The giant plan to track diversity in research journals

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Holly Else & Jeffrey M. Perkel: “In the next year, researchers should expect to face a sensitive set of questions whenever they send their papers to journals, and when they review or edit manuscripts. More than 50 publishers representing over 15,000 journals globally are preparing to ask scientists about their race or ethnicity — as well as their gender — in an initiative that’s part of a growing effort to analyse researcher diversity around the world. Publishers say that this information, gathered and stored securely, will help to analyse who is represented in journals, and to identify whether there are biases in editing or review that sway which findings get published. Pilot testing suggests that many scientists support the idea, although not all.

The effort comes amid a push for a wider acknowledgement of racism and structural racism in science and publishing — and the need to gather more information about it. In any one country, such as the United States, ample data show that minority groups are under-represented in science, particularly at senior levels. But data on how such imbalances are reflected — or intensified — in research journals are scarce. Publishers haven’t systematically looked, in part because journals are international and there has been no measurement framework for race and ethnicity that made sense to researchers of many cultures.

“If you don’t have the data, it is very difficult to understand where you are at, to make changes, set goals and measure progress,” says Holly Falk-Krzesinski, vice-president of research intelligence at the Dutch publisher Elsevier, who is working with the joint group and is based in Chicago, Illinois.

In the absence of data, some scientists have started measuring for themselves. Computational researchers are scouring the literature using software that tries to estimate racial and ethnic diversity across millions of published research articles, and to examine biases in who is represented or cited. Separately, over the past two years, some researchers have criticized publishers for not having diversity data already, and especially for being slow to collate information about small groups of elite decision makers: journal editors and editorial boards. At least one scientist has started publicizing those numbers himself….(More)”.

Sustainable Smart City Transitions: Theoretical Foundations, Sociotechnical Assemblage and Governance Mechanisms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Luca Mora, Mark Deakin, Xiaoling Zhang, Michael Batty, Martin de Jong, Paolo Santi and Francesco Paolo Appio: “This book enhances the reader’s understanding of the theoretical foundations, sociotechnical assemblage, and governance mechanisms of sustainable smart city transitions.

Drawing on empirical evidence stemming from existing smart city research, the book begins by advancing a theory of sustainable smart city transitions, which forms bridges between smart city development studies and some of the key assumptions underpinning transition management and system innovation research, human geography, spatial planning, and critical urban scholarship. This interdisciplinary theoretical formulation details how smart city transitions unfold and how they should be conceptualized and enacted in order to be assembled as sustainable developments. The proposed theory of sustainable smart city transitions is then enriched by the findings of investigations into the planning and implementation of smart city transition strategies and projects.

Focusing on different empirical settings, change dimensions, and analytical elements, the attention moves from the sociotechnical requirements of citywide transition pathways to the development of sector-specific smart city projects and technological innovations, in particular in the fields of urban mobility and urban governance.

This book represents a relevant reference work for academic and practitioner audiences, policy makers, and representative of smart city industries….(More) (Open Access)”.

The Summit for Democracy commitments are out—now what?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Norman Eisen, Mario Picon, Robin J. Lewis, Renzo Falla, and Lilly Blumenthal: “On February 14, 2022, two months after the first Summit for Democracy, the U.S. Department of State released written commitments from 56 governments focused on strengthening democracy, combatting corruption, and defending human rights. Now the post-summit Year of Action can begin in earnest. As two of us discussed in a post right after the Summit, for the event to achieve its objectives, civil society, the private sector, and other good governance champions must work with and hold governments accountable for the implementation of concrete, measurable, and meaningful commitments.

From our initial survey, we observe significant variation in terms of the specificity and nature of commitments published thus far. Here, we offer a brief snapshot of the distribution of countries with published commitments, the range of those commitments, and their significance. Our initial reactions are preliminary; this post offers a roadmap for the deeper reading and analysis of the commitments that we and many others will undertake.

The countries that have submitted written commitments to date fall along the spectrum of governance regimes, as defined by the recently released Democracy Index 2021 from the Economist Intelligence Unit. 53 of 167 countries featured in the index provided written commitments with clear over-representation of those classified as full democracies—18 out of 21 full democracies submitted commitments. Meanwhile, 26 out of 53 countries considered flawed democracies submitted commitments. An even smaller group of hybrid regimes (that is, ones that combine democratic and autocratic features; 8 out of 34 countries) and a minuscule proportion of countries under what are considered authoritarian regimes (1 out of 59 countries) responded to the call for written commitments.

Among these submissions, the nature of the commitments varies. Most countries offer some commitments on the domestic front, but many, particularly the full democracies, focus on the international arena. As examples, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s commitments include “organizing elections within constitutional deadlines,” while New Zealand’s include a pledge of “1 million NZD to support anti-corruption within the Pacific region.”…(More)”.

Commit to transparent COVID data until the WHO declares the pandemic is over

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Edouard Mathieu at Nature: “…There are huge inequalities in data reporting around the world. Most of my time over the past two years has been spent digging through official websites and social-media accounts of hundreds of governments and health authorities. Some governments still report official statistics in low-resolution images on Facebook or infrequent press conferences on YouTube — often because they lack resources to do better. Some countries, including China and Iran, have provided no files at all.

Sometimes, it’s a lack of awareness: government officials might think that a topline figure somewhere in a press release is sufficient. Sometimes, the problem is reluctance: publishing the first file would mean a flood of requests for more data that authorities can’t or won’t publish.

