Society won’t trust A.I. until business earns that trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by François Candelon, Rodolphe Charme di Carlo and Steven D. Mills: “…The concept of a social license—which was born when the mining industry, and other resource extractors, faced opposition to projects worldwide—differs from the other rules governing A.I.’s use. Academics such as Leeora Black and John Morrison, in the book The Social License: How to Keep Your Organization Legitimate,define the social license as “the negotiation of equitable impacts and benefits in relation to its stakeholders over the near and longer term. It can range from the informal, such as an implicit contract, to the formal, like a community benefit agreement.” 

The social license isn’t a document like a government permit; it’s a form of acceptance that companies must gain through consistent and trustworthy behavior as well as stakeholder interactions. Thus, a social license for A.I. will be a socially constructed perception that a company has secured the right to use the technology for specific purposes in the markets in which it operates. 

Companies cannot award themselves social licenses; they will have to win them by proving they can be trusted. As Morrison argued in 2014, akin to the capability to dig a mine, the fact that an A.I.-powered solution is technologically feasible doesn’t mean that society will find its use morally and ethically acceptable. And losing the social license will have dire consequences, as natural resource companies, such as Shell and BP, have learned in the past…(More)”

Still Muted: The Limited Participatory Democracy of Zoom Public Meetings

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Katherine Levine Einstein: “Recent research has demonstrated that participants in public meetings are unrepresentative of their broader communities. Some suggest that reducing barriers to meeting attendance can improve participation, while others believe doing so will produce minimal changes. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted public meetings online, potentially reducing the time costs associated with participating. We match participants at online public meetings with administrative data to learn whether: (1) online participants are representative of their broader communities and (2) representativeness improves relative to in-person meetings. We find that participants in online forums are quite similar to those in in-person ones. They are similarly unrepresentative of residents in their broader communities and similarly overwhelmingly opposed to the construction of new housing. These results suggest important limitations to public meeting reform. Future research should continue to unpack whether reforms might prove more effective at redressing inequalities in an improved economic and public health context…(More)”.

Data Federalism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Bridget A. Fahey: “Private markets for individual data have received significant and sustained attention in recent years. But data markets are not for the private sector alone. In the public sector, the federal government, states, and cities gather data no less intimate and on a scale no less profound. And our governments have realized what corporations have: It is often easier to obtain data about their constituents from one another than to collect it directly. As in the private sector, these exchanges have multiplied the data available to every level of government for a wide range of purposes, complicated data governance, and created a new source of power, leverage, and currency between governments.

This Article provides an account of this vast and rapidly expanding intergovernmental marketplace in individual data. In areas ranging from policing and national security to immigration and public benefits to election management and public health, our governments exchange data both by engaging in individual transactions and by establishing “data pools” to aggregate the information they each have and diffuse access across governments. Understanding the breadth of this distinctly modern practice of data federalism has descriptive, doctrinal, and normative implications.

In contrast to conventional cooperative federalism programs, Congress has largely declined to structure and regulate intergovernmental data exchange. And in Congress’s absence, our governments have developed unorthodox cross-governmental administrative institutions to manage data flows and oversee data pools, and these sprawling, unwieldy institutions are as important as the usual cooperative initiatives to which federalism scholarship typically attends.

Data exchanges can also go wrong, and courts are not prepared to navigate the ways that data is both at risk of being commandeered and ripe for use as coercive leverage. I argue that these constitutional doctrines can and should be adapted to police the exchange of data. I finally place data federalism in normative frame and argue that data is a form of governmental power so unlike the paradigmatic ones our federalism is believed to distribute that it has the potential to unsettle federalism in both function and theory…(More)”.

Bringing Open Source to the Global Lab Bench

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Julieta Arancio and Shannon Dosemagen: “In 2015, Richard Bowman, an optics scientist, began experimenting with 3D printing a microscope as a single piece in order to reduce the time and effort of reproducing the design. Soon after, he started the OpenFlexure project, an open-license 3D-printed microscope. The project quickly took over his research agenda and grew into a global community of hundreds of users and developers, including professional scientists, hobbyists, community scientists, clinical researchers, and teachers. Anyone with access to a 3D printer can download open-source files from the internet to create microscopes that can be used for doing soil science research, detecting diseases such as malaria, or teaching microbiology, among other things. Today, the project is supported by a core team at the Universities of Bath and Cambridge in the United Kingdom, as well as in Tanzania by the Ifakara Health Institute and Bongo Tech & Research Labs, an engineering company. 

