Google Gets Serious About Mapping Wheelchair Accessibility

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Linda Poon at CityLab: “If there’s one thing Google’s got at its disposal, it’s a global army of avid map users. Now the company is leveraging that power to make its Maps feature more useful for people with mobility challenges—a group that often gets overlooked in the world of transit and urban innovation.

Google Maps already indicates if a location is wheelchair accessible—a result of a personal project by one of its employees—but its latest campaign will crowdsource data from its 30 million Local Guides worldwide, who contribute tips and photos about neighborhood establishments in exchange for points and small prizes like extra digital storage space. The company is calling on them to answer five simple questions—like whether a building has accessible entrances or bathrooms—when they submit a review for a location. In the coming weeks, Google will host workshops and “geowalks” specifically focused on mobility across seven cities, from New York City and London to Tokyo and Surabaya, Indonesia.

“The [users] have multiple motivations, and one is wanting to help their own community get around.” says Laura Slabin, Google’s director of local content and community. “So we’re leveraging the fact that people are motivated by altruism.”

But as simple as the questions seem—Is there wheelchair-accessible seating? or Is there a wheelchair-accessible elevator?—answering them requires careful attention to detail. That’s why Google even sent out a  nifty tip sheet to help its physically abled members answer those questions….(More)”.

Voice or chatter? Making ICTs work for transformative citizen engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Research Report Summary by Making All Voices Count: “What are the conditions in democratic governance that make information and communication technology (ICT)-mediated citizen engagement transformative? While substantial scholarship exists on the role of the Internet and digital technologies in triggering moments of political disruption and cascading upheavals, academic interest in the sort of deep change that transforms institutional cultures of democratic governance, occurring in ‘slow time’, has been relatively muted.

This study attempts to fill this gap. It is inspired by the idea of participation in everyday democracy and seeks to explore how ICT-mediated citizen engagement can promote democratic governance and amplify citizen voice.

ICT-mediated citizen engagement is defined by this study as comprising digitally-mediated information outreach, dialogue, consultation, collaboration and decision-making, initiated either by government or by citizens, towards greater government accountability and responsiveness.

The study involved empirical explorations of citizen engagement initiatives in eight sites – two in Asia (India and Philippines), one in Africa (South Africa), three in South America (Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay) and two in Europe (Netherlands and Spain).

This summary of the larger Research Report presents recommendations for how public policies and programmes can promote ICTs for citizen engagement and transformative citizenship.  In doing so it provides an overview of the discussion the authors undertake on three inter-related dimensions, namely:

  • calibrating digitally mediated citizen participation as a measure of political empowerment and equality
  • designing techno-public spaces as bastions of inclusive democracy
  • ensuring that the rule of law upholds democratic principles in digitally mediated governance…(More. Full research report)

Internet of Things tackles global animal poaching

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “ZSL (Zoological Society of London), one of the most famous zoos in Europe, has teamed up with non-profit technology company Digital Catapult to support the development of anti-poaching technology. The partnership will use the Internet of Things (IoT) and Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies to create a sensor and satellite-enabled network that will be able to help conservationists monitor wildlife and respond to poaching threats on land and sea in some of the world’s most remote national parks.

Up to 35,000 African elephants were killed by poachers in 2016, and black rhino and mountain gorilla populations continue to be at high risk. LPWAN could help prevent poaching in game reserves by enabling remote sensors to communicate with one another over long distance while using only a small amount of power. These connected sensors are able to detect activities nearby and determine whether these originate from wildlife or poachers, creating immediate alerts for those monitoring the area.

Digital Catapult has installed a LPWAN base station at the ZSL headquarters at London Zoo, which will enable prototypes to be tested on site. This technology will build on the revolutionary work already underway in areas including Kenya, Nepal, Australia, the Chagos Archipelago, and Antarctica.

The practise of poaching has been the target of many technology companies, with a similar project using artificial intelligence to monitor poachers recently coming to light. One of the many devastating impacts of poaching is the potential to cause extinction of some animals, and one startup has tackled this potential catastrophe with rhinos by producing a 3D printed horn that could help the species avoid being a target….(More)”.

Who serves the poor ? surveying civil servants in the developing world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Worldbank working paper by Daniel Oliver Rogger: “Who are the civil servants that serve poor people in the developing world? This paper uses direct surveys of civil servants — the professional body of administrators who manage government policy — and their organizations from Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines, to highlight key aspects of their characteristics and experience of civil service life. Civil servants in the developing world face myriad challenges to serving the world’s poor, from limited facilities to significant political interference in their work. There are a number of commonalities across service environments, and the paper summarizes these in a series of ‘stylized facts’ of the civil service in the developing world. At the same time, the particular challenges faced by a public official vary substantially across and within countries and regions. For example, measured management practices differ widely across local governments of a single state in Nigeria. Surveys of civil servants allow us to document these differences, build better models of the public sector, and make more informed policy choices….(More)”.

