Orientation Failure? Why Directionality Matters in Innovation Policy and Implementation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Mariam Tabatadze and Benjamin Kumpf: “…In the essay “The Moon and the Ghetto” from 1977, Richard Nelson brought renewed attention to the question of directionality of innovation. He asked why societies that are wealthy and technologically advanced are not able to deal effectively with social problems such as poverty or inequities in education. Nelson believed that politics are only a small part of the problem. The main challenge, according to him, was further advancing scientific and technological breakthroughs.

Since the late seventies, humanity has laid claim to many more significant technological and scientific achievements. However, challenges such as poverty, social inequalities and of course environmental degradation persist. This begs the question: is the main problem a lack of directionality?

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked renewed interest in mission-driven innovation in industrial and socio-economic policy (see below for a framing of missions and mission-oriented innovation). The focus is a continuation of a “normative turn” in national and supranational science, technology and innovation (STI) policies over the last 15 years.

The directionality of STI policies shifted from pursuing predominantly growth and competitiveness-related objectives to addressing societal challenges. It brings together elements of innovation policy – focused on economic growth – and transition policy, which seeks beneficial change for society at large. This is important as we are seeing increasingly more evidence on the negative effects of innovation in countries across the globe, from exacerbated inequalities between places to greater inequalities between income groups…(More)”.

A 630-Billion-Word Internet Analysis Shows ‘People’ Is Interpreted as ‘Men’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dana G. Smith at Scientific American: “A massive linguistic analysis of more than half a trillion words concludes that we assign gender to words that, by their very definition, should be gender-neutral.

Psychologists at New York University analyzed text from nearly three billion Web pages and compared how often words for person (“individual,” “people,” and so on) were associated with terms for a man (“male,” “he”) or a woman (“female,” “she”). They found that male-related words overlapped with “person” more frequently than female words did. The cultural concept of a person, from this perspective, is more often a man than a woman, according to the study, which was published on April 1 in Science Advances.

To conduct the study, the researchers turned to an enormous open-source data set of Web pages called the Common Crawl, which pulls text from everything from corporate white papers to Internet discussion forums. For their analysis of the text—a total of more than 630 billion words—the researchers used word embeddings, a computational linguistic technique that assesses how similar two words are by looking for how often they appear together.

“You can take a word like the word ‘person’ and understand what we mean by ‘person,’ how we represent the word ‘person,’ by looking at the other words that we often use around the word ‘person,’” explains April Bailey, a postdoctoral researcher at N.Y.U., who conducted the study. “We found that there was more overlap between the words for people and words for men than words for people and the words for women…, suggesting that there is this male bias in the concept of a person.”

Scientists have previously studied gender bias in language, such as the idea that women are more closely associated with family and home life and that men are more closely linked with work. “But this is the first to study this really general gender stereotype—the idea that men are sort of the default humans—in this quantitative computational social science way,” says Molly Lewis, a research scientist at the psychology department at Carnegie Mellon University, who was not involved in the study….(More)”.

The rise of the data steward

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Sarah Wray: “As data use and collaboration become more advanced, there is a need for a new profession within the public and private sectors, says Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer at New York University’s The GovLab. He calls this role the ‘data steward’ and is also seeking to expand existing definitions of the term.

While many cities, government organisations, and private sector companies have chief data officers and chief privacy officers, Verhulst says this new function is broader and necessary as more organisations begin to explore data collaborations which bring together data from various sources to solve problems for the public good.

Many cities, for instance, want to get more value and innovation from the open data they share, and are also increasingly partnering to benefit from private sector data on mobility, spending, and more.

Several examples highlight the challenges, though. There have been disputes about data-sharing and privacy, such as between Uber and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, while other initiatives have failed to gain traction. Copenhagen’s City Data Exchange facilitated the exchange of public and private data but was disbanded after it struggled to get enough data providers and users on the platform and to become financially sustainable.

Verhulst says that beyond ensuring the security and integrity of data, new skills required by data stewards include the ability to secure partnerships, adequately vet data partners and set up data-sharing agreements, as well as the capacity to steward data-sharing initiatives internally and obtain legal and executive buy-in. Data stewards should also develop financial models for data-sharing to ensure partnerships are sustainable over time.

“That’s quite often ignored,” says Verhulst. “It’s assumed that these things will pay for themselves. Well surprise, surprise, there are costs.”

In addition, there’s an important role for retaining an active focus on insights from data and problems to be solved. Many early open data efforts have taken a ‘build it and they will come’ approach, and usage at scale hasn’t always materialised.

A dynamic regulatory environment is also driving demand for new skills, says Verhulst, noting that the proposed EU Data Act indicates a mandate “to knock on the doors of the private sector [for data] in emergency contexts”.

“The question is: how do you go about that?” Verhulst comments. “Many organisations are going to have to figure this out.”

