Data collaboration to enable the EU Green Deal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Justine Gangneux: “In the fight against climate change, local authorities are increasingly turning to cross-sectoral data sharing as a game-changing strategy.

This collaborative approach empowers cities and communities to harness a wealth of data from diverse sources, enabling them to pinpoint emission hotspots, tailor policies for maximum impact, and allocate resources wisely.

Data can also strengthen climate resilience by engaging local communities and facilitating real-time progress tracking…

In recent years, more and more local data initiatives aimed at tackling climate change have emerged, spanning from urban planning to mobility, adaptation and energy management.

Such is the case of Porto’s CityCatalyst – the project put five demonstrators in place to showcase smart cities infrastructure and develop data standards and models, contributing to the efficient and integrated management of urban flows…

In Latvia, Riga is also exploring data solutions such as visualisations, aggregation or analytics, as part of the Positive Energy District strategy.  Driven by the national Energy Efficiency Law, the city is developing a project to monitor energy consumption based on building utility use data (heat, electricity, gas, or water), customer and billing data, and Internet of Things smart metre data from individual buildings…

As these examples show, it is not just public data that holds the key; private sector data, from utilities as energy or water, to telecoms, offers cities valuable insights in their efforts to tackle climate change…(More)”.

Europe wants to get better at planning for the worst

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Sarah Anne Aarup: “The European Union is beset by doom and gloom — from wars on its doorstep to inflation and the climate crisis — not to mention political instability in the U.S. and rivalry with China.

All too often, the EU has been overtaken by events, which makes the task of getting better at planning for the worst all the more pressing. 

As European leaders fought political fires at their informal summit last week in Granada, unaware that Palestinian militants would launch their devastating raid on Israel a day later, they quietly started a debate on strategic foresight.

At this stage still very much a thought experiment, the concept of “open strategic autonomy” is being championed by host Spain, the current president of the Council of the EU. The idea reflects a shift in priorities to navigate an increasingly uncertain world, and a departure from the green and digital transitions that have dominated the agenda in recent years.

To the uninitiated, the concept of open strategic autonomy sounds like an oxymoron — that’s because it is.

After the hyper globalized early 2000s, trust in liberalism started to erode. Then the Trump-era trade wars, COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed Europe’s economic reliance on powerful nations that are either latent — or overt — strategic rivals.

“The United States and China are becoming more self-reliant, and some voices were saying that this is what we have to do,” an official with the Spanish presidency told POLITICO. “But that’s not a good idea for Europe.”

Instead, open strategic autonomy is about shielding the EU just enough to protect its economic security while remaining an international player. In other words, it means “cooperating multilaterally wherever we can, acting autonomously wherever we must.”

It’s a grudging acceptance that great power politics now dominate economics…

The open strategic autonomy push is about countering an inward turn that was all about cutting dependencies, such as the EU’s reliance on Russian energy, after President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine.

“[We’re] missing a more balanced and forward-looking strategy” following the Versailles Declaration, the Spanish official said, referring to a first response by EU leaders to the Russian attack of February 24, 2022.

Spain delivered its contribution to the debate in the form of a thick paper drafted by its foresight office, in coordination with over 80 ministries across the EU…(More)”.

Everybody is looking into the Future! 

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report as part of the “Anticipation and monitoring of emerging technologies and disruptive innovation” (ANTICIPINNOV) project, a collaboration between the European Commission Joint Research Centre with the European Innovation Council (EIC): “Growing volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, present leading challenges in policy-making nowadays. Anticipatory thinking and foresight are of utmost importance to help explore trends, risks, emerging issues, and their potential implications and opportunities in order to draw useful insights for strategic planning, policy-making and preparedness.
The findings include a set of 106 signals and trends on emerging technologies and disruptive innovations across several areas of application based on a review of key reports on technology and innovation trends and signals produced by public and private entities outside of the EU institutions. Its goal is to strengthen the EIC’s strategic intelligence capacity through the use and development of anticipatory approaches that will – among other goals – support innovation funding prioritisation…(More)”.

FickleFormulas: The Political Economy of Macroeconomic Measurement

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About: “Statistics about economic activities are critical to governance. Measurements of growth, unemployment and inflation rates, public debts – they all tell us ‘how our economies are doing’ and inform policy. Citizens punish politicians who fail to deliver on them.

FickleFormulas has integrated two research projects at the University of Amsterdam that ran from 2014 to 2020. Its researchers have studied the origins of the formulas behind these indicators: why do we measure our economies the way we do? After all, it is far from self-evident how to define and measure economic indicators. Our choices have deeply distributional consequences, producing winners and losers, and they shape our future, for example when GDP figures hide the cost of environmental destruction.

