Missions with Impact: A practical guide to formulating effective missions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Guide by the Bertelsmann Stiftung: “The complex challenges associated with sustainability transitions pose major problems for modern political systems and raise the question of whether new ways of negotiation, decision-making and implementation are needed to address these challenges. For example, given the broad-reaching effects of an issue like climate change on diverse aspects of daily life, policy fields and action areas, conventional solutions are unlikely to prove effective.

Mission orientation proves to be a promising approach for addressing cross-cutting thematic challenges. It involves formulating well-defined “missions” intended to direct innovation, economic activities and societal initiatives toward desired outcomes. These missions aim for transformational change, targeting fundamental shifts that extend beyond the usual political timelines to ensure enduring impact. Across several OECD countries and at the EU level, initiatives embracing a mission-oriented approach are gaining momentum. For instance, the EU’s mission of “100 climate-neutral cities” exemplifies this approach by exploring new pathways to achieve climate neutrality by 2030. Here, stakeholders from diverse sectors can get involved to help generate effective solutions targeting the objective of climate neutrality…(More)”.

In the Land of the Unreal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Lisa Messeri: “In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race…(More)”.

Japan’s push to make all research open access is taking shape

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Dalmeet Singh Chawla: “The Japanese government is pushing ahead with a plan to make Japan’s publicly funded research output free to read. In June, the science ministry will assign funding to universities to build the infrastructure needed to make research papers free to read on a national scale. The move follows the ministry’s announcement in February that researchers who receive government funding will be required to make their papers freely available to read on the institutional repositories from April 2025.

The Japanese plan “is expected to enhance the long-term traceability of research information, facilitate secondary research and promote collaboration”, says Kazuki Ide, a health-sciences and public-policy scholar at Osaka University in Suita, Japan, who has written about open access in Japan.

The nation is one of the first Asian countries to make notable advances towards making more research open access (OA) and among the first countries in the world to forge a nationwide plan for OA.

The plan follows in the footsteps of the influential Plan S, introduced six years ago by a group of research funders in the United States and Europe known as cOAlition S, to accelerate the move to OA publishing. The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely available from 2026…(More)”.

21st Century technology can boost Africa’s contribution to global biodiversity data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Wiida Fourie-Basson: “In spring in the Southern hemisphere, the natural world is on full throttle: “Flowers are blooming, insects are emerging, birds are singing, and reptiles are coming out of their winter hibernation,” wrote Pete Crowcroft, known as @possumpete on the citizen science app, iNaturalist.

Yet, despite this annual bursting forth of life, a 2023 preprint puts the continent’s contribution to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility at a dismal 2.69%, with huge disparities between African countries…

Since its formation in 2008 as part of a graduate project at the University of California, the iNaturalist platform has evolved into one of the world’s most popular biodiversity observation platforms. Anyone, anywhere in the world, with a smartphone can download the app and start posting images and descriptions of their observations, and a large community of identifiers helps to confirm the species’ observation and label it as “research grade”.

Rebelo says iNaturalist is now used on a massive scale: “During the 2023 City Nature Challenge almost 67,000 people made nearly two million observations over four days – that is, five observations each second. Another 22,000 specialists identified 60 thousand species of animals, plants, and fungi. Few citizen science platforms are as powerful and efficient.”..

Andra Waagmeester, data scientist at Micelio in Belgium and a Wikimentor, believes the dearth of biodiversity data from Africa can be solved by combining the iNaturalist and Wikipedia communities: “They are independent communities, but there is substantial overlap between them. By overlaying the two data sets and leveraging the semantic web, we have the means to deal with the challenge.”

The need for biodiversity-related knowledge from Africa was first acknowledged by the Wiki-community during the 2018 Wikimania conference in Cape Town. The Wiki Biodiversity Project has since grown into an active global community that leverages crowd-sourced knowledge from platforms like iNaturalist…(More)”.

Training new teachers with digital simulations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Susan McKinnon Foundation: “This report shows the findings of a rapid review of the global literature on immersive simulation for teacher preparation. It finds that immersive digital simulations – and corresponding supports – can create significant positive shifts in trainee teacher skills, knowledge, and self-efficacy. The evidence is strong; of the 35 articles in our review, 30 studies show positive improvements in trainee teacher outcomes. The 30 studies showing positive effects include studies with rigorous designs, including a comprehensive systematic review with many well designed randomised controlled studies (the ‘gold standard’ of research). Benefits are seen across a range of teaching skills, from classroom management and teaching instruction through to better communication skills with parents and colleagues.


Six active ingredients in the implementation of digital simulations are important. This includes incorporating opportunities for: [1] instructional coaching, [2] feedback, [3] observation, [4] visual examples or models of best practice, [5] high dosage, that is, practicing many times over and [6]
strong underpinning theory and content… (More)”.

Generative AI and Democracy: Impacts and Interventions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Demos (UK): “This week’s election announcement has set all political parties firmly into campaign mode and over the next 40 days the public will be weighing up who will get their vote on 4th July.

This democratic moment, however, will take place against the backdrop of a new and largely untested threat; generative-AI. In the lead up to the election, the strength of our electoral integrity is likely to be tested by the spread of AI-generated content and deepfakes – an issue that over 60% of the public are concerned about, according to recent Demos and Full Fact polling.

Our new paper takes a look at the near and long-term solutions at our disposal for bolstering the resilience of our democratic institutions amidst the modern technological age. We explore the top four pressing mechanisms by which generative-AI challenges the stability of democracy, and how to mitigate them…(More)”.

