Whose Streets? Our Streets!

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Rebecca Williams: “The extent to which “smart city” technology is altering our sense of freedom in public spaces deserves more attention if we want a democratic future. Democracy–the rule of the people–constitutes our collective self-determination and protects us against domination and abuse. Democracy requires safe spaces, or commons, for people to organically and spontaneously convene regardless of their background or position to campaign for their causes, discuss politics, and protest. In these commons, where anyone can take a stand and be noticed is where a notion of collective good can be developed and communicated. Public spaces, like our streets, parks, and squares, have historically played a significant role in the development of democracy. We should fight to preserve the freedoms intrinsic to our public spaces because they make democracy possible.

Last summer, approximately 15 to 26 million people participated in Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd making it the largest mass movement in U.S. history. In June, the San Diego Police Department obtained footage of Black Lives Matter protesters from “smart streetlight” cameras, sparking shock and outrage from San Diego community members. These “smart streetlights” were promoted as part of citywide efforts to become a “smart city” to help with traffic control and air quality monitoring. Despite discoverable documentation about the streetlight’s capabilities and data policies on their website, including a data-sharing agreement about how they would share data with the police, the community had no expectation that the streetlights would be surveilling protestors. After media coverage and ongoing advocacy from the Transparent and Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology San Diego (TRUSTSD) coalition, the City Council, set aside the funding for the streetlights4 until a surveillance technology ordinance was considered and the Mayor ordered the 3,000+ streetlight cameras off. Due to the way power was supplied to the cameras, they remained on, but the city reported it no longer had access to the data it collected. In November, the City Council voted unanimously in favor of a surveillance ordinance and to establish a Privacy Advisory Board.In May, it was revealed that the San Diego Police Department had previously (in 2017) held back materials to Congress’ House Committee on Oversight and Reform about their use facial recognition technology. This story, with its mission creep and mishaps, is representative of a broader set of “smart city” cautionary trends that took place in the last year. These cautionary trends call us to question if our public spaces become places where one fears punishment, how will that affect collective action and political movements?

This report is an urgent warning of where we are headed if we maintain our current trajectory of augmenting our public space with trackers of all kinds. In this report, I outline how current “smart city” technologies can watch you. I argue that all “smart city” technology trends toward corporate and state surveillance and that if we don’t stop and blunt these trends now that totalitarianism, panopticonism, discrimination, privatization, and solutionism will challenge our democratic possibilities. This report examines these harms through cautionary trends supported by examples from this last year and provides 10 calls to action for advocates, legislatures, and technology companies to prevent these harms. If we act now, we can ensure the technology in our public spaces protect and promote democracy and that we do not continue down this path of an elite few tracking the many….(More)”

Designing data collaboratives to better understand human mobility and migration in West Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst


“The Big Data for Migration Alliance (BD4M) is released the report, “Designing Data Collaboratives to Better Understand Human Mobility and Migration in West Africa,” providing findings from a first-of-its-kind rapid co-design and prototyping workshop, or “Studio.” The first BD4M Studio convened over 40 stakeholders in government, international organizations, research, civil society, and the public sector to develop concrete strategies for developing and implementing cross- sectoral data partnerships, or “data collaboratives,” to improve ethical and secure access to data for migration-related policymaking and research in West Africa.

BD4M is an effort spearheaded by the International Organization for Migration’s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (IOM GMDAC), European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), and The GovLab to accelerate the responsible and ethical use of novel data sources and methodologies—such as social media, mobile phone data, satellite imagery, artificial intelligence—to support migration-related programming and policy on the global, national, and local levels. 

The BD4M Studio was informed by The Migration Domain of The 100 Questions Initiative — a global agenda-setting exercise to define the most impactful questions related to migration that could be answered through data collaboration. Inspired by the outputs of The 100 Questions, Studio participants designed data collaboratives that could produce answers to three key questions: 

  1. How can data be used to estimate current cross-border migration and mobility by sex and age in West Africa?
  2.  How can data be used to assess the current state of diaspora communities and their migration behavior in the region?
  3. How can we use data to better understand the drivers of migration in West Africa?…(More)”

Off-Label: How tech platforms decide what counts as journalism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Emily Bell: “…But putting a stop to militarized fascist movements—and preventing another attack on a government building—will ultimately require more than content removal. Technology companies need to fundamentally recalibrate how they categorize, promote, and circulate everything under their banner, particularly news. They have to acknowledge their editorial responsibility.

The extraordinary power of tech platforms to decide what material is worth seeing—under the loosest possible definition of who counts as a “journalist”—has always been a source of tension with news publishers. These companies have now been put in the position of being held accountable for developing an information ecosystem based in fact. It’s unclear how much they are prepared to do, if they will ever really invest in pro-truth mechanisms on a global scale. But it is clear that, after the Capitol riot, there’s no going back to the way things used to be.

