AI often mangles African languages. Local scientists and volunteers are taking it back to school

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Sandeep Ravindran: “Imagine joyfully announcing to your Facebook friends that your wife gave birth, and having Facebook automatically translate your words to “my prostitute gave birth.” Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Porto, says that’s what happened to a friend when Facebook’s English translation mangled the nativity news he shared in his native language, Hausa.

Such errors in artificial intelligence (AI) translation are common with African languages. AI may be increasingly ubiquitous, but if you’re from the Global South, it probably doesn’t speak your language.

That means Google Translate isn’t much help, and speech recognition tools such as Siri or Alexa can’t understand you. All of these services rely on a field of AI known as natural language processing (NLP), which allows AI to “understand” a language. The overwhelming majority of the world’s 7000 or so languages lack data, tools, or techniques for NLP, making them “low-resourced,” in contrast with a handful of “high-resourced” languages such as English, French, German, Spanish, and Chinese.

Hausa is the second most spoken African language, with an estimated 60 million to 80 million speakers, and it’s just one of more than 2000 African languages that are mostly absent from AI research and products. The few products available don’t work as well as those for English, notes Graham Neubig, an NLP researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s not the people who speak the languages making the technology.” More often the technology simply doesn’t exist. “For example, now you cannot talk to Siri in Hausa, because there is no data set to train Siri,” Muhammad says.

He is trying to fill that gap with a project he co-founded called HausaNLP, one of several launched within the past few years to develop AI tools for African languages…(More)”.

Evidence-based policymaking in the legislatures

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Ville Aula: “Evidence-based policymaking is a popular approach to policy that has received widespread public attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as in the fight against climate change. It argues that policy choices based on rigorous, preferably scientific evidence should be given priority over choices based on other types of justification. However, delegating policymaking solely to researchers goes against the idea that policies are determined democratically.

In my recent article published in Policy & Politics: Evidence-based policymaking in the legislatures we explored the tension between politics and evidence in the national legislatures. While evidence-based policymaking has been extensively studied within governments, the legislative arena has received much less attention. The focus of the study was on understanding how legislators, legislative committees, and political parties together shape the use of evidence. We also wanted to explore how the interviewees understand timeliness and relevance of evidence, because lack of time is a key challenge within legislatures. The study is based on 39 interviews with legislators, party employees, and civil servants in Eduskunta, the national Parliament of Finland.

Our findings show that, in Finland, political parties play a key role in collecting, processing, and brokering evidence within legislatures. Finnish political parties maintain detailed policy programmes that guide their work in the legislature. The programmes are often based on extensive consultations with expert networks of the party and evidence collection from key stakeholders. Political parties are not ready to review these programmes every time new evidence is offered to them. This reluctance can give the appearance that parties do not want to follow evidence. Nevertheless, reluctance is oftens necessary for political parties to maintain stable policy platforms while navigating uncertainty amidst competing sources of evidence. Party positions can be based on extensive evidence and expertise even if some other sources of evidence contradict them.

Partisan expert networks and policy experts employed by political parties in particular appear to be crucial in formulating the evidence-base of policy programmes. The findings suggest that these groups should be a new target audience for evidence brokering. Yet political parties, their employees, and their networks have rarely been considered in research on evidence-based policymaking.

Turning to the question of timeliness we found, as expected, that use of evidence in the Parliament of Finland is driven by short-term reactiveness. However, in our study, we also found that short-term reactiveness and the notion of timeliness can refer to time windows ranging from months to weeks and, sometimes, merely days. The common recommendation by policy scholars to boost uptake of evidence by making it timely and relevant is therefore far from simple…(More)”.