OpenFlexure is one of many open science hardware projects that are championed by the Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH), a transnational network of open science hardware advocates. Although there are differences in practice, open hardware projects operate on similar principles to open-source software, and they span disciplines ranging from nanotechnology to environmental monitoring. GOSH defines the field as “any piece of hardware used for scientific investigations that can be obtained, assembled, used, studied, modified, shared, and sold by anyone. It includes standard lab equipment as well as auxiliary materials, such as sensors, biological reagents, analog and digital electronic components.” Compared to an off-the-shelf microscope, which may cost thousands of dollars, an OpenFlexure microscope may cost a few hundred. By being significantly cheaper and easier to maintain, open hardware enables more people in more places to do science….(More)”.

Rehashing the Past: Social Equity, Decentralized Apps & Web 3.0

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Opening blog by Jeffrey R. Yost of new series on Blockchain and Society: “Blockchain is a powerful technology with roots three decades old in a 1991 paper on (immutable) timestamping of digital content. This paper, by Bellcore’s Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, along with key (in both senses) crypto research of a half dozen future Turing Awardees (Nobel of computer science–W. Diffie, M. Hellman, R. Rivest, A. Shamir, L. Adleman, S. Micali), and others, provided critical foundations for Bitcoin, blockchain, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).  This initial and foundational blog post, of Blockchain and Society, seeks to address and analyze the history, sociology, and political economy of blockchain and cryptocurrency. Subsequent blogs will dive deeper into individual themes and topics on crypto’s sociocultural and political economy contexts….(More)”.

Artificial Intelligence Bias and Discrimination: Will We Pull the Arc of the Moral Universe Towards Justice?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Emile Loza de Siles: “In 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. foresaw the inevitability of society’s eventual triumph over the deep racism of his time and the stain that continues to cast its destructive oppressive pall today. From the pulpit of the nation’s church, Dr King said, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice”. More than 40 years later, Eric Holder, the first African American United States Attorney General, agreed, but only if people acting with conviction exert to pull that arc towards justice.

With artificial intelligence (AI) bias and discrimination rampant, the need to pull the moral arc towards algorithmic justice is urgent. This article offers empowering clarity by conceptually bifurcating AI bias problems into AI bias engineering and organisational AI governance problems, revealing proven legal development pathways to protect against the corrosive harms of AI bias and discrimination…(More)”.

Facial Recognition Plan from IRS Raises Big Concerns

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by James Hendler: “The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is planning to require citizens to create accounts with a private facial recognition company in order to file taxes online. The IRS is joining a growing number of federal and state agencies that have contracted with ID.me to authenticate the identities of people accessing services.

The IRS’s move is aimed at cutting down on identity theft, a crime that affects millions of Americans. The IRS, in particular, has reported a number of tax filings from people claiming to be others, and fraud in many of the programs that were administered as part of the American Relief Plan has been a major concern to the government.

The IRS decision has prompted a backlash, in part over concerns about requiring citizens to use facial recognition technology and in part over difficulties some people have had in using the system, particularly with some state agencies that provide unemployment benefits. The reaction has prompted the IRS to revisit its decision.

As a computer science researcher and the chair of the Global Technology Policy Council of the Association for Computing Machinery, I have been involved in exploring some of the issues with government use of facial recognition technology, both its use and its potential flaws. There have been a great number of concerns raised over the general use of this technology in policing and other government functions, often focused on whether the accuracy of these algorithms can have discriminatory affects. In the case of ID.me, there are other issues involved as well….(More)”.

Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Congressman Ro Khanna: “… offers a revolutionary roadmap to facing America’s digital divide, offering greater economic prosperity to all. In Khanna’s vision, “just as people can move to technology, technology can move to people. People need not be compelled to move from one place to another to reap the benefits offered by technological progress” (from the foreword by Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate in Economics).

In the digital age, unequal access to technology and the revenue it creates is one of the most pressing issues facing the United States. There is an economic gulf between those who have struck gold in the tech industry and those left behind by the digital revolution; a geographic divide between those in the coastal tech industry and those in the heartland whose jobs have been automated; and existing inequalities in technological access—students without computers, rural workers with spotty WiFi, and plenty of workers without the luxury to work from home.

