UK’s Digital Strategy


Executive Summary: “This government’s Plan for Britain is a plan to build a stronger, fairer country that works for everyone, not just the privileged few. …Our digital strategy now develops this further, applying the principles outlined in the Industrial Strategy green paper to the digital economy. The UK has a proud history of digital innovation: from the earliest days of computing to the development of the World Wide Web, the UK has been a cradle for inventions which have changed the world. And from Ada Lovelace – widely recognised as the first computer programmer – to the pioneers of... (More >)

Facebook artificial intelligence spots suicidal users


Leo Kelion at BBC News: “Facebook has begun using artificial intelligence to identify members that may be at risk of killing themselves. The social network has developed algorithms that spot warning signs in users’ posts and the comments their friends leave in response. After confirmation by Facebook’s human review team, the company contacts those thought to be at risk of self-harm to suggest ways they can seek help. A suicide helpline chief said the move was “not just helpful but critical”. The tool is being tested only in the US at present. It marks the first use of AI... (More >)

Denmark is appointing an ambassador to big tech


Matthew Hughes in The Next Web: “Question: Is Facebook a country? It sounds silly, but when you think about it, it does have many attributes in common with nation states. For starters, it’s got a population that’s bigger than that of India, and its 2016 revenue wasn’t too far from Estonia’s GDP. It also has a ‘national ethos’. If America’s philosophy is capitalism, Cuba’s is communism, and Sweden’s is social democracy, Facebook’s is ‘togetherness’, as corny as that may sound. Given all of the above, is it really any surprise that Denmark is considering appointing a ‘big tech ambassador’... (More >)

Big and open data are prompting a reform of scientific governance


Sabina Leonelli in Times Higher Education: “Big data are widely seen as a game-changer in scientific research, promising new and efficient ways to produce knowledge. And yet, large and diverse data collections are nothing new – they have long existed in fields such as meteorology, astronomy and natural history. What, then, is all the fuss about? In my recent book, I argue that the true revolution is in the status accorded to data as research outputs in their own right. Along with this has come an emphasis on open data as crucial to excellent and reliable science. Previously –... (More >)

Human Decisions and Machine Predictions


NBER Working Paper by Jon Kleinberg, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Jure Leskovec, Jens Ludwig, and Sendhil Mullainatha: “We examine how machine learning can be used to improve and understand human decision-making. In particular, we focus on a decision that has important policy consequences. Millions of times each year, judges must decide where defendants will await trial—at home or in jail. By law, this decision hinges on the judge’s prediction of what the defendant would do if released. This is a promising machine learning application because it is a concrete prediction task for which there is a large volume of data available.... (More >)

How a Political Scientist Knows What Our Enemies Will Do (Often Before They Do)


Article by the National Academy of Sciences, part of a series, From Research to Reward, seeking to demonstrate how advances in our understanding of natural processes often lead to surprising and remarkable benefits for society: “…From the time of quills and cannons to our era of cyber-attacks and drone warfare, mathematics has been crucial to national security. Equations ensure missiles land on the right target, combat materials hold up on the battlefield, and secrets stay locked in code. But when it comes to the human side of conflict—decisions people make about when, how, and why to use these tools—professionals... (More >)

Mapping open data governance models: Who makes decisions about government data and how?


Ana Brandusescu, Danny Lämmerhirt and Stefaan Verhulst call for a systematic and comparative investigation of the different governance models for open data policy and publication…. “An important value proposition behind open data involves increased transparency and accountability of governance. Yet little is known about how open data itself is governed. Who decides and how? How accountable are data holders to both the demand side and policy makers? How do data producers and actors assure the quality of government data? Who, if any, are data stewards within government tasked to make its data open? Getting a better understanding of open... (More >)

Corporate Social Responsibility for a Data Age


Stefaan G. Verhulst in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Proprietary data can help improve and save lives, but fully harnessing its potential will require a cultural transformation in the way companies, governments, and other organizations treat and act on data…. We live, as it is now common to point out, in an era of big data. The proliferation of apps, social media, and e-commerce platforms, as well as sensor-rich consumer devices like mobile phones, wearable devices, commercial cameras, and even cars generate zettabytes of data about the environment and about us. Yet much of the most valuable data resides... (More >)

The value of crowdsourcing in public policymaking: epistemic, democratic and economic value


Tanja Aitamurto & Kaiping Chen in The Theory and Practice of Legislation: “While national and local governments increasingly deploy crowdsourcing in lawmaking as an open government practice, it remains unclear how crowdsourcing creates value when it is applied in policymaking. Therefore, in this article, we examine value creation in crowdsourcing for public policymaking. We introduce a framework for analysing value creation in public policymaking in the following three dimensions: democratic, epistemic and economic. Democratic value is created by increasing transparency, accountability, inclusiveness and deliberation in crowdsourced policymaking. Epistemic value is developed when crowdsourcing serves as a knowledge search mechanism... (More >)

Information for accountability: Transparency and citizen engagement for improved service delivery in education systems


Lindsay Read and Tamar Manuelyan Atinc at Brookings: “There is a wide consensus among policymakers and practitioners that while access to education has improved significantly for many children in low- and middle-income countries, learning has not kept pace. A large amount of research that has attempted to pinpoint the reasons behind this quality deficit in education has revealed that providing extra resources such as textbooks, learning materials, and infrastructure is largely ineffective in improving learning outcomes at the system level without accompanying changes to the underlying structures of education service delivery and associated systems of accountability. Information is a... (More >)