The Adoption and Implementation of Artificial Intelligence Chatbots in Public Organizations: Evidence from U.S. State Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tzuhao Chen, Mila Gascó-Hernandez, and Marc Esteve: “Although the use of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots in public organizations has increased in recent years, three crucial gaps remain unresolved. First, little empirical evidence has been produced to examine the deployment of chatbots in government contexts. Second, existing research does not distinguish clearly between the drivers of adoption and the determinants of success and, therefore, between the stages of adoption and implementation. Third, most current research does not use a multidimensional perspective to understand the adoption and implementation of AI in government organizations. Our study addresses these gaps by exploring the following question: what determinants facilitate or impede the adoption and implementation of chatbots in the public sector? We answer this question by analyzing 22 state agencies across the U.S.A. that use chatbots. Our analysis identifies ease of use and relative advantage of chatbots, leadership and innovative culture, external shock, and individual past experiences as the main drivers of the decisions to adopt chatbots. Further, it shows that different types of determinants (such as knowledge-base creation and maintenance, technology skills and system crashes, human and financial resources, cross-agency interaction and communication, confidentiality and safety rules and regulations, and citizens’ expectations, and the COVID-19 crisis) impact differently the adoption and implementation processes and, therefore, determine the success of chatbots in a different manner. Future research could focus on the interaction among different types of determinants for both adoption and implementation, as well as on the role of specific stakeholders, such as IT vendors…(More)”.

Rules of Order: Assessing the State of Global Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stewart Patrick: “The current disorder has multiple causes, although their relative weight can be debated. They include intensifying strategic competition between the United States and China, two superpowers with dramatically different world order visions and clashing material interests; Russia’s brazen assault against its neighbor, resulting in the most serious armed conflict in Europe since World War II; an ongoing diffusion of power from advanced market democracies to emerging nations with diverse preferences, combined with resistance from established powers against accommodating them in multilateral institutions; a widespread retreat from turbocharged globalization, as national governments seek to claw back autonomy from market forces to pursue industrial, social, national security, and other policies and, in some cases, to weaponize interdependence; growing alienation between richer and poorer nations, exacerbated by accelerating climate change and stalled development; a global democratic recession now in its seventeenth year that has left no democracy unscathed; and a resurgence of sovereignty-minded nationalism that calls on governments to take back control from forces blamed for undermining national security, prosperity, and identity. (The “America First” ethos of Donald Trump’s presidency, which rejected the tenets of post-1945 U.S. internationalism, is but the most prominent recent example.) In sum, the crisis of cooperation is as much a function of the would-be global problem-solvers as it is a function of the problems themselves.

Given these centrifugal tendencies, is there any hope for a renewed open, rules-based world order? As a first step in answering this question, this paper surveys areas of global convergence and divergence on principles and rules of state conduct across fourteen major global issue areas. These are grouped into four categories: (1) rules to promote basic stability and peaceful coexistence by reducing the specter of violence; (2) rules to facilitate economic exchange and prosperity; (3) rules to promote cooperation on transnational and even planetary challenges like climate change, pandemics, the global commons, and the regulation of cutting-edge technologies; and (4) rules that seek to embed liberal values, particularly principles of democracy and human rights, in the international sphere. This stocktaking reveals significant preference diversity and normative disagreement among nations in both emerging and long-established spheres of interdependence. Ideally, this brief survey will give global policymakers a better sense of what, collectively, they are up against—and perhaps even suggest ways to bridge existing differences…(More)”

Computing the Climate: How We Know What We Know About Climate Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Steve M. Easterbrook: “How do we know that climate change is an emergency? How did the scientific community reach this conclusion all but unanimously, and what tools did they use to do it? This book tells the story of climate models, tracing their history from nineteenth-century calculations on the effects of greenhouse gases, to modern Earth system models that integrate the atmosphere, the oceans, and the land using the full resources of today’s most powerful supercomputers. Drawing on the author’s extensive visits to the world’s top climate research labs, this accessible, non-technical book shows how computer models help to build a more complete picture of Earth’s climate system. ‘Computing the Climate’ is ideal for anyone who has wondered where the projections of future climate change come from – and why we should believe them…(More)”.