Criticisms of particular measures are hardly new. GDP in particular has been denounced as a deeply deficient measure of production at best and a fundamentally misleading guidepost for human development at worst. But also measures of inflation, balances of payments and trade, unemployment figures, productivity or public debt hide unsolved and maybe insoluble problems. In FickleFormulas we have asked: which social, political and economic factors shape the formulas used to calculate macroeconomic indicators?

In our quest for answers we have mobilized scholarship and expertise scattered across academic disciplines – a wealth of knowledge brought together for example here. We have reconstructed expert-deliberations of past decades, but mostly we wanted to learn from those who actually design macroeconomic indicators: statisticians at national statistical offices or organizations such as the OECD, the UN, the IMF, or the World Bank. For us, understanding macroeconomic indicators has been impossible without talking to the people who live and breathe them….(More)”.

Towards a Holistic EU Data Governance

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SITRA Publication: “The European Union’s ambitious data strategy aims to establish the EU as a leader in a data-driven society by creating a single market for data while fully respecting European policies on privacy, data protection, and competition law. To achieve the strategy’s bold aims, Europe needs more practical business cases where data flows across the organisations.

Reliable data sharing requires new technical, governance and business solutions. Data spaces address these needs by providing soft infrastructure to enable trusted and easy data flows across organisational boundaries.

Striking the right balance between regulation and innovation will be critical to creating a supportive environment for data-sharing business cases to flourish. In this working paper, we take an in-depth look at the governance issues surrounding data sharing and data spaces.

Data sharing requires trust. Trust can be facilitated by effective governance, meaning the rules for data sharing. These rules come from different arenas. The European Commission is establishing new regulations related to data, and member states also have their laws and authorities that oversee data-sharing activities. Ultimately, data spaces need local rules to enable interoperability and foster trust between participants. The governance framework for data spaces is called a rulebook, which codifies legal, business, technical, and ethical rules for data sharing.

The extensive discussions and interviews with experts reveal confusion in the field. People developing data sharing in practice or otherwise involved in data governance issues struggle to know who does what and who decides what. Data spaces also struggle to create internal governance structures in line with the regulatory environment. The interviews conducted for this study indicate that coordination at the member state level could play a decisive role in coordinating the EU-level strategy with concrete local data space initiatives.

The root cause of many of the pain points we identify is the problem of gaps, duplication and overlapping of roles between the different actors at all levels. To address these challenges and cultivate effective governance, a holistic data governance framework is proposed. This framework combines the existing approach of rulebooks with a new tool called the rolebook, which serves as a register of roles and bodies involved in data sharing. The rolebook aims to increase clarity and empower stakeholders at all levels to understand the current data governance structures.

In conclusion, effective governance is crucial for the success of the EU data strategy and the development of data spaces. By implementing the proposed holistic data governance framework, the EU can promote trust, balanced regulation and innovation, and support the growth of data spaces across sectors…(More)”.

The emergence of non-personal data markets

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Report by the Think Tank of the European Parliament: “The European Commission’s Data Strategy aims to create a single market for data, open to data from across the world, where personal and non-personal data, including sensitive business data, are secure. The EU Regulation on the free flow of non-personal data allows non-personal data to be stored and processed anywhere in the EU without unjustified restrictions, with limited exceptions based on grounds of public security. The creation of multiple common sector-specific European data spaces aims to ensure Europe’s global competitiveness and data sovereignty. The Data Act proposed by the Commission aims to remove barriers to data access for both consumers and businesses and to establish common rules to govern the sharing of data generated using connected products or related services.

The aim of the study is to provide an in-depth, comprehensive, and issue-specific analysis of the emergence of non-personal data markets in Europe. The study seeks to identify the potential value of the non-personal data market, potential challenges and solutions, and the legislative/policy measures necessary to facilitate the further development of non-personal data markets. The study also ranks the main non-personal data markets by size and growth rate and provides a sector-specific analysis for the mobility and transport, energy, and manufacturing sectors…(More)”.

Technology Foresight for Public Funding of Innovation: Methods and Best Practices

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JRC Paper: “In times of growing uncertainties and complexities, anticipatory thinking is essential for policymakers. Technology foresight explores the longer-term futures of Science, Technology and Innovation. It can be used as a tool to create effective policy responses, including in technology and innovation policies, and to shape technological change. In this report we present six anticipatory and technology foresight methods that can contribute to anticipatory intelligence in terms of public funding of innovation: the Delphi survey, genius forecasting, technology roadmapping, large language models used in foresight, horizon scanning and scenario planning. Each chapter provides a brief overview of the method with case studies and recommendations. The insights from this report show that only by combining different anticipatory viewpoints and approaches to spotting, understanding and shaping emergent technologies, can public funders such as the European Innovation Council improve their proactive approaches to supporting ground-breaking technologies. In this way, they will help innovation ecosystems to develop…(More)”.