The GovLab is now running the third cohort of its training for data stewards, and the first focused in the Eastern Hemisphere.

The Developing a Data Reuse Strategy for Public Problems course is part of The GovLab’s Open Data Policy Lab, which is supported by Microsoft..(More)”.

Health Data Governance Principles

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Principles prepared by Transform health: “Data-driven approaches are increasingly the norm or aspiration in the operation of health systems. The collection, processing, storage, analysis, use, sharing and disposal of health data has grown in complexity. This exponential increase in data use necessitates robust and equitable governance of health data. Countries and regions around the world are instituting health data governance policies and legislation. However, there is not yet a comprehensive, global set of principles to guide the governance of health data across public health systems and policies. The Health Data Governance Principles respond to that need.

The Principles are intended as a resource for, and have applicability to, a range of stakeholders involved in the collection and use of health data, including governments, the private sector, international organisations, civil society, among others. We encourage all stakeholders to endorse the Principles.

We want to see the Principles adopted by governments, technology companies, and other institutions responsible for collecting and managing health data…(More)”.

City museums in the age of datafication: could museums be meaningful sites of data practice in smart cities?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Natalia Grincheva: “The article documents connections and synergies between city museums’ visions and programming as well as emerging smart city issues and dilemmas in a fast-paced urban environment marked with the processes of increasing digitalization and datafication. The research employs policy/document analysis and semi-structured interviews with smart city government representatives and museum professionals to investigating both smart city policy frameworks as well as city museum’s data-driven installations and activities in New York, London and Singapore. A comparative program analysis of the Singapore City Gallery, Museum of the City of New York and Museum of London identifies such sites of data practices as Data storytelling, interpretation and eco-curation. Discussing these sites as dedicated spaces of smart citizen engagement, the article reveals that city museums can either empower their visitors to consider their roles as active city co-makers or see them as passive recipients of the smart city transformations….(More)”.

Google is using AI to better detect searches from people in crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by James Vincent: “In a personal crisis, many people turn to an impersonal source of support: Google. Every day, the company fields searches on topics like suicide, sexual assault, and domestic abuse. But Google wants to do more to direct people to the information they need, and says new AI techniques that better parse the complexities of language are helping.

Specifically, Google is integrating its latest machine learning model, MUM, into its search engine to “more accurately detect a wider range of personal crisis searches.” The company unveiled MUM at its IO conference last year, and has since used it to augment search with features that try to answer questions connected to the original search.

In this case, MUM will be able to spot search queries related to difficult personal situations that earlier search tools could not, says Anne Merritt, a Google product manager for health and information quality.

“MUM is able to help us understand longer or more complex queries like ‘why did he attack me when i said i dont love him,’” Merrit told The Verge. “It may be obvious to humans that this query is about domestic violence, but long, natural-language queries like these are difficult for our systems to understand without advanced AI.”

Other examples of queries that MUM can react to include “most common ways suicide is completed” (a search Merrit says earlier systems “may have previously understood as information seeking”) and “Sydney suicide hot spots” (where, again, earlier responses would have likely returned travel information — ignoring the mention of “suicide” in favor of the more popular query for “hot spots”). When Google detects such crisis searches, it responds with an information box telling users “Help is available,” usually accompanied by a phone number or website for a mental health charity like Samaritans.

In addition to using MUM to respond to personal crises, Google says it’s also using an older AI language model, BERT, to better identify searches looking for explicit content like pornography. By leveraging BERT, Google says it’s “reduced unexpected shocking results by 30%” year-on-year. However, the company was unable to share absolute figures for how many “shocking results” its users come across on average, so while this is a comparative improvement, it gives no indication of how big or small the problem actually is.

Google is keen to tell you that AI is helping the company improve its search products — especially at a time when there’s a building narrative that “Google search is dying.” But integrating this technology comes with its downsides, too.

Many AI experts warn that Google’s increasing use of machine learning language models could surface new problems for the company, like introducing biases and misinformation into search results. AI systems are also opaque, offering engineers restricted insight into how they come to certain conclusions…(More)”.

Internet poverty: The next frontier in development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jesús Crespo Cuaresma, Katharina Fenz, Marianne Nari Fisher, Homi Kharas: “…people today also need to access a minimum package of internet services as part of basic human needs. To expand on the traditional method of poverty measurement, researchers at World Data Lab have identified and costed a “minimum internet basket,” which combines measures of quantity, quality, and affordability based on consultations with the Alliance for Affordable Internet, Ookla, and GSMA. 

Under this expanded definition (see below image), a person is considered internet poor if s/he cannot afford a minimum quantity (1 GB) and quality (10 Mbps download speed) of internet services without spending more than 10 percent of his or her disposable income on these services. This minimum package of internet services would allow a person to fulfill basic needs, such as accessing emails, reading the news, or using government e-services. The core methodology of internet poverty was initially presented in mid-2021 and has undergone additional enhancements to identify the number of internet poor in almost all countries. 

