(US) Administration Announces New “Smart Cities” Initiative to Help Communities Tackle Local Challenges and Improve City Services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Factsheet from the White House: “Today, the Administration is announcing a new “Smart Cities” Initiative that will invest over $160 million in federal research and leverage more than 25 new technology collaborations to help local communities tackle key challenges such as reducing traffic congestion, fighting crime, fostering economic growth, managing the effects of a changing climate, and improving the delivery of city services. The new initiative is part of this Administration’s overall commitment to target federal resources to meet local needs and support community-led solutions.

Over the past six years, the Administration has pursued a place-based approach to working with communities as they tackle a wide range of challenges, from investing in infrastructure and filling open technology jobs to bolstering community policing. Advances in science and technology have the potential to accelerate these efforts. An emerging community of civic leaders, data scientists, technologists, and companies are joining forces to build “Smart Cities” – communities that are building an infrastructure to continuously improve the collection, aggregation, and use of data to improve the life of their residents – by harnessing the growing data revolution, low-cost sensors, and research collaborations, and doing so securely to protect safety and privacy.

As part of the initiative, the Administration is announcing:

  • More than $35 million in new grants and over $10 million in proposed investments to build a research infrastructure for Smart Cities by the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology.
  • Nearly $70 million in new spending and over $45 million in proposed investments to unlock new solutions in safety, energy, climate preparedness, transportation, health and more, by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
  • More than 20 cities participating in major new multi-city collaborations that will help city leaders effectively collaborate with universities and industry.

Today, the Administration is also hosting a White House Smart Cities Forum, coinciding with Smart Cities Week hosted by the Smart Cities Council, to highlight new steps and brainstorm additional ways that science and technology can support municipal efforts.

The Administration’s Smart Cities Initiative will begin with a focus on key strategies:

  • Creating test beds for “Internet of Things” applications and developing new multi-sector collaborative models: Technological advancements and the diminishing cost of IT infrastructure have created the potential for an “Internet of Things,” a ubiquitous network of connected devices, smart sensors, and big data analytics. The United States has the opportunity to be a global leader in this field, and cities represent strong potential test beds for development and deployment of Internet of Things applications. Successfully deploying these and other new approaches often depends on new regional collaborations among a diverse array of public and private actors, including industry, academia, and various public entities.
  • Collaborating with the civic tech movement and forging intercity collaborations: There is a growing community of individuals, entrepreneurs, and nonprofits interested in harnessing IT to tackle local problems and work directly with city governments. These efforts can help cities leverage their data to develop new capabilities. Collaborations across communities are likewise indispensable for replicating what works in new places.
  • Leveraging existing Federal activity: From research on sensor networks and cybersecurity to investments in broadband infrastructure and intelligent transportation systems, the Federal government has an existing portfolio of activities that can provide a strong foundation for a Smart Cities effort.
  • Pursuing international collaboration: Fifty-four percent of the world’s population live in urban areas. Continued population growth and urbanization will add 2.5 billion people to the world’s urban population by 2050. The associated climate and resource challenges demand innovative approaches. Products and services associated with this market present a significant export opportunity for the U.S., since almost 90 percent of this increase will occur in Africa and Asia.

Complementing this effort, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is examining how a variety of technologies can enhance the future of cities and the quality of life for urban residents. The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program is also announcing the release of a new framework to help coordinate Federal agency investments and outside collaborations that will guide foundational research and accelerate the transition into scalable and replicable Smart City approaches. Finally, the Administration’s growing work in this area is reflected in the Science and Technology Priorities Memo, issued by the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Science and Technology Policy in preparation for the President’s 2017 budget proposal, which includes a focus on cyber-physical systems and Smart Cities….(More)”

Syria refugees tap in to legal advice by text

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hannah Kuchler in the Financial Times: “Syrian refugees can now access free legal advice by text message after a Palestinian start-up launched a service in Turkey, which it hopes to expand to reach refugees across Europe.

Refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria can receive legal guidance via their mobile phones on everything from whether they have the right to work to education services available for their children, after Souktel, a small start-up partnered with the American Bar Association.

The 30-person start-up employs both former humanitarian workers from Oxfam and USAID, who understand the problems faced by refugees, and software engineers who tackle the challenge of sorting, tagging and translating enquiries which are then sent to a team of Turkish lawyers.

Jacob Korenblum, president and chief executive of Souktel, said more than 10,000 individuals have used the service since it launched less than three weeks ago, with lawyers busy answering a steady stream of questions.

“Given the strength and rapid interest in this service and the uptake since its launch, we want to scale into Greece and other European countries to meet the same need,” he said. “This is very much becoming a pan-European problem at the very least.”…

The American Bar Association approached Souktel and asked them to build a service that could offer remote legal support and uses funds from international donors to pay the company….

Smartphones — or even basic mobile phones — have fast become one of the easiest ways of communicating for the poor or dispossessed. Even when basic infrastructure has failed, people are able to access information and connect with relatives abroad via their devices.

Mr Korenblum, a Canadian former aid worker, helped found Souktel after he saw young people in Palestine relying on their mobile devices when working there 10 years ago. The company has built similar services on behalf of humanitarian organisations working in other areas — including the UK’s department for international development in Gaza, Iraq and Somalia, among other places…(More)”

 

A new journal wants to publish your research ideas

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tania Rabesandratana at ScienceInsider: “Do you have a great idea for a study that you want to share with the world? A new journal will gladly publish it. Research Ideas and Outcomes(RIO) will also publish papers on your methods, workflows, data, reports, and software—in short, “all outputs of the research cycle.” RIO, an open-access (OA) journal, was officially launched today and will start accepting submissions in November.

“We’re interested in making the full process of science open,” says RIO founding editor Ross Mounce, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London. Many good research proposals fall by the wayside because funding agencies have limited budgets, Mounce says; RIO is a way to give them another chance. Mounce hopes that funders will use the journal to spot interesting new projects.

Publishing proposals can also help create links between research teams, Mounce says. “Let’s say you’re going to Madagascar for 6 months to sample turtle DNA,” he suggests. ”If you can let other researchers know ahead of time, you can agree to do things together.”

RIO‘s idea to publish research proposals is “exactly what we need if we really want to have open science,” says Iryna Kuchma, the OA program manager at the nonprofit organization Electronic Information for Libraries in Rome. Pensoft, the publishing company behind RIO, is a “strong open-access publishing venue” that has proven its worth with more than a dozen journals in the biodiversity field, Kuchma says.

The big question is, of course: Will researchers want to share promising ideas, at the risk that rivals run with them?…(More)”

‘Airbnb for refugees’ group overwhelmed by offers of help

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at The Guardian: “A German group which matchmakes citizens willing to share their homes with refugees said it had been overwhelmed by offers of support, with plans in the works for similar schemes in other European countries.

The Berlin-based Refugees Welcome, which has been described as an “Airbnb for refugees”, has helped people fleeing from Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria.

More than 780 Germans have signed up to the Refugees Welcome website and 26 people have been placed in private homes so far. Two of the site’s founders, Jonas Kakoschke, 31, and Mareike Geiling, 28, live with 39-year-old Bakari, a refugee from Mali, whom they are helping with German classes while he waits for a work permit.

A spokesman said the project’s growing success has now led to offers of help to set up similar schemes in other EU countries, including Greece, Portugal and the UK, with a comparable project in Austria already up and running since January.

Over the weekend, thousands of Icelanders offered to accommodate Syrian refugees in their own homes in an open letter to the government about the migration crisis….(More)”

How Africa can benefit from the data revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Guardian: “….The modern information infrastructure is about movement of data. From data we derive information and knowledge, and that knowledge can be propagated rapidly across the country and throughout the world. Facebook and Google have both made massive investments in machine learning, the mainstay technology for converting data into knowledge. But the potential for these technologies in Africa is much larger: instead of simply advertising products to people, we can imagine modern distributed health systems, distributed markets, knowledge systems for disease intervention. The modern infrastructure should be data driven and deployed across the mobile network. A single good idea can then be rapidly implemented and distributed via the mobile phone app ecosystems.

