Mapping the Landscape of AI-Powered Nonprofits

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Kevin Barenblat: “Visualize the year 2050. How do you see AI having impacted the world? Whatever you’re picturing… the reality will probably be quite a bit different. Just think about the personal computer. In its early days circa the 1980s, tech companies marketed the devices for the best use cases they could imagine: reducing paperwork, doing math, and keeping track of forgettable things like birthdays and recipes. It was impossible to imagine that decades later, the larger-than-a-toaster-sized devices would be smaller than the size of Pop-Tarts, connect with billions of other devices, and respond to voice and touch.

It can be hard for us to see how new technologies will ultimately be used. The same is true of artificial intelligence. With new use cases popping up every day, we are early in the age of AI. To make sense of all the action, many landscapes have been published to organize the tech stacks and private sector applications of AI. We could not, however, find an overview of how nonprofits are using AI for impact…

AI-powered nonprofits (APNs) are already advancing solutions to many social problems, and Google.org’s recent research brief AI in Action: Accelerating Progress Towards the Sustainable Development Goals shows that AI is driving progress towards all 17 SDGs. Three goals that stand out with especially strong potential to be transformed by AI are SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), SDG 4 (Quality Education), and SDG 13 (Climate Action). As such, this series focuses on how AI-powered nonprofits are transforming the climate, health care, and education sectors…(More)”.

The MAGA Plan to End Free Weather Reports

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Zoë Schlanger: “In the United States, as in most other countries, weather forecasts are a freely accessible government amenity. The National Weather Service issues alerts and predictions, warning of hurricanes and excessive heat and rainfall, all at the total cost to American taxpayers of roughly $4 per person per year. Anyone with a TV, smartphone, radio, or newspaper can know what tomorrow’s weather will look like, whether a hurricane is heading toward their town, or if a drought has been forecast for the next season. Even if they get that news from a privately owned app or TV station, much of the underlying weather data are courtesy of meteorologists working for the federal government.

Charging for popular services that were previously free isn’t generally a winning political strategy. But hard-right policy makers appear poised to try to do just that should Republicans gain power in the next term. Project 2025—a nearly 900-page book of policy proposals published by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—states that an incoming administration should all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under which the National Weather Service operates….NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” Project 2025 reads. … “The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded,” the document says. It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s…(More)”.

What does a ‘mission-driven’ approach to government mean and how can it be delivered?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Institute for Government and Nesta: “… set out a recommended approach for how government could effectively organise itself to deliver missions. It should act as a guide for public servants at the start of a new administration that has pledged to do things differently.

Missions are designed to set bold visions for change, inspiring collaboration across the system and society to break down silos and work towards a common goal. They represent the ultimate purpose of the Government, and the story it aims to tell by the end of the Parliament.

To succeed, government will need to adopt three key roles: driving public service innovation, shaping markets and harnessing collective intelligence to improve decision-making. Achieving these missions will require strong foundations and well-recognised enablers of good government, pursued in a specific manner to bring about a cultural change in Whitehall…(More)”.

AI: a transformative force in maternal healthcare

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Afifa Waheed: “Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics have enormous potential in healthcare and are quickly shifting the landscape – emerging as a transformative force. They offer a new dimension to the way healthcare professionals approach disease diagnosis, treatment and monitoring. AI is being used in healthcare to help diagnose patients, for drug discovery and development, to improve physician-patient communication, to transcribe voluminous medical documents, and to analyse genomics and genetics. Labs are conducting research work faster than ever before, work that otherwise would have taken decades without the assistance of AI. AI-driven research in life sciences has included applications looking to address broad-based areas, such as diabetes, cancer, chronic kidney disease and maternal health.

In addition to increasing the knowledge of access to postnatal and neonatal care, AI can predict the risk of adverse events in antenatal and postnatal women and their neonatal care. It can be trained to identify those at risk of adverse events, by using patients’ health information such as nutrition status, age, existing health conditions and lifestyle factors. 

AI can further be used to improve access to women located in rural areas with a lack of trained professionals – AI-enabled ultrasound can assist front-line workers with image interpretation for a comprehensive set of obstetrics measurements, increasing quality access to early foetal ultrasound scans. The use of AI assistants and chatbots can also improve pregnant mothers’ experience by helping them find available physicians, schedule appointments and even answer some patient questions…

Many healthcare professionals I have spoken to emphasised that pre-existing conditions such as high blood pressure that leads to preeclampsia, iron deficiency, cardiovascular disease, age-related issues for those over 35, various other existing health conditions, and failure in the progress of labour that might lead to Caesarean (C-section), could all cause maternal deaths. Training AI models to detect these diseases early on and accurately for women could prove to be beneficial. AI algorithms can leverage advanced algorithms, machine learning (ML) techniques, and predictive models to enhance decision-making, optimise healthcare delivery, and ultimately improve patient outcomes in foeto-maternal health…(More)”.