Dignity in the Digital Age tackles these challenges head-on and imagines how the digital economy can create opportunities for people all across the country without uprooting them. Congressman Ro Khanna of Silicon Valley offers a vision for democratizing digital innovation to build economically vibrant and inclusive communities. Instead of being subject to tech’s reshaping of our economy, Representative Khanna argues that we must channel those powerful forces toward creating a more healthy, equal, and democratic society.

Born into an immigrant family, Khanna understands how economic opportunity can change the course of a person’s life. Anchored by an approach Khanna refers to as “progressive capitalism,” he shows how democratizing access to tech can strengthen every sector of economy and culture. By expanding technological jobs nationwide through public and private partnerships, we can close the wealth gap in America and begin to repair the fractured, distrusting relationships that have plagued our country for far too long.

Moving deftly between storytelling, policy, and some of the country’s greatest thinkers in political philosophy and economics, Khanna presents a bold vision we can’t afford to ignore. Dignity in a Digital Age is a roadmap to how we can seek dignity for every American in an era in which technology shapes every aspect of our lives…(More)”.

Citizen science and the right to research: building local knowledge of climate change impacts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sarita Albagli & Allan Yu Iwama: “The article presents results of a research project aiming to develop theoretical and empirical contributions on participatory approaches and methods of citizen science for risk mapping and adaptation to climate change. In the first part, the paper presents a review of the literature on key concepts and perspectives related to participatory citizen science, introducing the concept of the “right to research”. It highlights the mutual fertilization with participatory mapping methods to deal with disaster situations associated to climate change. In the second part, the paper describes and presents the results and conclusions of an action-research developed on the coastline between the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2017–2018. It involved affected communities as protagonists in mapping and managing risks of natural disasters caused by extreme climate events, by combining citizen science approaches and methods with Participatory Geographic Information Systems (PGIS) and social cartography. The article concludes by pointing out the contributions and limits of the “right to research” as a relevant Social Science approach to reframe citizen science from a democratic view….(More)”.

Guide for Policymakers on Making Transparency Meaningful

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by CDT: “In 2020, the Minneapolis police used a unique kind of warrant to investigate vandalism of an AutoZone store during the protests over the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. This “geofence” warrant required Google to turn over data on all users within a certain geographic area around the store at a particular time — which would have included not only the vandal, but also protesters, bystanders, and journalists. 

It was only several months later that the public learned of the warrant, because Google notified a user that his account information was subject to the warrant, and the user told reporters. And it was not until a year later — when Google first published a transparency report with data about geofence warrants — that the public learned the total number of geofence warrants Google receives from U.S. authorities and of a recent “explosion” in their use. New York lawmakers introduced a bill to forbid geofence warrants because of concerns they could be used to target protesters, and, in light of Google’s transparency report, some civil society organizations are calling for them to be banned, too.

Technology company transparency matters, as this example shows. Transparency about governmental and company practices that affect users’ speech, access to information, and privacy from government surveillance online help us understand and check the ways in which tech companies and governments wield power and impact people’s human rights. 

Policymakers are increasingly proposing transparency measures as part of their efforts to regulate tech companies, both in the United States and around the world. But what exactly do we mean when we talk about transparency when it comes to technology companies like social networks, messaging services, and telecommunications firms? A new report from CDT, Making Transparency Meaningful: A Framework for Policymakers, maps and describes four distinct categories of technology company transparency:

  1. Transparency reports that provide aggregated data and qualitative information about moderation actions, disclosures, and other practices concerning user generated content and government surveillance; 
  2. User notifications about government demands for their data and moderation of their content; 
  3. Access to data held by intermediaries for independent researchers, public policy advocates, and journalists; and 
  4. Public-facing analysis, assessments, and audits of technology company practices with respect to user speech and privacy from government surveillance. 

Different forms of transparency are useful for different purposes or audiences, and they also give rise to varying technical, legal, and practical challenges. Making Transparency Meaningful is designed to help policymakers and advocates understand the potential benefits and tradeoffs that come with each form of transparency. This report addresses key questions raised by proposed legislation in the United States and Europe that seeks to mandate one or more of these types of transparency and thereby hold tech companies and governments more accountable….(More)”.