The information infrastructure does not require large scale thinking and investment to deliver. In fact, it requires just the reverse. It requires agility and innovation. Larger companies cannot react quickly enough to exploit technological advances. Small companies with a good idea can grow quickly. From IBM to Microsoft, Google and now Facebook. All these companies now agree on one thing: data is where the value lies. Modern internet companies are data-driven from the ground up. Could the same thing happen in Africa’s economies? Can entire countries reformulate their infrastructures to be data-driven from the ground up?

Maybe, or maybe not, but it isn’t necessary to have a grand plan to give it a go. It is already natural to use data and communication to solve real world problems. In Silicon Valley these are the challenges of getting a taxi or reserving a restaurant. In Africa they are often more fundamental. John Quinn has been in Kampala, Uganda at Makerere University for eight years now targeting these challenges. In June this year, John and other researchers from across the region came together for Africa’s first workshop on data science at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology. The objective was to spread knowledge of technologies, ideas and solutions. For the modern information infrastructure to be successful software solutions need to be locally generated. African apps to solve African problems. With this in mind the workshop began with a three day summer school on data science which was then followed by two days of talks on challenges in African data science.

The ideas and solutions presented were cutting edge. The Umati project uses social media to understand the use of ethnic hate speech in Kenya (Sidney Ochieng, iHub, Nairobi). The use of social media for monitoring the evolution and effects of Ebola in west Africa (Nuri Pashwani, IBM Research Africa). The Kudusystem for market making in Ugandan farm produce distribution via SMS messages (Kenneth Bwire, Makerere University, Kampala). Telecommunications data for inferring the source and spread of a typhoid outbreak in Kampala (UN Pulse Lab, Kampala). The Punya system for prototyping and deployment of mobile phone apps to deal with emerging crises or market opportunities (Julius Adebayor, MIT) and large scale systems for collating and sharing data resources Open Data Kenya and UN OCHA Human Data Exchange….(More)”

One way traffic: The open data initiative project and the need for an effective demand side initiative in Ghana

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Frank L. K. Ohemeng and Kwaku Ofosu-Adarkwa in the Government Information Quarterly: “In recent years the necessity for governments to develop new public values of openness and transparency, and thereby increase their citizenries’ sense of inclusiveness, and their trust in and confidence about their governments, has risen to the point of urgency. The decline of trust in governments, especially in developing countries, has been unprecedented and continuous. A new paradigm that signifies a shift to citizen-driven initiatives over and above state- and market-centric ones calls for innovative thinking that requires openness in government. The need for this new synergy notwithstanding, Open Government cannot be considered truly open unless it also enhances citizen participation and engagement. The Ghana Open Data Initiative (GODI) project strives to create an open data community that will enable government (supply side) and civil society in general (demand side) to exchange data and information. We argue that the GODI is too narrowly focused on the supply side of the project, and suggest that it should generate an even platform to improve interaction between government and citizens to ensure a balance in knowledge sharing with and among all constituencies….(More)”

Accur8Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Accur8Africa aims to be the leading platform supporting the accuracy of data in the continent. If we intend to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the next fifteen years, accurate data remains a non-negotiable necessity. Accur8Africa recognizes that nothing less than a data revolution is required. To achieve this we are building the statistical capacity of institutions across Africa and encouraging the use of data-driven decisions alongside better development metrics for key sectors such as gender equality, climate change, equity and social inclusion and health.