Bringing Communities In, Achieving AI for All

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Shobita Parthasarathy and Jared Katzman: “…To this end, public and philanthropic research funders, universities, and the tech industry should be seeking out partnerships with struggling communities, to learn what they need from AI and build it. Regulators, too, should have their ears to the ground, not just the C-suite. Typical members of a marginalized community—or, indeed, any nonexpert community—may not know the technical details of AI, but they understand better than anyone else the power imbalances at the root of concerns surrounding AI bias and discrimination. And so it is from communities marginalized by AI, and from scholars and organizations focused on understanding and ameliorating social disadvantage, that AI designers and regulators most need to hear.

Progress toward AI equity begins at the agenda-setting stage, when funders, engineers, and corporate leaders make decisions about research and development priorities. This is usually seen as a technical or management task, to be carried out by experts who understand the state of scientific play and the unmet needs of the market… A heartening example comes from Carnegie Mellon University, where computer scientists worked with residents in the institution’s home city of Pittsburgh to build a technology that monitored and visualized local air quality. The collaboration began when researchers attended community meetings where they heard from residents who were suffering the effects of air pollution from a nearby factory. The residents had struggled to get the attention of local and national officials because they were unable to provide the sort of data that would motivate interest in their case. The researchers got to work on prototype systems that could produce the needed data and refined their technology in response to community input. Eventually their system brought together heterogeneous information, including crowdsourced smell reports, video footage of factory smokestacks, and air-quality and wind data, which the residents then submitted to government entities. After reviewing the data, administrators at the Environmental Protection Agency agreed to review the factory’s compliance, and within a year the factory’s parent company announced that the facility would close…(More)”.

Your Driving App Is Leading You Astray

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Julia Angwin: “…If you use a navigation app, you probably have felt helpless anger when your stupid phone endangers your life, and the lives of all the drivers around you, to potentially shave a minute or two from your drive time. Or maybe it’s stuck you on an ugly freeway when a glorious, ocean-hugging alternative lies a few miles away. Or maybe it’s trapped you on a route with no four-way stops, ignoring a less stressful solution that doesn’t leave you worried about a car barreling out of nowhere.

For all the discussion of the many extraordinary ways algorithms have changed our society and our lives, one of the most impactful, and most infuriating, often escapes notice. Dominated by a couple of enormously powerful tech monopolists that have better things to worry about, our leading online mapping systems from Google and Apple are not nearly as good as they could be.

You may have heard the extreme stories, such as when navigation apps like Waze and Google Maps apparently steered drivers into lakes and onto impassable dirt roads, or when jurisdictions beg Waze to stop dumping traffic onto their residential streets. But the reality is these apps affect us, our roads and our communities every minute of the day. Primarily programmed to find the fastest route, they endanger and infuriate us on a remarkably regular basis….

The best hope for competition relies on the success of OpenStreetMap. Its data underpins most maps other than Google, including Amazon, Facebook and Apple, but it is so under-resourced that it only recently hired paid systems administrators to ensure its back-end machines kept running….In addition, we can promote competition by using the few available alternatives. To navigate cities with public transit, try apps such as Citymapper that offer bike, transit and walking directions. Or use the privacy-focused Organic Maps…(More)”.

The Economic Case for Reimagining the State

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Tony Blair Institute: “The new government will need to lean in to support the diffusion of AI-era tech across the economy by adopting a pro-innovation, pro-technology stance, as advocated by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in our paper Accelerating the Future: Industrial Strategy in the Era of AI.

