How Native Americans Are Trying to Debug A.I.’s Biases

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alex V. Cipolle in The New York Times: “In September 2021, Native American technology students in high school and college gathered at a conference in Phoenix and were asked to create photo tags — word associations, essentially — for a series of images.

One image showed ceremonial sage in a seashell; another, a black-and-white photograph circa 1884, showed hundreds of Native American children lined up in uniform outside the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, one of the most prominent boarding schools run by the American government during the 19th and 20th centuries.

For the ceremonial sage, the students chose the words “sweetgrass,” “sage,” “sacred,” “medicine,” “protection” and “prayers.” They gave the photo of the boarding school tags with a different tone: “genocide,” “tragedy,” “cultural elimination,” “resiliency” and “Native children.”

The exercise was for the workshop Teaching Heritage to Artificial Intelligence Through Storytelling at the annual conference for the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. The students were creating metadata that could train a photo recognition algorithm to understand the cultural meaning of an image.

The workshop presenters — Chamisa Edmo, a technologist and citizen of the Navajo Nation, who is also Blackfeet and Shoshone-Bannock; Tracy Monteith, a senior Microsoft engineer and member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians; and the journalist Davar Ardalan — then compared these answers with those produced by a major image recognition app.

For the ceremonial sage, the app’s top tag was “plant,” but other tags included “ice cream” and “dessert.” The app tagged the school image with “human,” “crowd,” “audience” and “smile” — the last a particularly odd descriptor, given that few of the children are smiling.

The image recognition app botched its task, Mr. Monteith said, because it didn’t have proper training data. Ms. Edmo explained that tagging results are often “outlandish” and “offensive,” recalling how one app identified a Native American person wearing regalia as a bird. And yet similar image recognition apps have identified with ease a St. Patrick’s Day celebration, Ms. Ardalan noted as an example, because of the abundance of data on the topic….(More)”.

The Strategic and Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence in the Public Sector of Latin America and the Caribbean

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “Governments can use artificial intelligence (AI) to design better policies and make better and more targeted decisions, enhance communication and engagement with citizens, and improve the speed and quality of public services. The Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region is seeking to leverage the immense potential of AI to promote the digital transformation of the public sector. The OECD, in collaboration with CAF, Development Bank of Latin America, prepared this report to help national governments in the LAC region understand the current regional baseline of activities and capacities for AI in the public sector; to identify specific approaches and actions they can take to enhance their ability to use this emerging technology for efficient, effective and responsive governments; and to collaborate across borders in pursuit of a regional vision for AI in the public sector. This report incorporates a stocktaking of each country’s strategies and commitments around AI in the public sector, including their alignment with the OECD AI Principles. It also includes an analysis of efforts to build key governance capacities and put in place critical enablers for AI in the public sector. It concludes with a series of recommendations for governments in the LAC region….(More)”.

The first answer for food insecurity: data sovereignty

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview by Brian Oaster: “For two years now, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated almost every structural inequity in Indian Country. Food insecurity is high on that list.

Like other inequities, it’s an intergenerational product of dispossession and congressional underfunding — nothing new for Native communities. What is new, however, is the ability of Native organizations and sovereign nations to collectively study and understand the needs of the many communities facing the issue. The age of data sovereignty has (finally) arrived.

To that end, the Native American Agriculture Fund (NAAF) partnered with the Indigenous Food and Agricultural Initiative (INAI) and the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) to produce a special report, Reimagining Hunger Responses in Times of Crisis, which was released in January.

According to the report, 48% of the more than 500 Native respondents surveyed across the country agreed that “sometimes or often during the pandemic the food their household bought just didn’t last, and they didn’t have money to get more.” Food security and access were especially low among Natives with young children or elders at home, people in fair to poor health and those whose employment was disrupted by the pandemic. “Native households experience food insecurity at shockingly higher rates than the general public and white households,” the report noted.

It also detailed how, throughout the pandemic, Natives overwhelmingly turned to their tribal governments and communities — as opposed to state or federal programs — for help. State and federal programs, like the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, don’t always mesh with the needs of rural reservations. A benefits card is useless if there’s no food store in your community. In response, tribes and communities came together and worked to get their people fed.

Understanding how and why will help pave the way for legislation that empowers tribes to provide for their own people, by using federal funding to build local agricultural infrastructure, for instance, instead of relying on assistance programs that don’t always work. HCN spoke with the Native American Agriculture Fund’s CEO, Toni Stanger-McLaughlin (Colville), to find out more…(More)”.