Wastewater monitoring: ‘the James Webb Telescope for population health’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Exemplars News: “When the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a lockdown across Bangladesh and her research on environmental exposure to heavy metals became impossible to continue, Dr. Rehnuma Haque began a search for some way she could contribute to the pandemic response.

“I knew I had to do something during COVID,” said Dr. Haque, a research scientist at the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b). “I couldn’t just sit at home.”

Then she stumbled upon articles on early wastewater monitoring efforts for COVID in Australia, the Netherlands, Italy, and the United States. “When I read those papers, I was so excited,” said Dr. Haque. “I emailed my supervisor, Dr. Mahbubur Rahman, and said, ‘Can we do this?’”

Two months later, in June 2020, Dr. Haque and her colleagues had launched one of the most robust and earliest national wastewater surveillance programs for COVID in a low- or middle-income country (LMIC).

The initiative, which has now been expanded to monitor for cholera, salmonella, and rotavirus and may soon be expanded further to monitor for norovirus and antibiotic resistance, demonstrates the power and potential of wastewater surveillance to serve as a low-cost tool for obtaining real-time meaningful health data at scale to identify emerging risks and guide public health responses.

“It is improving public health outcomes,” said Dr. Haque. “We can see everything going on in the community through wastewater surveillance. You can find everything you are looking for and then prepare a response.”

A single wastewater sample can yield representative data about an entire ward, town, or county and allow LMICs to monitor for emerging pathogens. Compared with clinical monitoring, wastewater monitoring is easier and cheaper to collect, can capture infections that are asymptomatic or before symptoms arise, raises fewer ethical concerns, can be more inclusive and not as prone to sampling biases, can generate a broader range of data, and is unrivaled at quickly generating population-level data…(More)” – See also: The #Data4Covid19 Review

The planet is too important to be left to activists: The guiding philosophy of the Climate Majority Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jadzia Tedeschi and Rupert Read: “Increasing numbers of people around the world are convinced that human civilisation is teetering on the brink, but that our political “leaders” aren’t levelling with us about just how dire the climate outlook is. Quite a few of us are beginning to imagine collapse. And yet, for the most part, the responses available to individuals who want to take action seem to be limited to either consumer choices (minimising the amount of plastics we buy, using reusable coffee cups, recycling, and so on) or radical protests (such as gluing oneself to roads at busy intersections, disrupting sports matches, splashing soup on priceless art works, and risking imprisonment).

But there must be a space for action between these two alternatives. While the radical tactics of the Extinction Rebellion movement (XR) did succeed in nudging the public conversation concerning the climate and biodiversity crisis toward a new degree of seriousness, these same tactics also alienated people who would otherwise be sympathetic to XR’s cause and managed to give “climate activists” a bad name in the process. To put it simply, the radical tactics of XR could never achieve the kind of broad-based consensus that is needed to meaningfully respond to the current crisis.

We need a coordinated, collective effort at scale, which entails collaborating across social boundaries and political battlelines. If we are to prevent irrecoverable civilisational collapse, we need to demonstrate that taking care of the natural world is in everybody’s interest.

The Climate Majority Project works to inspire, fund, connect, coordinate, and scale citizen-led initiatives in workplaces, local communities, and strategic professional networks to reach beyond the boundaries of activism-as-usual. It is our endeavour to instantiate the kind of ambitious, moderate flank to XR that Rupert Read has previously called for. The plan is to prove the concept in the UK and then go global — albeit at a slower pace; after all, moderation is rarely adorned with fireworks…(More)”.

The danger of building strong narratives on weak data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by John Burn-Murdoch: “Measuring gross domestic product is extremely complicated. Around the world, national statistics offices are struggling to get the sums right the first time around.

Some struggle more than others. When Ireland first reported its estimate for GDP growth in Q1 2015, it came in at 1.4 per cent. One year later, and with some fairly unique distortions due to its location as headquarters for many US big tech and pharma companies, this was revised upwards to an eye-watering 21.4 per cent.

