A growing number of governments hope to clone America’s DARPA

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “Using messenger RNA to make vaccines was an unproven idea. But if it worked, the technique would revolutionise medicine, not least by providing protection against infectious diseases and biological weapons. So in 2013 America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gambled. It awarded a small, new firm called Moderna $25m to develop the idea. Eight years, and more than 175m doses later, Moderna’s covid-19 vaccine sits on the list of innovations for which DARPA can claim at least partial credit, alongside weather satellites, GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the internet.

It is the agency that shaped the modern world, and this success has spurred imitators. In America there are ARPAs for homeland security, intelligence and energy, as well as the original defence one. President Joe Biden has asked Congress for $6.5bn to set up a health version, which will, the president vows, “end cancer as we know it”. His administration also has plans for another, to tackle climate change. Germany has recently established two such agencies: one civilian (the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, or SPRIN-D) and another military (the Cybersecurity Innovation Agency). Japan’s version is called Moonshot R&D. In Britain, a bill for an Advanced Research and Invention Agency—often referred to as UK ARPA—is making its way through parliament….(More)”.

Data-driven environmental decision-making and action in armed conflict

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Wim Zwijnenburg: “Our understanding of how severely armed conflicts have impacted natural resources, eco-systems, biodiversity and long-term implications on climate has massively improved over the last decade. Without a doubt, cataclysmic events such as the 1991 Gulf War oil fires contributed to raising awareness on the conflict-environment nexus, and the images of burning wells are engraved into our collective mind. But another more recent, under-examined yet major contributor to this growing cognizance is the digital revolution, which has provided us with a wealth of data and information from conflict-affected countries quickly made available through the internet. With just a few clicks, anyone with a computer or smartphone and a Wi-Fi connection can follow, often in near-real time, events shared through social media in warzones or satellite imagery showing what is unfolding on the ground.

These developments have significantly deepened our understanding of how military activities, both historically and in current conflicts, contribute to environmental damage and can impact the lives and livelihoods of civilians. Geospatial analysis through earth observation (EO) is now widely used to document international humanitarian law (IHL) violations, improve humanitarian response and inform post-conflict assessments.

These new insights on conflict-environment dynamics have driven humanitarian, military and political responses. The latter are essential for the protection of the environment in armed conflict: with knowledge and understanding also comes a responsibility to prevent, mitigate and minimize environmental damage, in line with existing international obligations. Of particular relevance, under international humanitarian law, militaries must take into account incidental environmental damage that is reasonably foreseeable based on an assessment of information from all sources available to them at the relevant time (ICRC Guidelines on the Protection of the Environment, Rule 7; Customary IHL Rule 43). Excessive harm is prohibited, and all feasible precautions must be taken to reduce incidental damage (Guidelines Rule 8, Customary IHL Rule 44).

How do we ensure that the data-driven strides forward in understanding conflict-driven environmental damage translate into proper military training and decision-making, humanitarian response and reconstruction efforts? How can this influence behaviour change and improve accountability for military actions and targeting decisions?…(More)”.

Innovating Public Service Delivery Through Crowdsourcing: What Role for The Third Sector and Civil Society?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nathalie Colasanti, Chiara Fantauzzi, and Rocco Frondizi: “The purpose of this paper is to study the involvement of the “crowd” in designing innovative public policies, and the possibility for the Third Sector to play a role in this process. To do so, we want to answer the following research question: what is the extent to which crowdsourcing is adopted in financing and delivering public services within New Public Governance arenas? In order to answer it, we employ the following approach. First of all, we will set public innovation into the context of New Public Governance; secondly, we will analyse definitions for crowdsourcing, and thirdly, we will provide an overview and crisis of crowdsourcing examples to demonstrate their significance as novel forms of public service finance and delivery. This approach evidences the potential and the outcomes of applying crowdsourcing in the public sector, and indicates the role of the actors involved: the adoption of a leadership role by the Third Sector could facilitate crowdsourcing processes. The outcome of the application of crowdsourcing in the public sector is a greater involvement of the civil society in its relationship with the State….(More)”.

Investing in Data Saves Lives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Lowcock and Raj Shah at Project Syndicate: “…Our experience of building a predictive model, and its use by public-health officials in these countries, showed that this approach could lead to better humanitarian outcomes. But it was also a reminder that significant data challenges, regarding both gaps and quality, limit the viability and accuracy of such models for the world’s most vulnerable countries. For example, data on the prevalence of cardiovascular diseases was 4-7 years old in several poorer countries, and not available at all for Sudan and South Sudan.

