Coronavirus: seven ways collective intelligence is tackling the pandemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Kathy Peach: “Tackling the emergence of a new global pandemic is a complex task. But collective intelligence is now being used around the world by communities and governments to respond.

At its simplest, collective intelligence is the enhanced capacity created when distributed groups of people work together, often with the help of technology, to mobilise more information, ideas and insights to solve a problem.

Advances in digital technologies have transformed what can be achieved through collective intelligence in recent years – connecting more of us, augmenting human intelligence with machine intelligence, and helping us to generate new insights from novel sources of data. It is particularly suited to addressing fast-evolving, complex global problems such as disease outbreaks.

Here are seven ways it is tackling the coronavirus pandemic:

1. Predicting and modelling outbreaks

On the December 31, 2019, health monitoring platform Blue Dot alerted its clients to the outbreak of a flu-like virus in Wuhan, China – nine days before the World Health Organization (WHO) released a statement about it. It then correctly predicted that the virus would jump from Wuhan to Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei and Tokyo.

Blue Dot combines existing data sets to create new insights. Natural language processing, the AI methods that understand and translate human-generated text, and machine learning techniques that learn from large volumes of data, sift through reports of disease outbreaks in animals, news reports in 65 languages, and airline passenger information. It supplements the machine-generated model with human intelligence, drawing on diverse expertise from epidemiologists to veterinarians and ecologists to ensure that its conclusions are valid.

2. Citizen science

The BBC carried out a citizen science project in 2018, which involved members of the public in generating new scientific data about how infections spread. People downloaded an app that monitored their GPS position every hour, and asked them to report who they had encountered or had contact with that day….(More).

Techlash? America’s Growing Concern with Major Technology Companies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Just a few years ago, Americans were overwhelmingly optimistic about the power of new technologies to foster an informed and engaged society. More recently, however, that confidence has been challenged by emerging concerns over the role that internet and technology companies — especially social media — now play in our democracy.

A new Knight Foundation and Gallup study explores how much the landscape has shifted. This wide-ranging study confirms that, for Americans, the techlash is real, widespread, and bipartisan. From concerns about the spread of misinformation to election interference and data privacy, we’ve documented the deep pessimism of folks across the political spectrum who believe tech companies have too much power — and that they do more harm than good. 

Despite their shared misgivings, Americans are deeply divided on how best to address these challenges. This report explores the contours of the techlash in the context of the issues currently animating policy debates in Washington and Silicon Valley. Below are the main findings from the executive summary….

  • 77% of Americans say major internet and technology companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple have too muchpower.
  • Americans are equally divided among those who favor (50%) and oppose (49%) government intervention that would require internet and technology companies to break into smaller companies. 
  • Americans do not trust social media companies much (44%) or at all (40%) to make the right decisions about what content should or should not be allowed on online platforms.
  • However, they would still prefer the companies (55%) to make those decisions rather than the government (44%). …(More)“

COVID-19 response and data protection law in the EU and US

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Cathy Cosgrove: “Managing the COVID-19 outbreak and stopping its spread is now a global challenge. In addition to the significant health and medical responses underway around the world, governments and public health officials are focused on how to monitor, understand and prevent the spread of the virus. Data protection and privacy laws, including the EU General Data Protection Regulation and various U.S. laws, are informing these responses.

One major response to limiting the spread of infection is contact tracing, which is the practice of identifying and monitoring anyone who may have come into contact with an infected person. Employers and educational institutions are also imposing travel restrictions, instituting self-quarantine policies, limiting visitors, and considering whether to require medical examinations. These responses necessarily involve obtaining and potentially sharing personal information, including data about an individual’s health, travel, personal contacts, and employment. For example, in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has asked airlines for the name, date of birth, address, phone number and email address for passengers on certain flights. 

As IAPP Editorial Director Jedidiah Bracy, CIPP, explored in his piece on balancing personal privacy with public interest last week, this collection and processing of personal data is creating substantial discussion about what data protection limitations may be required or appropriate. Even China — which is using AI and big data to manage the outbreak — has issued guidance recognizing the need to limit the collection of data and its use during this public health crisis….(More)”.

Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ilona M. Otto et al: “…In this paper, we examine a number of potential “social tipping elements” (STEs) for decarbonization that represent specific subdomains of the planetary social-economic system. Tipping of these subsystems could be triggered by “social tipping interventions” (STIs) that could contribute to rapid transition of the world system into a state of net zero anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The results reported in this study are based on an online expert survey, an expert workshop, and an extensive literature review (SI Appendix).

Our results complement the existing shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) that are used alongside the representative concentration pathways (RCPs) to analyze the feedbacks between climate change and socioeconomic factors, such as world population growth, economic development, and technological progress. Our results could be useful for exploring possible transformative pathways leading to scenarios that reach net zero emissions by 2050.

…Various types of tipping processes can be differentiated in the literature. Many authors refer to critical thresholds , a notion closely related to the metaphor of a “butterfly effect”. Other processes related to tipping dynamics include metamorphosis, where a rapid loss of structures of one sort occurs simultaneously with the development of new structures, as well as cascades driven by positive feedbacks in processes occurring simultaneously at smaller scales.

The social tipping dynamics of interest for this study are typically manifested as spreading processes in complex social networks of behaviors, opinions, knowledge, technologies, and social norms, including spreading processes of structural change and reorganization. These spreading processes resemble contagious dynamics observed in epidemiology that spread through social networks. Once triggered, such processes can be irreversible and difficult to stop. Similar contagious dynamics have been observed in human behavior, for example in assaultive violence, participation in social movements, or health-related behaviors and traits, such as smoking or obesity..(More)”.

How Taiwan Used Big Data, Transparency and a Central Command to Protect Its People from Coronavirus

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Beth Duff-Brown: “…So what steps did Taiwan take to protect its people? And could those steps be replicated here at home?

Stanford Health Policy’s Jason Wang, MD, PhD, an associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine who also has a PhD in policy analysis, credits his native Taiwan with using new technology and a robust pandemic prevention plan put into place at the 2003 SARS outbreak.

“The Taiwan government established the National Health Command Center (NHCC) after SARS and it’s become part of a disaster management center that focuses on large-outbreak responses and acts as the operational command point for direct communications,” said Wang, a pediatrician and the director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes, and Prevention at Stanford. The NHCC also established the Central Epidemic Command Center, which was activated in early January.

“And Taiwan rapidly produced and implemented a list of at least 124 action items in the past five weeks to protect public health,” Wang said. “The policies and actions go beyond border control because they recognized that that wasn’t enough.”

Wang outlines the measures Taiwan took in the last six weeks in an article published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Given the continual spread of COVID-19 around the world, understanding the action items that were implemented quickly in Taiwan, and the effectiveness of these actions in preventing a large-scale epidemic, may be instructive for other countries,” Wang and his co-authors wrote.

Within the last five weeks, Wang said, the Taiwan epidemic command center rapidly implemented those 124 action items, including border control from the air and sea, case identification using new data and technology, quarantine of suspicious cases, educating the public while fighting misinformation, negotiating with other countries — and formulating policies for schools and businesses to follow.

Big Data Analytics

The authors note that Taiwan integrated its national health insurance database with its immigration and customs database to begin the creation of big data for analytics. That allowed them case identification by generating real-time alerts during a clinical visit based on travel history and clinical symptoms.

Taipei also used Quick Response (QR) code scanning and online reporting of travel history and health symptoms to classify travelers’ infectious risks based on flight origin and travel history in the last 14 days. People who had not traveled to high-risk areas were sent a health declaration border pass via SMS for faster immigration clearance; those who had traveled to high-risk areas were quarantined at home and tracked through their mobile phones to ensure that they stayed home during the incubation period.

The country also instituted a toll-free hotline for citizens to report suspicious symptoms in themselves or others. As the disease progressed, the government called on major cities to establish their own hotlines so that the main hotline would not become jammed….(More)”.

Systems Thinking and Regulatory Governance: A Review of the International Academic Literature

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jeroen van der Heijden: “This research paper presents findings from a broad scoping of the international academic literature on the use of systems thinking and systems science in regulatory governance and practice. It builds on a systematic review of peer-reviewed articles published in the top 15 journals for regulatory scholarship. The aim of the research paper is to introduce those working in a regulatory environment to the key concepts of systems thinking and systems science, and to discuss the state of the art of regulatory knowledge on these topics.