Africa has data in abundance but it exists in a fragmented and disorganized manner. As a result, the achievements of the Millennium Development Goals will be largely unquantifiable. As we transition from the MDG’s to the Sustainable Development Goals, and national governments meet to discuss the 17 goals that could transform the world by 2030, we believe that the African Continent deserves better and more accurate data…..Africa has a great role to play in the next fifteen years. The United Nations development agenda has generated momentum for a worldwide “data revolution,” shining a much-needed light on the need for better development data in Africa and elsewhere. Governments, international institutions, and donors need accurate data on basic development metrics such as inflation, vaccination coverage, and school enrolment in order to accurately plan, budget, and evaluate their activities. Governments, citizens, and civil society can then use this data as a “currency” for accountability. When statistical systems function properly, good-quality data are exchanged freely amongst all stakeholders ensuring that funding and development efforts are producing the desired results….(More)”

Weathernews thinks crowdsourcing is the future of weather

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Freedman at Mashable: “The weather forecast of the future will be crowdsourced, if one Japanese weather firm sees its vision fulfilled.

On Monday, Weathernews Inc. of Japan announced a partnership with the Chinese firm Moji to bring Weathernews’ technology to the latter company’s popular MoWeather app.

The benefit for Weathernews, in addition to more users and entry into the Chinese market, is access to more data that can then be turned into weather forecasts.

The company says that this additional user base, when added to its existing users, will make Weathernews “the largest crowdsourced weather service in the world,” with 420 million users across 175 countries.

 

…So far, though, mobile phones have not proven to be more reliable weather sensors than the network of thousands of far more expensive and specialized surface weather observation sites throughout the world, but crowdsourcing’s day in the sun may be close at hand. As Weathernews leaders were quick to point out to Mashable in an interview, the existing weather observing network on which most forecasts rely has significant drawbacks that makes crowdsourcing especially appealing outside the U.S.

For example, most surface weather stations are in wealthy nations, primarily in North America and Europe. There’s a giant forecasting blind spot over much of Africa, where many countries lack a national weather agency. However, these countries do have rapidly growing mobile phone networks that, if utilized in certain ways, could provide a way to fill in data gaps and make weather forecasts more accurate, too.

“At Weathernews, we have a core belief that more weather data is better,” said Weathernews managing director Tomohiro Ishibashi.

“So having access to the additional datasets from MoWeather’s vast user community allows us to provide more accurate and safer weather forecasting for all,” he said. “Our advanced algorithms analyze these new datasets and put them in our existing computer forecasting models.”

Weathernews is trying to use observations that most weather companies might regard as interesting but not worth the effort to tailor for computer modeling. For example, photos of clouds are a potential way to ground truth weather satellite imagery, Ishibashi told Mashable.

“For us the picture of the sky… has a lot of information,” he said. (The company’s website refers to such observations as “eye-servation.”)…

Compared to Weathernews’ ambitions, AccuWeather’s recent decision to incorporate crowdsourced data into its iOS app seems more traditional, like a TV weather forecaster adding a few new “weather watchers” to their station’s network during local television’s heyday in the 1980s and 90s.

Now, we’re all weather watchers….(More)”

Scientists Are Hoarding Data And It’s Ruining Medical Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Goldacre at Buzzfeed: “We like to imagine that science is a world of clean answers, with priestly personnel in white coats, emitting perfect outputs, from glass and metal buildings full of blinking lights.

The reality is a mess. A collection of papers published on Wednesday — on one of the most commonly used medical treatments in the world — show just how bad things have become. But they also give hope.

The papers are about deworming pills that kill parasites in the gut, at extremely low cost. In developing countries, battles over the usefulness of these drugs have become so contentious that some people call them “The Worm Wars.”…

This “deworm everybody” approach has been driven by a single, hugely influential trial published in 2004 by two economists, Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer. This trial, done in Kenya, found that deworming whole schools improved children’s health, school performance, and school attendance. What’s more, these benefits apparently extended to children in schools several miles away, even when those children didn’t get any deworming tablets (presumably, people assumed, by interrupting worm transmission from one child to the next).

A decade later, in 2013, these two economists did something that very few researchers have ever done. They handed over their entire dataset to independent researchers on the other side of the world, so that their analyses could be checked in public. What happened next has every right to kick through a revolution in science and medicine….

