Paper by Barry Bozeman: “The paper asks: ‘What can we learn from COVID-19 pandemic about effective use of scientific and technical information (STI) in policymaking and how might the lessons be put to use?’ The paper employs the political rhetoric of ‘follow the science’ as a lens for examining contemporary concerns in the use of STI, including (1) ‘Breadth of Science Products’, the necessity of a broader concept of STI that includes by-products science, (2) ‘Science Dynamism’, emphasizing the uncertainty and impeachability of science, (3) ‘STI Urgency’ suggesting that STI use during widespread calamities differs from more routine applications, and (4) ‘Hyper-politicization of Science’, arguing that a step-change in the contentiousness of politics affects uses and misuses of STI. The paper concludes with a discussion, STI Curation, as a possible ingredient to improving effective use. With more attention to credibility and trust of STI and to the institutional legitimacy of curators, it should prove possible to improve the effective use of STI in public policy….(More)”.
Serving citizens: measuring the performance of services for a better user experience
OECD Report: “Measuring the performance of services and making effective use of the results are critical for designing and delivering policies to improve people’s lives. Improving user satisfaction with public services is an objective in many OECD countries and is one of the indicators in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal 16 of “Building effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”. This paper explores the use of satisfaction indicators to monitor citizens’ and users’ experience with public services. It finds that satisfaction indicators provide an accurate aggregate account of the factors driving service performance. At the same time, it shows that additional measures are needed to monitor the access, responsiveness and quality of public services, as well as to identify concrete areas of improvement. This paper provides examples of how countries use performance data in decision making (both subjective users’ experience and objective service outputs). It also highlights common challenges and good practices to strengthen performance measurement and management…(More)”.
Toolkit on Digital Transformation for People-Oriented Cities and Communities
Toolkit by the ITU: “The Toolkit on Digital Transformation for People-Oriented Cities and Communities supports strategizing and planning the digital transformation of cities and communities to promote sustainable, inclusive, resilient and improved quality of life for residents in cities and communities.
The resources contained in this Toolkit include international standards and guidance, the latest research and projections, and cutting-edge reports on a variety of timely topics relevant to the digital transformation of cities and communities. The Toolkit can universally benefit cities and communities, as well as regions and countries regardless of their level of smart or digital development, or their geographical or economic status.
The Toolkit is:
- A one-stop guide containing latest international standards and other ITU and UN resources, publications and reports.
- An endeavour to identify the challenges faced by cities as well as potential solutions that they can leverage for maximum positive impact.
- A comprehensive, yet non-exhaustive collation of information that is meant to inspire and support progress toward the SDGs, especially SDG 11, at the local level...(More)”
Facial Expressions Do Not Reveal Emotions
Lisa Feldman Barrett at Scientific American: “Do your facial movements broadcast your emotions to other people? If you think the answer is yes, think again. This question is under contentious debate. Some experts maintain that people around the world make specific, recognizable faces that express certain emotions, such as smiling in happiness, scowling in anger and gasping with widened eyes in fear. They point to hundreds of studies that appear to demonstrate that smiles, frowns, and so on are universal facial expressions of emotion. They also often cite Charles Darwin’s 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals to support the claim that universal expressions evolved by natural selection.
Other scientists point to a mountain of counterevidence showing that facial movements during emotions vary too widely to be universal beacons of emotional meaning. People may smile in hatred when plotting their enemy’s downfall and scowl in delight when they hear a bad pun. In Melanesian culture, a wide-eyed gasping face is a symbol of aggression, not fear. These experts say the alleged universal expressions just represent cultural stereotypes. To be clear, both sides in the debate acknowledge that facial movements vary for a given emotion; the disagreement is about whether there is enough uniformity to detect what someone is feeling.
This debate is not just academic; the outcome has serious consequences. Today you can be turned down for a job because a so-called emotion-reading system watching you on camera applied artificial intelligence to evaluate your facial movements unfavorably during an interview. In a U.S. court of law, a judge or jury may sometimes hand down a harsher sentence, even death, if they think a defendant’s face showed a lack of remorse. Children in preschools across the country are taught to recognize smiles as happiness, scowls as anger and other expressive stereotypes from books, games and posters of disembodied faces. And for children on the autism spectrum, some of whom have difficulty perceiving emotion in others, these teachings do not translate to better communication….Emotion AI systems, therefore, do not detect emotions. They detect physical signals, such as facial muscle movements, not the psychological meaning of those signals. The conflation of movement and meaning is deeply embedded in Western culture and in science. An example is a recent high-profile study that applied machine learning to more than six million internet videos of faces. The human raters, who trained the AI system, were asked to label facial movements in the videos, but the only labels they were given to use were emotion words, such as “angry,” rather than physical descriptions, such as “scowling.” Moreover there was no objective way to confirm what, if anything, the anonymous people in the videos were feeling in those moments…(More)”.
Citizen power mobilized to fight against mosquito borne diseases
GigaBlog: “Just out in GigaByte is the latest data release from Mosquito Alert, a citizen science system for investigating and managing disease-carrying mosquitoes, and is part of our WHO-sponsored series on vector borne human diseases. Presenting 13,700 new database records in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) repository, all linked to photographs submitted by citizen volunteers and validated by entomological experts to determine if it provides evidence of the presence of any of the mosquito vectors of top concern in Europe. This is the latest of a new special issue of papers presenting biodiversity data for research on human diseases health, incentivising data sharing to fill important particular species and geographic gaps. As big fans of citizen science (and Mosquito Alert), its great to see this new data showcased in the series.