Between 2016 and 2020, Facebook, Twitter, and Google made dozens of announcements promising to increase the exposure of high-quality news and get rid of harmful misinformation. They claimed to be investing in content moderation and fact-checking; they assured us that they were creating helpful products like the Facebook News Tab. Yet the result of all these changes has been hard to examine, since the data is both scarce and incomplete. Gordon Crovitz—a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a cofounder of NewsGuard, which applies ratings to news sources based on their credibility—has been frustrated by the lack of transparency: “In Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter we have institutions that we know all give quality ratings to news sources in different ways,” he told me. “But if you are a news organization and you want to know how you are rated, you can ask them how these systems are constructed, and they won’t tell you.” Consider the mystery behind blue-check certification on Twitter, or the absurdly wide scope of the “Media/News” category on Facebook. “The issue comes down to a fundamental failure to understand the core concepts of journalism,” Crovitz said.

Still, researchers have managed to put together a general picture of how technology companies handle various news sources. According to Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University, “we know that there is a taxonomy within these companies, because we have seen them dial up and dial down the exposure of quality news outlets.” Internally, platforms rank journalists and outlets and make certain designations, which are then used to develop algorithms for personalized news recommendations and news products….(More)”

It’s hard to be a moral person. Technology is making it harder.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Sigal Samuel: “The idea of moral attention goes back at least as far as ancient Greece, where the Stoics wrote about the practice of attention (prosoché) as the cornerstone of a good spiritual life. In modern Western thought, though, ethicists didn’t focus too much on attention until a band of female philosophers came along, starting with Simone Weil.

Weil, an early 20th-century French philosopher and Christian mystic, wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” She believed that to be able to properly pay attention to someone else — to become fully receptive to their situation in all its complexity — you need to first get your own self out of the way. She called this process “decreation,” and explained: “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty … ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.”

Weil argued that plain old attention — the kind you use when reading novels, say, or birdwatching — is a precondition for moral attention, which is a precondition for empathy, which is a precondition for ethical action.

Later philosophers, like Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum, picked up and developed Weil’s ideas. They garbed them in the language of Western philosophy; Murdoch, for example, appeals to Plato as she writes about the need for “unselfing.” But this central idea of “unselfing” or “decreation” is perhaps most reminiscent of Eastern traditions like Buddhism, which has long emphasized the importance of relinquishing our ego and training our attention so we can perceive and respond to others’ needs. It offers tools like mindfulness meditation for doing just that…(More)”

Who will benefit from big data? Farmers’ perspective on willingness to share farm data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Airong Zhang et al : “Agricultural industries are facing a dual challenge of increasing production to meet the growing population with a disruptive changing climate and, at the same time, reducing its environmental impacts. Digital agriculture supported by big data technology has been regarded as a solution to address such challenges. However, realising the potential value promised by big data technology depends upon farm-level data generated by digital agriculture being aggregated at scale. Yet, there is limited understanding of farmers’ willingness to contribute agricultural data for analysis and how that willingness could be affected by their perceived beneficiary of the aggregated data.

The present study aimed to investigate farmers’ perspective on who would benefit the most from the aggregated agricultural data, and their willingness to share their input and output farm data with a range of agricultural sector stakeholders (i.e. other farmers, industry and government statistical organisations, technology businesses, and research institutions). To do this, we conducted a computer-assisted telephone interview with 880 Australian farmers from broadacre agricultural sectors. The results show that only 34 % of participants regarded farmers as the primary beneficiary of aggregated agricultural data, followed by agribusiness (35 %) and government (21 %) as the main beneficiary. The participants’ willingness to share data was mostly positive. However, the level of willingness fluctuated depending on who was perceived as the primary beneficiary and with which stakeholder the data would be shared. While participants reported concerns over aggregated farm data being misused and privacy of own farm data, perception of farmers being the primary beneficiary led to the lowest levels of concerns. The findings highlight that, to seize the opportunities of sustainable agriculture through applying big data technologies, significant value propositions for farmers need to be created to provide a reason for farmers to share data, and a higher level of trust between farmers and stakeholders, especially technology and service providers, needs to be established….(More)”.

Ethical Governance of Artificial Intelligence in the Public Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Liza Ireni-Saban and Maya Sherman: “This book argues that ethical evaluation of AI should be an integral part of public service ethics and that an effective normative framework is needed to provide ethical principles and evaluation for decision-making in the public sphere, at both local and international levels.

It introduces how the tenets of prudential rationality ethics, through critical engagement with intersectionality, can contribute to a more successful negotiation of the challenges created by technological innovations in AI and afford a relational, interactive, flexible and fluid framework that meets the features of AI research projects, so that core public and individual values are still honoured in the face of technological development….(More)”.