On average, five years after an estimate of quarterly Irish GDP growth is first published, the latest revision of that figure is two full percentage points off the original value. The equivalent for the UK is almost 10 times smaller at 0.25 percentage points, making the ONS’s initial estimates among the most accurate in the developed world, narrowly ahead of the US at 0.26 and well ahead of the likes of Japan (0.46) and Norway (0.56).

But it’s not just the size of revisions that matters, it’s the direction. Out of 24 developed countries that consistently report quarterly GDP revisions to the OECD, the UK’s initial estimates are the most pessimistic. Britain’s quarterly growth figures typically end up 0.15 percentage points higher than first thought. The Germans go up by 0.07 on average, the French by 0.04, while the Americans, ever optimistic, typically end up revising their estimates down by 0.11 percentage points.

In other words, next time you hear a set of quarterly growth figures, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to mentally add 0.15 to the UK one and subtract 0.11 from the US.

This may all sound like nerdy detail, but it matters because people graft strong narratives on to this remarkably flimsy data. Britain was the only G7 economy yet to rebound past pre-Covid levels until it wasn’t. Ireland is booming, apparently, except its actual individual consumption per capita — a much better measure of living standards than GDP — has fallen steadily from just above the western European average in 2007 to 10 per cent below last year.

And the phenomenon is not exclusive to economic data. Two years ago, progressives critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic took to calling the UK “Plague Island”, citing Britain’s reported Covid death rates, which were among the highest in the developed world. But with the benefit of hindsight, we know that Britain was simply better at counting its deaths than most countries…(More)”

Developing Wearable Technologies to Advance Understanding of Precision Environmental Health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “The rapid proliferation of wearable devices that gather data on physical activity and physiology has become commonplace across various sectors of society. Concurrently, the development of advanced wearables and sensors capable of detecting a multitude of compounds presents new opportunities for monitoring environmental exposure risks. Wearable technologies are additionally showing promise in disease prediction, detection, and management, thereby offering potential advancements in the interdisciplinary fields of both environmental health and biomedicine.

To gain insight into this burgeoning field, on June 1 and 2, 2023, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine organized a 2-day virtual workshop titled Developing Wearable Technologies to Advance Understanding of Precision Environmental Health. Experts from government, industry, and academia convened to discuss emerging applications and the latest advances in wearable technologies. The workshop aimed to explore the potential of wearables in capturing, monitoring, and predicting environmental exposures and risks to inform precision environmental health…(More)”.

The Importance of Purchase to Plate Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Andrea Carlson and Thea Palmer Zimmerman: “…Because there can be economic and social barriers to maintaining a healthy diet, USDA promotes Food and Nutrition Security so that everyone has consistent and equitable access to healthy, safe, and affordable foods that promote optimal health and well-being. A set of data tools called the Purchase to Plate Suite (PPS) supports these goals by enabling the update of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), which estimates how much a budget-conscious family of four needs to spend on groceries to ensure a healthy diet. The TFP market basket – consisting of the specific amounts of various food categories required by the plan – forms the basis of the maximum allotment for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the “Food Stamps” program), which provided financial support towards the cost of groceries for over 41 million individuals in almost 22 million households in fiscal year 2022.

The 2018 Farm Act (Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018) requires that USDA reevaluate the TFP every five years using current food composition, consumption patterns, dietary guidance, and food prices, and using approved scientific methods. USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) was charged with estimating the current food prices using retail food scanner data (Levin et al. 2018; Muth et al. 2016) and utilized the PPS for this task. The most recent TFP update was released in August 2021 and the revised cost of the market basket was the first non-inflation adjustment increase in benefits for SNAP in over 40 years (US Department of Agriculture 2021).

The PPS combines datasets to enhance research related to the economics of food and nutrition. There are four primary components of the suite:

  • Purchase to Plate Crosswalk (PPC),
  • Purchase to Plate Price Tool (PPPT),
  • Purchase to Plate National Average Prices (PP-NAP) for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), and
  • Purchase to Plate Ingredient Tool (PPIT)..(More)”