Towards a Standard for Identifying and Managing Bias in Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

NIST Report: “As individuals and communities interact in and with an environment that is increasingly virtual they are often vulnerable to the commodification of their digital exhaust. Concepts and behavior that are ambiguous in nature are captured in this environment, quantified, and used to categorize, sort, recommend, or make decisions about people’s lives. While many organizations seek to utilize this information in a responsible manner, biases remain endemic across technology processes and can lead to harmful impacts regardless of intent. These harmful outcomes, even if inadvertent, create significant challenges for cultivating public trust in artificial intelligence (AI)….(More)”

Publicizing Corporate Secrets for Public Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Christopher Morten: “Federal regulatory agencies in the United States hold a treasure trove of valuable information essential to a functional society. Yet little of this immense and nominally “public” resource is accessible to the public. That worrying phenomenon is particularly true for the valuable information that agencies hold on powerful private actors. Corporations regularly shield vast swaths of the information they share with federal regulatory agencies from public view, claiming that the information contains legally protected trade secrets (or other proprietary “confidential commercial information”). Federal agencies themselves have largely acceded to these claims and even fueled them, by construing restrictively various doctrines of law, including trade secrecy law, freedom of information law, and constitutional law. Today, these laws—and fear of these laws—have reduced to a trickle the flow of information that the public can access. This should not and need not be the case.

This article challenges the conventional wisdom that trade secrecy law restricts public agencies’ power to publicize private businesses’ secrets. In fact, federal agencies, and regulatory agencies especially, have long held and still hold statutory and constitutional authority to obtain and divulge otherwise secret information on private actors, when doing so serves the public interest. For many regulatory agencies, that authority extends even to bona fide trade secrets. In an age of “informational capitalism,” this disclosure authority makes U.S. federal regulatory agencies uniquely valuable—and perhaps uniquely dangerous. Building on recent work that explores this right in the context of drugs and vaccines, and drawing heavily from scholarship in privacy and information law, the article proposes a practical framework that regulators can use to publicize secret information in a way that maximizes public benefit and minimizes private harm. Rather than endorse unconstrained information disclosure—transparency for transparency’s sake—this article instead proposes controlled “information publicity,” in which regulators cultivate carefully bounded “gardens” of secret information. Within these gardens, agencies admit only certain users and certain uses of information. Drawing on existing but largely overlooked real-world examples, the article shows that regulators can effectively and selectively publicize trade secret information to noncommercial users while thwarting commercial uses. Regulators can protect trade secrets’ integrity vis-à-vis competitors while simultaneously unlocking new, socially valuable uses…(More)”.

Mapping of exposed water tanks and swimming pools based on aerial images can help control dengue

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo: “Brazilian researchers have developed a computer program that locates swimming pools and rooftop water tanks in aerial photographs with the aid of artificial intelligence to help identify areas vulnerable to infestation by Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that transmits dengue, zika, chikungunya and yellow fever. 

The innovation, which can also be used as a public policy tool for dynamic socio-economic mapping of urban areas, resulted from research and development work by professionals at the University of São Paulo (USP), the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and the São Paulo State Department of Health’s Endemic Control Superintendence (SUCEN), as part of a project supported by FAPESP. An article about it is published in the journal PLOS ONE. 

“Our work initially consisted of creating a model based on aerial images and computer science to detect water tanks and pools, and to use them as a socio-economic indicator,” said Francisco Chiaravalloti Neto, last author of the article. He is a professor in the Epidemiology Department at USP’s School of Public Health (FSP), with a first degree in engineering. 

As the article notes, previous research had already shown that dengue tends to be most prevalent in deprived urban areas, so that prevention of dengue, zika and other diseases transmitted by the mosquito can be made considerably more effective by use of a relatively dynamic socio-economic mapping model, especially given the long interval between population censuses in Brazil (ten years or more). 

“This is one of the first steps in a broader project,” Chiaravalloti Neto said. Among other aims, he and his team plan to detect other elements of the images and quantify real infestation rates in specific areas so as to be able to refine and validate the model. 

“We want to create a flow chart that can be used in different cities to pinpoint at-risk areas without the need for inspectors to call on houses, buildings and other breeding sites, as this is time-consuming and a waste of the taxpayer’s money,” he added…(More)”.

The Use of Artificial Intelligence as a Strategy to Analyse Urban Informality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Agustina Iñiguez: “Within the Latin American and Caribbean region, it has been recorded that at least 25% of the population lives in informal settlements. Given that their expansion is one of the major problems afflicting these cities, a project is presented, supported by the IDB, which proposes how new technologies are capable of contributing to the identification and detection of these areas in order to intervene in them and help reduce urban informality.

Informal settlements, also known as slums, shantytowns, camps or favelas, depending on the country in question, are uncontrolled settlements on land where, in many cases, the conditions for a dignified life are not in place. Through self-built dwellings, these sites are generally the result of the continuous growth of the housing deficit.

For decades, the possibility of collecting information about the Earth’s surface through satellite imagery has been contributing to the analysis and production of increasingly accurate and useful maps for urban planning. In this way, not only the growth of cities can be seen, but also the speed at which they are growing and the characteristics of their buildings.