The Death of Public Knowledge? How Free Markets Destroy the General Intellect

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Aeron Davis: “...argues for the value and importance of shared, publicly accessible knowledge, and suggests that the erosion of its most visible forms, including public service broadcasting, education, and the network of public libraries, has worrying outcomes for democracy.

With contributions from both activists and academics, this collection of short, sharp essays focuses on different aspects of public knowledge, from libraries and education to news media and public policy. Together, the contributors record the stresses and strains placed upon public knowledge by funding cuts and austerity, the new digital economy, quantification and target-setting, neoliberal politics, and inequality. These pressures, the authors contend, not only hinder democracies, but also undermine markets, economies, and social institutions and spaces everywhere.

Covering areas of international public concern, these polemical, accessible texts include reflections on the fate of schools and education, the takeover of public institutions by private interests, and the corruption of news and information in the financial sector. They cover the compromised Greek media during recent EU negotiations, the role played by media and political elites in the Irish property bubble, the compromising of government policy by corporate interests in the United States and Korea, and the squeeze on public service media in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States.

Individually and collectively, these pieces spell out the importance of maintaining public, shared knowledge in all its forms, and offer a rallying cry for doing so, asserting the need for strong public, financial, and regulatory support….(More)”

MIT map offers real-time, crowd-sourced flood reporting during Hurricane Irma

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MIT News: “As Hurricane Irma bears down on the U.S., the MIT Urban Risk Lab has launched a free, open-source platform that will help residents and government officials track flooding in Broward County, Florida. The platform, RiskMap.us, is being piloted to enable both residents and emergency managers to obtain better information on flooding conditions in near-real time.

Residents affected by flooding can add information to the publicly available map via popular social media channels. Using Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram, users submit reports by sending a direct message to the Risk Map chatbot. The chatbot replies to users with a one-time link through which they can upload information including location, flood depth, a photo, and description.

Residents and government officials can view the map to see recent flood reports to understand changing flood conditions across the county. Tomas Holderness, a research scientist in the MIT Department of Architecture, led the design of the system. “This project shows the importance that citizen data has to play in emergencies,” he says. “By connecting residents and emergency managers via social messaging, our map helps keep people informed and improve response times.”…

The Urban Risk Lab also piloted the system in Indonesia — where the project is called PetaBencana.id, or “Map Disaster” — during a large flood event on Feb. 20, 2017.

During the flooding, over 300,000 users visited the public website in 24 hours, and the map was integrated into the Uber application to help drivers avoid flood waters. The project in Indonesia is supported by a grant from USAID and is working in collaboration with the Indonesian Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Pacific Disaster Centre, and the Humanitarian Open Street Map Team.

The Urban Risk Lab team is also working in India on RiskMap.in….(More)”.

Unnatural Surveillance: How Online Data Is Putting Species at Risk

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Adam Welz at YaleEnvironment360: “…The burgeoning pools of digital data from electronic tags, online scientific publications, “citizen science” databases and the like – which have been an extraordinary boon to researchers and conservationists – can easily be misused by poachers and illegal collectors. Although a handful of scientists have recently raised concerns about it, the problem is so far poorly understood.

Today, researchers are surveilling everything from blue whales to honeybees with remote cameras and electronic tags. While this has had real benefits for conservation, some attempts to use real-time location data in order to harm animals have become known: Hunters have shared tips on how to use VHF radio signals from Yellowstone National Park wolves’ research collars to locate the animals. (Although many collared wolves that roamed outside the park have been killed, no hunter has actually been caught tracking tag signals.) In 2013, hackers in India apparently successfully accessed tiger satellite-tag data, but wildlife authorities quickly increased security and no tigers seem to have been harmed as a result. Western Australian government agents used a boat-mounted acoustic tag detector to hunt tagged white sharks in 2015. (At least one shark was killed, but it was not confirmed whether it was tagged). Canada’s Banff National Park last year banned VHF radio receivers after photographers were suspected of harassing tagged animals.

While there is no proof yet of a widespread problem, experts say it is often in researchers’ and equipment manufacturers’ interests to underreport abuse. Biologist Steven Cooke of Carleton University in Canada lead-authored a paper this year cautioning that the “failure to adopt more proactive thinking about the unintended consequences of electronic tagging could lead to malicious exploitation and disturbance of the very organisms researchers hope to understand and conserve.” The paper warned that non-scientists could easily buy tags and receivers to poach animals and disrupt scientific studies, noting that “although telemetry terrorism may seem far-fetched, some fringe groups and industry players may have incentives for doing so.”…(More)”.

These 3 barriers make it hard for policymakers to use the evidence that development researchers produce

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Callen, Adnan Khan, Asim I. Khwaja, Asad Liaqat and Emily Myers at the Monkey Cage/Washington Post: “In international development, the “evidence revolution” has generated a surge in policy research over the past two decades. We now have a clearer idea of what works and what doesn’t. In India, performance pay for teachers works: students in schools where bonuses were on offer got significantly higher test scores. In Kenya, charging small fees for malaria bed nets doesn’t work — and is actually less cost-effective than free distribution. The American Economic Association’s registry for randomized controlled trials now lists 1,287 studies in 106 countries, many of which are testing policies that very well may be expanded.