Making life richer, easier and healthier: Robots, their future and the roles for public policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Paper: “This paper addresses the current and emerging uses and impacts of robots, the mid-term future of robotics and the role of policy. Progress in robotics will help to make life easier, richer and healthier. Wider robot use will help raise labour productivity. As science and engineering progress, robots will become more central to crisis response, from helping combat infectious diseases to maintaining critical infrastructure. Governments can accelerate and orient the development and uptake of socially valuable robots, for instance by: supporting cross-disciplinary R&D, facilitating research commercialisation, helping small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) understand the opportunities for investment in robots, supporting platforms that highlight robot solutions in healthcare and other sectors, embedding robotics engineering in high school curricula, tailoring training for workers with vocational-level mechanical skills, supporting data development useful to robotics, ensuring flexible regulation conducive to innovation, strengthening digital connectivity, and raising awareness of the importance of robotics….(More)“

Mapping Africa’s Buildings with Satellite Imagery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Google AI Blog: “An accurate record of building footprints is important for a range of applications, from population estimation and urban planning to humanitarian response and environmental science. After a disaster, such as a flood or an earthquake, authorities need to estimate how many households have been affected. Ideally there would be up-to-date census information for this, but in practice such records may be out of date or unavailable. Instead, data on the locations and density of buildings can be a valuable alternative source of information.

A good way to collect such data is through satellite imagery, which can map the distribution of buildings across the world, particularly in areas that are isolated or difficult to access. However, detecting buildings with computer vision methods in some environments can be a challenging task. Because satellite imaging involves photographing the earth from several hundred kilometres above the ground, even at high resolution (30–50 cm per pixel), a small building or tent shelter occupies only a few pixels. The task is even more difficult for informal settlements, or rural areas where buildings constructed with natural materials can visually blend into the surroundings. There are also many types of natural and artificial features that can be easily confused with buildings in overhead imagery.

In “Continental-Scale Building Detection from High-Resolution Satellite Imagery”, we address these challenges, using new methods for detecting buildings that work in rural and urban settings across different terrains, such as savannah, desert, and forest, as well as informal settlements and refugee facilities. We use this building detection model to create the Open Buildings dataset, a new open-access data resource containing the locations and footprints of 516 million buildings with coverage across most of the African continent. The dataset will support several practical, scientific and humanitarian applications, ranging from disaster response or population mapping to planning services such as new medical facilities or studying human impact on the natural environment….(More)”.

Power to the Public: The Promise of Public Interest Technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Tara Dawson McGuinness and Hana Schank: “As the speed and complexity of the world increases, governments and nonprofit organizations need new ways to effectively tackle the critical challenges of our time—from pandemics and global warming to social media warfare. In Power to the Public, Tara Dawson McGuinness and Hana Schank describe a revolutionary new approach—public interest technology—that has the potential to transform the way governments and nonprofits around the world solve problems. Through inspiring stories about successful projects ranging from a texting service for teenagers in crisis to a streamlined foster care system, the authors show how public interest technology can make the delivery of services to the public more effective and efficient.

At its heart, public interest technology means putting users at the center of the policymaking process, using data and metrics in a smart way, and running small experiments and pilot programs before scaling up. And while this approach may well involve the innovative use of digital technology, technology alone is no panacea—and some of the best solutions may even be decidedly low-tech.

Clear-eyed yet profoundly optimistic, Power to the Public presents a powerful blueprint for how government and nonprofits can help solve society’s most serious problems….(More)”

More Than Nudges Are Needed to End the Pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Richard Thaler in the New York Times: “…In the case of Covid vaccinations, society cannot afford to wait decades. Although vaccines are readily available and free for everyone over age 12 in the United States, there are many holdouts. About 40 percent of the adult population has not been fully vaccinated, and about a third has not yet gotten even one dose. It is time to get serious.

Of course, information campaigns must continue to stress the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, but it is important to target the messages at the most hesitant groups. It would help if the F.D.A. gave the vaccines its full approval rather than the current emergency use designation. Full approval for the Pfizer drug may come as soon as Labor Day, but the process for the other vaccines is much further behind.

One way to increase vaccine takeup would be to offer monetary incentives. For example, President Biden has recently advocated paying people $100 to get their shots.

Although this policy is well intended, I believe it is a mistake for a state or a country to offer to pay individuals to get vaccinated. First of all, the amount might be taken to be an indicator of how much — or little — the government thinks getting a jab is worth. Surely the value to society of increased vaccinations is well beyond $100 per person.

Second, it seems increasingly likely that one or more booster shots may be necessary for some populations in the United States to deal with the Delta variant of the coronavirus — and, perhaps, other variants as well. If that happens, we don’t want some people to procrastinate, hoping to get paid. Government-sponsored booster shots are already beginning in Israel and are at various stages of planning in several European countries.

An alternative model is being offered by the National Football League, which has stopped short of requiring players to be vaccinated but is offering plenty of incentives. Unvaccinated players have to be tested every day, must be masked and at a distance from teammates on flights, and must stay in their room until game day. Vaccinated players who test positive and are asymptomatic can return to duty after two negative tests 24 hours apart. But unvaccinated players must undergo a 10-day isolation period.

These incentives followed a long effort to educate the players about the benefits to themselves, their families and fellow players. It is hard to say which aspect of the N.F.L. plan is doing the work, but over 90 percent of the league’s players have received at least one jab. The fact that a team could lose a game because an unvaccinated player can’t play creates a powerful group dynamic…(More)”.