World Data Lab’s just-launched Internet Poverty Index can now adjust the actual cost of internet services in every country to estimate what a standard mobile internet package of 1 GB at 10 MB/second would cost in that country. It then computes how many people in the country could afford such a package. If the cost of the standardized package is above 10 percent of a person’s total spending, the person is considered internet poor. This allows us to create global estimates and share the number of people living in internet poverty globally, with disaggregations available by gender. 

As with the $1.90 threshold of extreme poverty, the key value added of the approach is not the threshold itself but its consistent measurement across countries and over time. There can be a legitimate discussion about the minimum package, just as there are now suggestions that higher poverty lines be used in lower-middle-income and upper-middle-income countries. For now, however, we use the same package in all countries, which would correspond roughly to $6 per month ($0.19/day; 2011 PPP)…(More)”

Befriending Trees to Lower a City’s Temperature

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Peter Wilson at the New York Times: “New York, Denver, Shanghai, Ottawa and Los Angeles have all unveiled Million Tree Initiatives aimed at greatly increasing their urban forests because of the ability of trees to reduce city temperatures, absorb carbon dioxide and soak up excess rainfall.

Central Melbourne, on the other hand, lacks those cities’ financial firepower and is planning to plant a little more than 3,000 trees a year over the next decade. Yet it has gained the interest of other cities by using its extensive data to shore up the community engagement and political commitment required to sustain the decades-long work of building urban forests.

A small municipality covering just 14.5 square miles in the center of the greater Melbourne metropolitan area — which sprawls for 3,860 square miles and houses 5.2 million people in 31 municipalities — the city of Melbourne introduced its online map in 2013.

Called the Urban Forest Visual, the map displayed each of the 80,000 trees in its parks and streets, and showed each tree’s age, species and health. It also gave each tree its own email address so that people could help to monitor them and alert council workers to any specific problems.

That is when the magic happened.

City officials were surprised to see the trees receiving thousands of love letters. They ranged from jaunty greetings — “good luck with the photosynthesis” — to love poems and emotional tributes about how much joy the trees brought to people’s lives….(More)”.

Democracy Report 2022: Autocratization Changing Nature?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem): “This Democracy Report documents several signs that autocratization is changing nature. With five military coups and one self-coup, 2021 featured an increase in coups unprecedented over the past two decades. These coups contributed to driving the uptick in the number of closed autocracies. They also seem to signal a shift toward emboldened actors, given the previous decline in coups during the 21st century.
Polarization and government misinformation are also increasing. These trends are interconnected. Polarized publics are more likely to demonize political opponents and distrust information from diverse sources, and mobilization shifts as a result. The increase in misinformation and polarization further signals what may prove to be a changing nature of autocratization in the world today. We discuss this shift in detail in the third part of the report: “Autocratization Changing Nature?”.
Another sign of emboldened political leaders is the increasing number of countries where critical, formal aspects of democracy are eroding. The autonomy of institutions such as Election Management Bodies (EMBs) are now attacked and undermined in many autocratzing countries alongside the judiciary and the legislature. This year’s Democracy Report documents such changes.
The Democracy Report 2022 is published along with version 12 of the V-Dem dataset. The dataset is produced by the worldwide V-Dem collaboration and is based on assessments by over 3,700 experts from more than 180 countries, resulting in over 30 million data points. The Democracy Report 2022 is authored by a team at the V-Dem Institute, and we alone are accountable for its contents.
The Democracy Report 2022 analyzes the evidence from three perspectives. The first part examines the state of the world in 2021 based on the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI) and the Regimes of the World (RoW) Index. The second part of the report focuses on countries that are in a process of changing. The third part presents data on coups, polarization, and disinformation, all of which signal that the fundamental dynamics of the current wave of autocratization may be changing.
In summary: The worldwide wave of autocratization is deepening, engulfing more countries, and seems to be changing nature…(More)”.

Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Justin Grimmer, Margaret E. Roberts, and Brandon M. Stewart: “From social media posts and text messages to digital government documents and archives, researchers are bombarded with a deluge of text reflecting the social world. This textual data gives unprecedented insights into fundamental questions in the social sciences, humanities, and industry. Meanwhile new machine learning tools are rapidly transforming the way science and business are conducted. Text as Data shows how to combine new sources of data, machine learning tools, and social science research design to develop and evaluate new insights.

Text as Data is organized around the core tasks in research projects using text—representation, discovery, measurement, prediction, and causal inference. The authors offer a sequential, iterative, and inductive approach to research design. Each research task is presented complete with real-world applications, example methods, and a distinct style of task-focused research.

Bridging many divides—computer science and social science, the qualitative and the quantitative, and industry and academia—Text as Data is an ideal resource for anyone wanting to analyze large collections of text in an era when data is abundant and computation is cheap, but the enduring challenges of social science remain…(More)”.