It addresses five themes:

(1) the evolution of systems thinking,

(2) examples of systems thinking from the academic literature,

(3) evidence of how systems thinking helps improving regulatory governance, and

(4) the epistemic challenges and

(5) ethical challenges that come with applying systems thinking to regulatory governance and practice….(More)”.

Partisan responses to democracy promotion – Estimating the causal effect of a civic information portal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Peter John and Fredrik M. Sjoberg: “Citizens respond to information about democracy according to whether they are electoral winners or losers. This difference occurs both at the national and constituency level. Democratic interventions that seek to promote accountability and transparency might therefore impact citizens differentially depending on the political party that people support. In a placebo-controlled experimental design, carried out in Kenya, we find that democracy promotion boosts the external efficacy and political participation of ruling party partisans, but leaves those from the opposition unaffected. These responses—based on national incumbency—are further conditioned by the partisanship of the MP of the constituency where the voter resides. These findings throw new light on the impact of civic interventions, such as Get Out the Vote (GOTV) and civic education, common in Africa as well as elsewhere, as we show their benefits accrue to the electoral winners rather than to the losers…(More)”.

Conceptualizing the Impact of Digital Interference in Elections: A Framework and Agenda for Future Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nahema Marchal: “Concerns over digital interference in elections are widespread. Yet evidence of its impact is still thin and fragmented. How do malicious uses of social media shape, transform, and distort democratic processes? And how should we characterize this impact? Existing research into the effects of social media manipulation has largely focused on measuring its purported impact on opinion swings and voting behavior. Though laudable, this focus might be too reductive. Drawing on normative theories of liberal democracy, in this paper I argue that the threat of digital interference does not lie in its capacity to change people’s views but rather in its power to undermine popular perceptions of electoral integrity, with potentially far-reaching consequences for public trust. Following this assessment, I formulate a preliminary research agenda and highlight previously overlooked relationships that could be explored to better understand how malicious uses of social media might shape such attitudes and to what effect….(More)”.

Civic Engagement Frameworks and Strategic Leadership Practices for Organization Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Susheel Chhabra: “In recent years, the engagement of stakeholders has become imperative for the overall success of an organization. As the global business landscape continues to evolve, promoting modern leadership techniques and engagement with the community have become two key tactics for organizations to remain competitive in the current market. Understanding and implementing these methodologies is pivotal for professionals and researchers around the globe.

Civic Engagement Frameworks and Strategic Leadership Practices for Organization Development is a critical reference source that provides vital research on the implementation of strategic leadership techniques for promoting civic engagement and sustaining organizational success. While highlighting topics such as social media strategies, analytical tools, and ethical interventions, this book is ideally designed for managers, executives, politicians, researchers, business specialists, government professionals, consultants, academicians, and students seeking current research on the use of civic engagement and strategic leadership initiatives for the overall development of organizations….(More)”.

France asks its citizens how to meet its climate-change targets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist on “An experiment in consultative democracy”: “A nurse, a roofer, an electrician, a former fireman, a lycée pupil, a photographer, a teacher, a marketing manager, an entrepreneur and a civil servant. Sitting on red velvet benches in a domed art-deco amphitheatre in Paris, they and 140 colleagues are part of an unusual democratic experiment in a famously centralised country. Their mission: to draw up measures to reduce French greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030, in line with an eu target that is otherwise in danger of being missed (and which the European Commission now wants to tighten). Six months ago, none of them had met. Now, they have just one month left to show that they can reinvent the French democratic process—and help save the planet. “It’s our moment,” Sylvain, one of the delegates, tells his colleagues from the podium. “We have the chance to propose something historic.”

On March 6th the “citizens’ climate convention” was due to begin its penultimate three-day sitting, the sixth since it began work last October. The convention is made up of a representative sample of the French population, selected by randomly generated telephone numbers. President Emmanuel Macron devised it in an attempt to calm the country after the gilets jaunes (yellow jackets) crisis of 2018. In response to the demand for less top-down decision-making, he first launched what he grandly called a “great national debate”, which took place a year ago. He also pledged the creation of a citizens’ assembly. It is designed to focus on precisely the conundrum that provoked the original protests against a rise in the carbon tax on motor fuel: how to make green policy palatable, efficient and fair.Already signed up?…(More)”.