This kind of statistical replication is almost vanishingly rare. A recent study set out to find all well-documented cases in which the raw data from a randomized trial had been reanalysed. It found just 37, out of many thousands. What’s more, only five were conducted by entirely independent researchers, people not involved in the original trial.

These reanalyses were more than mere academic fun and games. The ultimate outcomes of the trials changed, with terrifying frequency: One-third of them were so different that the take-home message of the trial shifted.

This matters. Medical trials aren’t conducted out of an abstract philosophical interest, for the intellectual benefit of some rarefied class in ivory towers. Researchers do trials as a service, to find out what works, because they intend to act on the results. It matters that trials get an answer that is not just accurate, but also reliable.

So here we have an odd situation. Independent reanalysis can improve the results of clinical trials, and help us not go down blind alleys, or give the wrong treatment to the wrong people. It’s pretty cheap, compared to the phenomenal administrative cost of conducting a trial. And it spots problems at an alarmingly high rate.

And yet, this kind of independent check is almost never done. Why not? Partly, it’s resources. But more than that, when people do request raw data, all too often the original researchers duck, dive, or simply ignore requests….

Two years ago I published a book on problems in medicine. Front and center in this howl was “publication bias,” the problem of clinical trial results being routinely and legally withheld from doctors, researchers, and patients. The best available evidence — from dozens of studieschasing results for completed trials — shows that around half of all clinical trials fail to report their results. The same is true of industry trials, and academic trials. What’s more, trials with positive results are about twice as likely to post results, so we see a biased half of the literature.

This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine. When half the evidence is withheld, doctors and patients cannot make informed decisions about which treatment is best. When I wrote about this, various people from the pharmaceutical industry cropped up to claim that the problem was all in the past. So I befriended some campaigners, we assembled a group of senior academics, and started the AllTrials.net campaign with one clear message: “All trials must be registered, with their full methods and results reported.”

Dozens of academic studies had been published on the issue, and that alone clearly wasn’t enough. So we started collecting signatures, and we now have more than 85,000 supporters. At the same time we sought out institutional support. Eighty patient groups signed up in the first month, with hundreds more since then. Some of the biggest research funders, and even government bodies, have now signed up.

This week we’re announcing support from a group of 85 pension funds and asset managers, representing more than 3.5 trillion euros in funds, who will be asking the pharma companies they invest in to make plans to ensure that all trials — past, present, and future — report their results properly. Next week, after two years of activity in Europe, we launch our campaign in the U.S….(More)”

Local Governments Need Financial Transparency Tools

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cities of the Future: “Comprehensive financial transparency — allowing anyone to look up the allocation of budgets, expenses by department, and even the ledger of each individual expense as it happens — can help local governments restore residents’ confidence, help manage the budget efficiently and make more informed decisions for new projects and money allocation.

A few weeks ago, we had municipal elections in Spain. Many local governments changed hands and the new administrations had to review the current budgets, see where money was being spent and, on occasion, discovered expenses they were not expecting.

As costs rise and cities find it more difficult to provide the same services without raising taxes, citizens among others are demanding full disclosure of income and expenses.

Tools such as OpenGov platform are helping cities accomplish that goal…Earlier this year the city of Beaufort (pop. 13,000), South Carolina’s second oldest city known for its historic charm and moss-laden oak trees, decided to implement OpenGov. It rolled out the platform to the public last February, becoming the first city in the State to provide the public with in-depth, comprehensive financial data (spanning five budget years).

The reception by the city council and residents was extremely positive. Residents can now look up where their tax money goes down to itemized expenses. They can also see up-to-date charts of every part of the budget, how it is being spent, and what remains to be used. City council members can monitor the administration’s performance and ask informed questions at town meetings about the budget use, right down to the smallest expenses….

Many cities are now implementing open data tools to share information on different aspects of city services, such as transit information, energy use, water management, etc. But those tools are difficult to use and do not provide comprehensive financial information about the use of public money. …(More)”