geneva) were more naturally suited to democracy than nation-states (especially big nations like France). He also wrote that the people themselves, not elected representatives, were the best rulers through what we today call direct democracy…(More)”.

How Innovation Ecosystems Foster Citizen Participation Using Emerging Technologies in Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “This report examines how actors in Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands interact and work together to contribute to the development of emerging technologies for citizen participation. Through in-depth research and analysis of actors’ motivations, experiences, challenges, and enablers in this nascent but promising field, this paper presents a unique cross-national perspective on innovation ecosystems for citizen participation using emerging technology. It includes lessons and concrete proposals for policymakers, innovators, and researchers seeking to develop technology-based citizen participation initiatives…(More)”.

What 40 Million Devices Can Teach Us About Digital Literacy in America

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Juan M. Lavista Ferres: “…For the first time, Microsoft is releasing a privacy-protected dataset that provides new insights into digital engagement across the United States. This dataset, built from anonymized usage data from 40 million Windows devices, offers the most comprehensive view ever assembled of how digital tools are being used across the country. It goes beyond surveys and self-reported data to provide a real-world look at software application usage across 28,000 ZIP codes, creating a more detailed and nuanced understanding of digital engagement than any existing commercial or government study.

In collaboration with leading researchers at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, we analyzed this dataset and developed two key indices to measure digital literacy:

  • Media & Information Composite Index (MCI): This index captures general computing activity, including media consumption, information gathering, and usage of productivity applications like word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.
  • Content Creation & Computation Index (CCI): This index measures engagement with more specialized digital applications, such as content creation tools like Photoshop and software development environments.

By combining these indices with demographic data, several important insights emerge:

Urban-Rural Disparities Exist—But the Gaps Are Uneven While rural areas often lag in digital engagement, disparities within urban areas are just as pronounced. Some city neighborhoods have digital activity levels on par with major tech hubs, while others fall significantly behind, revealing a more complex digital divide than previously understood.

Income and Education Are Key Drivers of Digital Engagement Higher-income and higher-education areas show significantly greater engagement in content creation and computational tasks. This suggests that digital skills—not just access—are critical in shaping economic mobility and opportunity. Even in places where broadband availability is the same, digital usage patterns vary widely, demonstrating that access alone is not enough.

Infrastructure Alone Won’t Close the Digital Divide Providing broadband connectivity is essential, but it is not a sufficient solution to the challenges of digital literacy. Our findings show that even in well-connected regions, significant skill gaps persist. This means that policies and interventions must go beyond infrastructure investments to include comprehensive digital education, skills training, and workforce development initiatives…(More)”.

Patients’ Trust in Health Systems to Use Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Paige Nong and Jodyn Platt: “The growth and development of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care introduces a new set of questions about patient engagement and whether patients trust systems to use AI responsibly and safely. The answer to this question is embedded in patients’ experiences seeking care and trust in health systems. Meanwhile, the adoption of AI technology outpaces efforts to analyze patient perspectives, which are critical to designing trustworthy AI systems and ensuring patient-centered care.

We conducted a national survey of US adults to understand whether they trust their health systems to use AI responsibly and protect them from AI harms. We also examined variables that may be associated with these attitudes, including knowledge of AI, trust, and experiences of discrimination in health care….Most respondents reported low trust in their health care system to use AI responsibly (65.8%) and low trust that their health care system would make sure an AI tool would not harm them (57.7%)…(More)”.