AI Chatbot Credited With Preventing Suicide. Should It Be?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Samantha Cole: “A recent Stanford study lauds AI companion app Replika for “halting suicidal ideation” for several people who said they felt suicidal. But the study glosses over years of reporting that Replika has also been blamed for throwing users into mental health crises, to the point that its community of users needed to share suicide prevention resources with each other.

The researchers sent a survey of 13 open-response questions to 1006 Replika users who were 18 years or older and students, and who’d been using the app for at least one month. The survey asked about their lives, their beliefs about Replika and their connections to the chatbot, and how they felt about what Replika does for them. Participants were recruited “randomly via email from a list of app users,” according to the study. On Reddit, a Replika user posted a notice they received directly from Replika itself, with an invitation to take part in “an amazing study about humans and artificial intelligence.”

Almost all of the participants reported being lonely, and nearly half were severely lonely. “It is not clear whether this increased loneliness was the cause of their initial interest in Replika,” the researchers wrote. 

The surveys revealed that 30 people credited Replika with saving them from acting on suicidal ideation: “Thirty participants, without solicitation, stated that Replika stopped them from attempting suicide,” the paper said. One participant wrote in their survey: “My Replika has almost certainly on at least one if not more occasions been solely responsible for me not taking my own life.” …(More)”.

The not-so-silent type: Vulnerabilities across keyboard apps reveal keystrokes to network eavesdroppers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Jeffrey Knockel, Mona Wang, and Zoë Reichert: “Typing logographic languages such as Chinese is more difficult than typing alphabetic languages, where each letter can be represented by one key. There is no way to fit the tens of thousands of Chinese characters that exist onto a single keyboard. Despite this obvious challenge, technologies have developed which make typing in Chinese possible. To enable the input of Chinese characters, a writer will generally use a keyboard app with an “Input Method Editor” (IME). IMEs offer a variety of approaches to inputting Chinese characters, including via handwriting, voice, and optical character recognition (OCR). One popular phonetic input method is Zhuyin, and shape or stroke-based input methods such as Cangjie or Wubi are commonly used as well. However, used by nearly 76% of mainland Chinese keyboard users, the most popular way of typing in Chinese is the pinyin method, which is based on the pinyin romanization of Chinese characters.

All of the keyboard apps we analyze in this report fall into the category of input method editors (IMEs) that offer pinyin input. These keyboard apps are particularly interesting because they have grown to accommodate the challenge of allowing users to type Chinese characters quickly and easily. While many keyboard apps operate locally, solely within a user’s device, IME-based keyboard apps often have cloud features which enhance their functionality. Because of the complexities of predicting which characters a user may want to type next, especially in logographic languages like Chinese, IMEs often offer “cloud-based” prediction services which reach out over the network. Enabling “cloud-based” features in these apps means that longer strings of syllables that users type will be transmitted to servers elsewhere. As many have previously pointed out, “cloud-based” keyboards and input methods can function as vectors for surveillance and essentially behave as keyloggers. While the content of what users type is traveling from their device to the cloud, it is additionally vulnerable to network attackers if not properly secured. This report is not about how operators of cloud-based IMEs read users’ keystrokes, which is a phenomenon that has already been extensively studied and documented. This report is primarily concerned with the issue of protecting this sensitive data from network eavesdroppers…(More)”.

A New National Purpose: Harnessing Data for Health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Tony Blair Institute: “We are at a pivotal moment where the convergence of large health and biomedical data sets, artificial intelligence and advances in biotechnology is set to revolutionise health care, drive economic growth and improve the lives of citizens. And the UK has strengths in all three areas. The immense potential of the UK’s health-data assets, from the NHS to biobanks and genomics initiatives, can unlock new diagnostics and treatments, deliver better and more personalised care, prevent disease and ultimately help people live longer, healthier lives.

However, realising this potential is not without its challenges. The complex and fragmented nature of the current health-data landscape, coupled with legitimate concerns around privacy and public trust, has made for slow progress. The UK has had a tendency to provide short-term funding across multiple initiatives, which has led to an array of individual projects – many of which have struggled to achieve long-term sustainability and deliver tangible benefits to patients.

To overcome these challenges, it will be necessary to be bold and imaginative. We must look for ways to leverage the unique strengths of the NHS, such as its nationwide reach and cradle-to-grave data coverage, to create a health-data ecosystem that is much more than the sum of its many parts. This will require us to think differently about how we collect, manage and utilise health data, and to create new partnerships and models of collaboration that break down traditional silos and barriers. It will mean treating data as a key health resource and managing it accordingly.

One model to do this is the proposed sovereign National Data Trust (NDT) – an endeavour to streamline access to and curation of the UK’s valuable health-data assets…(More)”.

AI-enabled Peacekeeping Tech for the Digital Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “There are countless organisations and government agencies working to resolve conflicts around the globe, but they often lack the tools to know if they are making the right decisions. Project Didi is developing those technological tools – helping peacemakers plan appropriately and understand the impact of their actions in real time.

Project Didi Co-founder and CCO Gabe Freund explained to Springwise that the project uses machine learning, big data, and AI to analyse conflicts and “establish a new standard for best practice when it comes to decision-making in the world of peacebuilding.”

In essence, the company is attempting to analyse the many factors that are involved in conflict in order to identify a ‘ripe moment’ when both parties will be willing to negotiate for peace. The tools can track the impact and effect of all actors across a conflict. This allows them to identify and create connections between organisations and people who are doing similar work, amplifying their effects…(More)” See also: Project Didi (Kluz Prize)