AI-era tech can also transform public services, creating a smaller, lower-cost state that delivers better outcomes for citizens. New TBI analysis suggests:

  • Adoption of AI across the public-sector workforce could save around one-fifth of workforce time at a comparatively low cost. If the government chooses to bank these time savings and reduce the size of the workforce, this could result in annual net savings of £10 billion per year by the end of this Parliament and £34 billion per year by the end of the next – enough to pay for the entire defence budget.
  • AI-era tech also offers significant potential to improve the UK’s health services. We envisage a major expansion of the country’s preventative-health-care system, including: a digital health record for every citizen; improved access to health checks online, at home and on the high street; and a wider rollout of preventative treatments across the population. This programme could lead to the triple benefit of a healthier population, a healthier economy (with more people in work) and healthier public finances (since more workers mean more tax revenues). Even a narrow version of this programme – focused only on cardiovascular disease – could lead to 70,000 more people in work and generate net savings to the Exchequer worth £600 million by the end of this parliamentary term, and £1.2 billion by the end of the next. Much larger gains are possible – worth £6 billion per year by 2040 – if medical treatments continue to advance and the programme expands to cover a wider range of conditions, including obesity and cancer.
  • Introducing a digital ID could significantly improve the way that citizens interact with government, in terms of saving them time, easing access and creating a more personalised service. A digital ID could also generate a net gain of about £2 billion per year for the Exchequer by helping to reduce benefit fraud, improve the efficiency of tax-revenue collection and better target welfare payments in a crisis. Based on international experience, we think it is achievable for the government to implement a digital ID within three years and generate cumulative net savings of almost £4 billion during this Parliament, and nearly £10 billion during the next term.
  • AI could also lead to a 6 per cent boost in educational attainment by helping to improve the quality of teaching, save teacher time and improve the ability of students to absorb lesson content. These gains would take time to materialise but could eventually raise UK GDP by up to 6 per cent in the long run and create more than £30 billion in fiscal space per year.

The four public-sector use cases outlined above could create substantial fiscal savings for the new government worth £12 billion a year (0.4 per cent of GDP) by the end of this parliamentary term, £37 billion (1.3 per cent of GDP) by the end of the next, and more than £40 billion (1.5 per cent of GDP) by 2040…(More)”.

A new index is using AI tools to measure U.S. economic growth in a broader way

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jeff Cox: “Measuring the strength of the sprawling U.S. economy is no easy task, so one firm is sending artificial intelligence in to do the job.

The Zeta Economic Index, launched Monday, uses generative AI to analyze what its developers call “trillions of behavioral signals,” largely focused on consumer activity, to score growth on both a broad level of health and a separate measure on stability.

At its core, the index will gauge online and offline activity across eight categories, aiming to give a comprehensive look that incorporates standard economic data points such as unemployment and retail sales combined with high-frequency information for the AI age.

“The algorithm is looking at traditional economic indicators that you would normally look at. But then inside of our proprietary algorithm, we’re ingesting the behavioral data and transaction data of 240 million Americans, which nobody else has,” said David Steinberg, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Zeta Global.

“So instead of looking at the data in the rearview mirror like everybody else, we’re trying to put it out in advance to give a 30-day advanced snapshot of where the economy is going,” he added…(More)”.

Exploring Digital Biomarkers for Depression Using Mobile Technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Yuezhou Zhang et al: “With the advent of ubiquitous sensors and mobile technologies, wearables and smartphones offer a cost-effective means for monitoring mental health conditions, particularly depression. These devices enable the continuous collection of behavioral data, providing novel insights into the daily manifestations of depressive symptoms.

We found several significant links between depression severity and various behavioral biomarkers: elevated depression levels were associated with diminished sleep quality (assessed through Fitbit metrics), reduced sociability (approximated by Bluetooth), decreased levels of physical activity (quantified by step counts and GPS data), a slower cadence of daily walking (captured by smartphone accelerometers), and disturbances in circadian rhythms (analyzed across various data streams).
Leveraging digital biomarkers for assessing and continuously monitoring depression introduces a new paradigm in early detection and development of customized intervention strategies. Findings from these studies not only enhance our comprehension of depression in real-world settings but also underscore the potential of mobile technologies in the prevention and management of mental health issues…(More)”

Building an AI ecosystem in a small nation: lessons from Singapore’s journey to the forefront of AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Shaleen Khanal, Hongzhou Zhang & Araz Taeihagh: “Artificial intelligence (AI) is arguably the most transformative technology of our time. While all nations would like to mobilize their resources to play an active role in AI development and utilization, only a few nations, such as the United States and China, have the resources and capacity to do so. If so, how can smaller or less resourceful countries navigate the technological terrain to emerge at the forefront of AI development? This research presents an in-depth analysis of Singapore’s journey in constructing a robust AI ecosystem amidst the prevailing global dominance of the United States and China. By examining the case of Singapore, we argue that by designing policies that address risks associated with AI development and implementation, smaller countries can create a vibrant AI ecosystem that encourages experimentation and early adoption of the technology. In addition, through Singapore’s case, we demonstrate the active role the government can play, not only as a policymaker but also as a steward to guide the rest of the economy towards the application of AI…(More)”.