Advances in artificial intelligence facilitate the processing of a large amount of information. When a satellite or aerial image is taken of a neighbourhood where a municipal team has previously demarcated informal areas, the image is processed by an algorithm that will identify the characteristic visual patterns of the area observed from space. The algorithm will then identify other areas with similar characteristics in other images, automatically recognising the districts where informality predominates. It is worth noting that while satellites are able to report both where and how informal settlements are growing, specialised equipment and processing infrastructure are also required…(More)”

Holding Out for Something Better

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Rebecca Williams on the “Limits of Customer Service and Administrative Burden Frameworks” : “On December 13th, the Biden Administration published an Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government. The EO promises to improve a slew of government services with the help of technology and rests on a theory of change that these “customer service” improvements will “engender trust,” but does not speak to changing the substance of these public goods, which may be the primary cause of the public’s trust issues, only their delivery. While the EO harkens to democratic principles, it makes no mention of how public input informed why they were prioritizing the delivery of the services mentioned versus other services.

Words are imbued with meaning and connotation and using “customer service” to describe the delivery of public goods has a dark side. It’s not just that the analogy doesn’t logically work — everything that makes “customer service” high quality in the business context is missing from government, there is no competition forcing the government to attract and retain customers — this phrase will not get us there. It’s that this mismatch of power dynamics makes it a dangerous phrase to substitute in. Calling the public “customers” implicitly reduces their participatory power to mere consumers and doesn’t fully embody the government’s duty to serve all its people well.

Michèle Champagne @michhhamI “love how “service design” and “design thinking” consultants have slowly invaded public policy circles, where public servants and policymakers are taught that “design skills“ are mandatory positive thinking, rapid prototyping, and problem solving. Thing is, that‘s solutionism.April 21st 2021“

It’s important in these times of diminished voter rights, rising police surveillance, and prosecution of protestors to protect our democratic rights and be wary of anyone co-opting democratic language for lesser rights. As illustrated by Michèle Champagne’s brilliant tweet (above), asking for feedback after the bulk of the substance has been decided isn’t democratic, it’s providing a very small set of choices and dressing it up as democratic.

Let’s move away from consumer language for public goods to participatory and rights-based language; let’s lead delivery improvement initiatives with public input and place these improvements in the service of larger debates about what collective goods we want to have as a community. For example, if 63% of the population is supportive of healthcare for all, let’s be sure related public service improvements contemplate and serve that substantive expansion; investing in more application infrastructure might make less sense than considering how technology can support the issuance of universal medicare cards or uniform reporting standards. This is a job the Executive Branch could spearhead (the Federal Government takes on pilots projects routinely with input from the public), but it is also one the larger civic tech community should hold in their minds as a possibility…(More)”.

Privacy As/And Civil Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tiffany C. Li: “Decades have passed since the modern American civil rights movement began, but the fight for equality is far from over. Systemic racism, sexism, and discrimination against many marginalized groups is still rampant in our society. Tensions rose to a fever pitch in 2020, with a summer of Black Lives Matters protests, sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, leading in to an attempted armed insurrection and attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Asian-Americans faced rising rates of racism and hate crimes , spurred in part by inflammatory statements from the then-sitting President of the United States. Members of the LGBT community faced attacks on their civil rights during the Trump administration, including a rolling back of protections awarded to transgender individuals.

At the same time, the world faced a deadly pandemic that exposed the inequalities tearing the fabric of our society. The battle for civil rights is clearly not over, and the nation and the world have faced setbacks in the fight for equality, brought out by the pandemic, political pressures, and other factors. Meanwhile, the role of technology is also changing, with new technologies like facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and connected devices, offering new threats and perhaps new hope for civil rights. To understand privacy at our current point in time, we must consider the role of privacy in civil rights—and even, as scholars like Alvaro Bedoya have suggested, privacy itself as a civil right.

This Article is an attempt to expand upon the work of privacy and civil rights scholars in conceptualizing privacy as a civil right and situating this concept within the broader field of privacy studies. This Article builds on the work of scholars who have analyzed critical dimensions of privacy and privacy law, and who have advocated for changes in privacy law that can move our society forward to protect privacy and equality for all…(More)”.

Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Innovation in Digital Assets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Factsheet from The White House: “Digital assets, including cryptocurrencies, have seen explosive growth in recent years, surpassing a $3 trillion market cap last November and up from $14 billion just five years prior. Surveys suggest that around 16 percent of adult Americans – approximately 40 million people – have invested in, traded, or used cryptocurrencies. Over 100 countries are exploring or piloting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), a digital form of a country’s sovereign currency.

The rise in digital assets creates an opportunity to reinforce American leadership in the global financial system and at the technological frontier, but also has substantial implications for consumer protection, financial stability, national security, and climate risk. The United States must maintain technological leadership in this rapidly growing space, supporting innovation while mitigating the risks for consumers, businesses, the broader financial system, and the climate. And, it must play a leading role in international engagement and global governance of digital assets consistent with democratic values and U.S. global competitiveness.

That is why today, President Biden will sign an Executive Order outlining the first ever, whole-of-government approach to addressing the risks and harnessing the potential benefits of digital assets and their underlying technology. The Order lays out a national policy for digital assets across six key priorities: consumer and investor protection; financial stability; illicit finance; U.S. leadership in the global financial system and economic competitiveness; financial inclusion; and responsible innovation…(More)”