Vector-borne diseases account for more than 17% of all infectious diseases in humans. There are large gaps in knowledge related to these vectors, and data mobilization campaigns are required to improve data coverage to help research on vector-borne diseases and human health. As part of these efforts, GigaScience Press has partnered with the GBIF; and has been supported by TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, hosted at the World Health Organization. Through this we launched this “Vectors of human disease” thematic series. Incentivising the sharing of this extremely important data, Article Processing Charges have been waived to assist with the global call for novel data. This effort has already led to the release of newly digitised location data for over 600,000 vector specimens observed across the Americas and Europe.
While paying credit to such a large number of volunteers, creating such a large public collection of validated mosquito images allows this dataset to be used to train machine-learning models for vector detection and classification. Sharing the data in this novel manner meant the authors of these papers had to set up a new credit system to evaluate contributions from multiple and diverse collaborators, which included university researchers, entomologists, and other non-academics such as independent researchers and citizen scientists. In the GigaByte paper these are acknowledged through collaborative authorship for the Mosquito Alert Digital Entomology Network and the Mosquito Alert Community…(More)”.
What makes administrative data research-ready?
Paper by Louise Mc Grath-Lone et al: “Administrative data are a valuable research resource, but are under-utilised in the UK due to governance, technical and other barriers (e.g., the time and effort taken to gain secure data access). In recent years, there has been considerable government investment in making administrative data “research-ready”, but there is no definition of what this term means. A common understanding of what constitutes research-ready administrative data is needed to establish clear principles and frameworks for their development and the realisation of their full research potential…Overall, we screened 2,375 records and identified 38 relevant studies published between 2012 and 2021. Most related to administrative data from the UK and US and particularly to health data. The term research-ready was used inconsistently in the literature and there was some conflation with the concept of data being ready for statistical analysis. From the thematic analysis, we identified five defining characteristics of research-ready administrative data: (a) accessible, (b) broad, (c) curated, (d) documented and (e) enhanced for research purposes…
Our proposed characteristics of research-ready administrative data could act as a starting point to help data owners and researchers develop common principles and standards. In the more immediate term, the proposed characteristics are a useful framework for cataloguing existing research-ready administrative databases and relevant resources that can support their development…(More)”.
Tech Inclusion for Excluded Communities
Essay by Linda Jakob Sadeh & Smadar Nehab: “Companies often offer practical trainings to address the problem of diversity in high tech, acknowledging the disadvantages that members of excluded communities face and trying to level the playing field in terms of expertise and skills. But such trainings often fail in generating mass participation among excluded communities in tech professions. Beyond the professional knowledge and hands-on technical experience that these trainings provide, the fundamental social, ethnic, and economic barriers often remain unaddressed.
Thus, a paradoxical situation arises: On the one hand, certain communities are excluded from high tech and from the social mobility it affords. On the other hand, even when well-meaning companies wish to hire from these communities and implement diversity and inclusion measures that should make doing so possible, the pool of qualified and interested candidates often remains small. Members of the excluded communities remain discouraged from studying or training for these professions and from joining economic growth sectors, particularly high tech.
Tech Inclusion, the model we advance in this article, seeks to untangle this paradox. It takes a sincere look at the social and economic barriers that prevent excluded communities from participating in the tech industry. It suggests that the technology industry can be a driving force for inclusion if we turn the inclusion paradigm on its head, by bringing the industry to the excluded community, instead of trying to bring the excluded community to the industry, while cultivating a supportive environment for both potential candidates and firms…(More)”.
A Theory of Visionary Disruption
Paper by Joshua S. Gans: “Exploitation of disruptive technologies often requires resource deployment that creates conflict if there are divergent beliefs regarding the efficacy of a new technology. This arises when a visionary agent has more optimistic beliefs about a technological opportunity. Exploration in the form of experiments can be persuasive when beliefs differ by mitigating disagreement and its costs. This paper examines experimental choice when experiments need to persuade as well as inform. It is shown that, due to resource constraints, persuasion factors more highly for entrepreneurial than incumbent firms. However, incumbent firms, despite being able to redeploy resources using authority, are constrained in adoption as exploration cannot mitigate the costs of disagreement…(More)”.
Smart Cities and Smart Communities: Empowering Citizens through Intelligent Technologies
Book edited by Srikanta Patnaik, Siddhartha Sen, Sudeshna Ghosh: “Smart City” programs and strategies have become one of the most dominant urban agendas for local governments worldwide in the past two decades. The rapid urbanization rate and unprecedented growth of megacities in the 21st century triggered drastic changes in traditional ways of urban policy and planning, leading to an influx of digital technology applications for fast and efficient urban management. With the rising popularity in making our cities “smart”, several domains of urban management, urban infrastructure, and urban quality-of-life have seen increasing dependence on advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) that optimize and control the day-to-day functioning of urban systems. Smart Cities, essentially, act as digital networks that obtain large-scale real-time data on urban systems, process them, and make decisions on how to manage them efficiently. The book presents 26 chapters, which are organized around five topics: (1) Conceptual framework for smart cities and communities; (2) Technical concepts and models for smart city and communities; (3) Civic engagement and citizen participation; (4) Case studies from the Global North; and (5) Case studies from the Global South…(More)”.
Collective Intelligence for Smart Cities
Book by Chun HO WU, George To Sum Ho, Fatos Xhafa, Andrew W. H. IP, Reinout Van Hille: “Collective Intelligence for Smart Cities begins with an overview of the fundamental issues and concepts of smart cities. Surveying the current state-of-the-art research in the field, the book delves deeply into key smart city developments such as health and well-being, transportation, safety, energy, environment and sustainability. In addition, the book focuses on the role of IoT cloud computing and big data, specifically in smart city development. Users will find a unique, overarching perspective that ties together these concepts based on collective intelligence, a concept for quantifying mass activity familiar to many social science and life science researchers. Sections explore how group decision-making emerges from the consensus of the collective, collaborative and competitive activities of many individuals, along with future perspectives…(More)”