Some governments rushed to launch pandemic dashboards, often built as one-off jobs by hired contractors. Civil servants couldn’t upgrade them as the pandemic shifted and new metrics and charts became more relevant. I started building our global data set on COVID-19 vaccinations in 2021, but many governments didn’t supply data for weeks — sometimes months — after roll-outs because their dashboards couldn’t accommodate the data. Worse, they rarely supplied underlying data essential for others to download and produce their own analyses. (My team asked repeatedly.)

Over and over, I’ve seen governments emphasize making dashboards look good when the priority should be making data available. A simple text file would do. After all, research groups like mine and citizens with expertise in data-visualization tools are more than willing to create a useful website or mobile app. But to do so, we need the raw material in a machine-readable format….(More)”.

OECD Framework for the Classification of AI systems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Digital Economy Paper: “As artificial intelligence (AI) integrates all sectors at a rapid pace, different AI systems bring different benefits and risks. In comparing virtual assistants, self-driving vehicles and video recommendations for children, it is easy to see that the benefits and risks of each are very different. Their specificities will require different approaches to policy making and governance. To help policy makers, regulators, legislators and others characterise AI systems deployed in specific contexts, the OECD has developed a user-friendly tool to evaluate AI systems from a policy perspective. It can be applied to the widest range of AI systems across the following dimensions: People & Planet; Economic Context; Data & Input; AI model; and Task & Output. Each of the framework’s dimensions has a subset of properties and attributes to define and assess policy implications and to guide an innovative and trustworthy approach to AI as outlined in the OECD AI Principles….(More)”.

Data Dissemination in the Digital Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by PARIS21 and Open Data Watch: “…a first account of the state of data portals in national statistical offices.

Data portals form a critical link between producers and users of data; and they facilitate the use of data in evidence-based decision making. National statistical offices, supported by their international partners, have embraced data portals as a way to disseminate official data.

However, data portals need to be designed and implemented in a sustainable manner to be beneficial to end users. Currently, there is a lack of common principles and guidelines as to how these data portals should be set up and managed to guide institutions.

This report proposes a holistic method to evaluate data portals and proposes recommendations to improve their use and function…(More)”.

The World Uncertainty Index

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Hites Ahir, Nicholas Bloom & Davide Furceri: “We construct the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) for an unbalanced panel of 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1952. This is the frequency of the word “uncertainty” in the quarterly Economist Intelligence Unit country reports. Globally, the Index spikes around major events like the Gulf War, the Euro debt crisis, the Brexit vote and the COVID pandemic. The level of uncertainty is higher in developing countries but is more synchronized across advanced economies with their tighter trade and financial linkages. In a panel vector autoregressive setting we find that innovations in the WUI foreshadow significant declines in output. This effect is larger and more persistent in countries with lower institutional quality, and in sectors with greater financial constraints…(More)”.

Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

World Economic Forum Report: “With the integration of screenless technology into everyday life, the data ecosystem is growing increasingly complicated. New ambient data collection methods bring many benefits, but they also have the potential to amplify mistrust between people and technology.

In this Insight Report, the World Economic Forum’s Taskforce on Data Intermediaries explores the potential to outsource human decision points to an agent acting on an individual’s behalf, in the form of a data intermediary.

The opportunities and risks of such a new approach are explored, representing one of many new policy anchors through and around which individuals may navigate new data ecosystem models. Levers of action for both the public and private sectors are suggested to ensure a future-proof digital policy environment that allows for the seamless and trusted movement of data between people and the technology that serves them…(More)”.

Relational Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Virginia Dignum: “The impact of Artificial Intelligence does not depend only on fundamental research and technological developments, but for a large part on how these systems are introduced into society and used in everyday situations. Even though AI is traditionally associated with rational decision-making, understanding and shaping the societal impact of AI in all its facets requires a relational perspective. A rational approach to AI, where computational algorithms drive decision-making independent of human intervention, insights and emotions, has shown to result in bias and exclusion, laying bare societal vulnerabilities and insecurities. A relational approach, that focus on the relational nature of things, is needed to deal with the ethical, legal, societal, cultural, and environmental implications of AI. A relational approach to AI recognises that objective and rational reasoning cannot does not always result in the ‘right’ way to proceed because what is ‘right’ depends on the dynamics of the situation in which the decision is taken, and that rather than solving ethical problems the focus of design and use of AI must be on asking the ethical question. In this position paper, I start with a general discussion of current conceptualisations of AI followed by an overview of existing approaches to governance and responsible development and use of AI. Then, I reflect over what should be the bases of a social paradigm for AI and how this should be embedded in relational, feminist and non-Western philosophies, in particular the Ubuntu philosophy….(More)”.

Global Cooperation on Digital Governance and the Geoeconomics of New Technologies in a Multi-polar World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A special collection of papers by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and King’s College London (KCL) resulting from: “… a virtual conference as part of KCL’s Project for Peaceful Competition. It brought together an intellectually and geographically diverse group of experts to discuss the geoeconomics of new digital technologies and the prospects for governance of the technologies in a multi-polar world. The papers prepared for discussion at the conference are collected in this series. An introduction summarizes (in heavily abbreviated form) the principal analytical conclusions emerging from the conference, together with the main policy recommendations put forward by participants….(More)”.