But can policymakers put this evidence to use?

Here’s how we did our research

We assessed the constraints that keep policymakers from acting on evidence. We surveyed a total of 1,509 civil servants in Pakistan and 108 in India as part of a program called Building Capacity to Use Research Evidence (BCURE), carried out by Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD)at Harvard Kennedy School and funded by the British government. We found that simply presenting evidence to policymakers doesn’t necessarily improve their decision-making. The link between evidence and policy is complicated by several factors.

1. There are serious constraints in policymakers’ ability to interpret evidence….

2. Organizational and structural barriers get in the way of using evidence….

 

3. When presented with quantitative vs. qualitative evidence, policymakers update their beliefs in unexpected ways....(More)

How to Regulate Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Oren Etzioni in the New York Times: “…we should regulate the tangible impact of A.I. systems (for example, the safety of autonomous vehicles) rather than trying to define and rein in the amorphous and rapidly developing field of A.I.

I propose three rules for artificial intelligence systems that are inspired by, yet develop further, the “three laws of robotics” that the writer Isaac Asimov introduced in 1942: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except when such orders would conflict with the previous law; and a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the previous two laws.

These three laws are elegant but ambiguous: What, exactly, constitutes harm when it comes to A.I.? I suggest a more concrete basis for avoiding A.I. harm, based on three rules of my own.

First, an A.I. system must be subject to the full gamut of laws that apply to its human operator. This rule would cover private, corporate and government systems. We don’t want A.I. to engage in cyberbullying, stock manipulation or terrorist threats; we don’t want the F.B.I. to release A.I. systems that entrap people into committing crimes. We don’t want autonomous vehicles that drive through red lights, or worse, A.I. weapons that violate international treaties.

Our common law should be amended so that we can’t claim that our A.I. system did something that we couldn’t understand or anticipate. Simply put, “My A.I. did it” should not excuse illegal behavior.

My second rule is that an A.I. system must clearly disclose that it is not human. As we have seen in the case of bots — computer programs that can engage in increasingly sophisticated dialogue with real people — society needs assurances that A.I. systems are clearly labeled as such. In 2016, a bot known as Jill Watson, which served as a teaching assistant for an online course at Georgia Tech, fooled students into thinking it was human. A more serious example is the widespread use of pro-Trump political bots on social media in the days leading up to the 2016 elections, according to researchers at Oxford….

My third rule is that an A.I. system cannot retain or disclose confidential information without explicit approval from the source of that information…(More)”

Gaming for Infrastructure

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nilmini Rubin & Jennifer Hara  at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “…the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates that the United States needs $4.56 trillion to keep its deteriorating infrastructure current but only has funding to cover less than half of necessary infrastructure spending—leaving the at least country $2.0 trillion short through the next decade. Globally, the picture is bleak as well: World Economic Forum estimates that the infrastructure gap is $1 trillion each year.

What can be done? Some argue that public-private partnerships (PPPs or P3s) are the answer. We agree that they can play an important role—if done well. In a PPP, a private party provides a public asset or service for a government entity, bears significant risk, and is paid on performance. The upside for governments and their citizens is that the private sector can be incentivized to deliver projects on time, within budget, and with reduced construction risk. The private sector can benefit by earning a steady stream of income from a long-term investment from a secure client. From the Grand Parkway Project in Texas to the Queen Alia International Airport in Jordan, PPPs have succeeded domestically and internationally.

The problem is that PPPs can be very hard to design and implement. And since they can involve commitments of millions or even billions of dollars, a PPP failure can be awful. For example, the Berlin Airport is a PPP that is six years behind schedule, and its costs overruns total roughly $3.8 billion to date.

In our experience, it can be useful for would-be partners to practice engaging in a PPP before they dive into a live project. At our organization, Tetra Tech’s Institute for Public-Private Partnerships, for example, we use an online and multiplayer game—the P3 Game—to help make PPPs work.

The game is played with 12 to 16 people who are divided into two teams: a Consortium and a Contracting Authority. In each of four rounds, players mimic the activities they would engage in during the course of a real PPP, and as in real life, they are confronted with unexpected events: The Consortium fails to comply with a routine road inspection, how should the Contracting Authority team respond? The cost of materials skyrockets, how should the Consortium team manage when it has a fixed price contract?

Players from government ministries, legislatures, construction companies, financial institutions, and other entities get to swap roles and experience a PPP from different vantage points. They think through challenges and solve problems together—practicing, failing, learning, and growing—within the confines of the game and with no real-world cost.

More than 1,000 people have participated to date, including representatives of the US Army Corps of Engineers, the World Bank, and Johns Hopkins University, using a variety of scenarios. PPP team members who work on part of the Schiphol-Amsterdam-Almere Project, a $5.6-billion road project in the Netherlands, played the game using their actual contract document….(More)”.