AI chatbots do work of civil servants in productivity trial

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Paul Seddon: “Documents disclosed to the BBC have shed light on the use of AI-powered chatbot technology within government.

The chatbots have been used to analyse lengthy reports – a job that would normally be done by humans.

The Department for Education, which ran the trial, hopes it could boost productivity across Whitehall.

The PCS civil service union says it does not object to the use of AI – but clear guidelines are needed “so the benefits are shared by workers”.

The latest generation of chatbots, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), can quickly analyse reams of information, including images, to answer questions and summarise long articles.

They are expected to upend working practices across the economy in the coming years, and the government says they will have “significant implications” for the way officials work in future.

The education department ran the eight-week study over the summer under a contract with London-based company Faculty.ai, to test how so-called large language models (LLMs) could be used by officials.

The firm’s researchers used its access to a premium version of ChatGPT, the popular chatbot developed by OpenAI, to analyse draft local skills training plans that had been sent to the department to review.

These plans, drawn up by bodies representing local employers, are meant to influence the training offered by local further education colleges.

Results from the pilot are yet to be published, but documents and emails requested by the BBC under Freedom of Information laws offer an insight into the project’s aims.

According to an internal document setting out the reasons for the study, a chatbot would be used to summarise and compare the “main insights and themes” from the training plans.

The results, which were to be compared with summaries produced by civil servants, would test how Civil Service “productivity” might be improved.

It added that language models could analyse long, unstructured documents “where previously the only other option for be for individuals to read through all the reports”.

But the project’s aims went further, with hopes the chatbot could help provide “useful insights” that could help the department’s skills unit “identify future skills needs across the country”…(More)”.

To redesign democracy, the U.S. should borrow an idea from Dublin

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Claudia Chwalisz and Zia Khan: “…Let’s start with some of the mechanics: The typical citizens’ assembly convenes community members from all walks of life to study, deliberate, and provide recommendations to policy questions on behalf of the larger public. Crucially, these representatives are randomly selected through a lottery (also known as sortition) and serve temporarily, as with jury duty.The idea is to reach beyond the typical folks who show up at a school board meeting or that run for office but instead engage a true cross-section of the community. Assemblies make every citizen a potential representative of the people, not just a vote to be turned out. 

While citizen’s assemblies were eclipsed as a tool of governance as elections came to define democracy, the idea actually dates back to ancient Athens and shaped early democratic institutions in America, like the jury system. Now, as the United States grapples with its own challenges of division and discord and the 2024 elections loom, this old idea points us toward new ways of giving people real voice and power. 

Assemblies can create good conditions for people to have honest conversations, grapple with tradeoffs, and understand different points of view. As shown in other equally diverse and large countries, citizens’ assemblies can be instrumental in addressing issues that have proven particularly divisive or have been susceptible to political stagnation, such as homelessness, climate change, land use, safety and policing, abortion, transgender rights, migration, and others.

In most places, assemblies have been only advisory thus far—but the moral authority of speaking on behalf of the people and hard-won consensus can be powerful. In Ireland and many other places, they’ve been organized by public authorities as a way to supplement input from elected officials…(More)”.

Can Google Trends predict asylum-seekers’ destination choices?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Haodong Qi & Tuba Bircan: “Google Trends (GT) collate the volumes of search keywords over time and by geographical location. Such data could, in theory, provide insights into people’s ex ante intentions to migrate, and hence be useful for predictive analysis of future migration. Empirically, however, the predictive power of GT is sensitive, it may vary depending on geographical context, the search keywords selected for analysis, as well as Google’s market share and its users’ characteristics and search behavior, among others. Unlike most previous studies attempting to demonstrate the benefit of using GT for forecasting migration flows, this article addresses a critical but less discussed issue: when GT cannot enhance the performances of migration models. Using EUROSTAT statistics on first-time asylum applications and a set of push-pull indicators gathered from various data sources, we train three classes of gravity models that are commonly used in the migration literature, and examine how the inclusion of GT may affect models’ abilities to predict refugees’ destination choices. The results suggest that the effects of including GT are highly contingent on the complexity of different models. Specifically, GT can only improve the performance of relatively simple models, but not of those augmented by flow Fixed-Effects or by Auto-Regressive effects. These findings call for a more comprehensive analysis of the strengths and limitations of using GT, as well as other digital trace data, in the context of modeling and forecasting migration. It is our hope that this nuanced perspective can spur further innovations in the field, and ultimately bring us closer to a comprehensive modeling framework of human migration…(More)”.