Globally, we are still missing about 50% of the data needed to respond effectively in countries experiencing humanitarian emergencies. OCHA and The Rockefeller Foundation are cooperating to provide early insight into crises, during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. But realizing the full potential of our approach depends on the contributions of others.

So, as governments, development banks, and major humanitarian and development agencies reflect on the first year of the pandemic response, as well as on discussions at the recent World Bank Spring Meetings, they must recognize the crucial role data will play in recovering from this crisis and preventing future ones. Filling gaps in critical data should be a top priority for all humanitarian and development actors.

Governments, humanitarian organizations, and regional development banks thus need to invest in data collection, data-sharing infrastructure, and the people who manage these processes. Likewise, these stakeholders must become more adept at responsibly sharing their data through open data platforms and that maintain rigorous interoperability standards.

Where data are not available, the private sector should develop new sources of information through innovative methods such as using anonymized social-media data or call records to understand population movement patterns….(More)”.

Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Gillian Tett: “Amid severe digital disruption, economic upheaval, and political flux, how can we make sense of the world? Leaders today typically look for answers in economic models, Big Data, or artificial intelligence platforms. Gillian Tett points to anthropology—the study of human culture. Anthropologists train to get inside the minds of other people, helping them not only to understand other cultures but also to appraise their own environment with fresh perspective as an insider-outsider, gaining lateral vision.

Today, anthropologists are more likely to study Amazon warehouses than remote Amazon tribes; they have done research into institutions and companies such as General Motors, Nestlé, Intel, and more, shedding light on practical questions such as how internet users really define themselves; why corporate projects fail; why bank traders miscalculate losses; how companies sell products like pet food and pensions; why pandemic policies succeed (or not). Anthropology makes the familiar seem unfamiliar and vice versa, giving us badly needed three-dimensional perspective in a world where many executives are plagued by tunnel vision, especially in fields like finance and technology. Lively, lucid, and practical, Anthro-Vision offers a revolutionary new way for understanding the behavior of organizations, individuals, and markets in today’s ever-evolving world….(More)”

Deepfake Maps Could Really Mess With Your Sense of the World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Will Knight at Wired: “Satellite images showing the expansion of large detention camps in Xinjiang, China, between 2016 and 2018 provided some of the strongest evidence of a government crackdown on more than a million Muslims, triggering international condemnation and sanctions.

Other aerial images—of nuclear installations in Iran and missile sites in North Korea, for example—have had a similar impact on world events. Now, image-manipulation tools made possible by artificial intelligence may make it harder to accept such images at face value.

In a paper published online last month, University of Washington professor Bo Zhao employed AI techniques similar to those used to create so-called deepfakes to alter satellite images of several cities. Zhao and colleagues swapped features between images of Seattle and Beijing to show buildings where there are none in Seattle and to remove structures and replace them with greenery in Beijing.

Zhao used an algorithm called CycleGAN to manipulate satellite photos. The algorithm, developed by researchers at UC Berkeley, has been widely used for all sorts of image trickery. It trains an artificial neural network to recognize the key characteristics of certain images, such as a style of painting or the features on a particular type of map. Another algorithm then helps refine the performance of the first by trying to detect when an image has been manipulated….(More)”.

Next-generation nowcasting to improve decision making in a crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Frank Gerhard, Marie-Paule Laurent, Kyriakos Spyrounakos, and Eckart Windhagen at McKinsey: “In light of the limitations of the traditional models, we recommend a modified approach to nowcasting that uses country- and industry-specific expertise to boil down the number of variables to a selected few for each geography or sector, depending on the individual economic setting. Given the specific selection of each core variable, the relationships between the variables will be relatively stable over time, even during a major crisis. Admittedly, the more variables used, the easier it is to explain an economic shift; however, using more variables also means a greater chance of a break in some of the statistical relationships, particularly in response to an exogenous shock.

This revised nowcasting model will be more flexible and robust in periods of economic stress. It will provide economically intuitive outcomes, include the consideration of complementary, high-frequency data, and offer access to economic insights that are at once timely and unique.

Nowcast for Q1 2021 shows differing recovery speeds by sector and geography.

For example, consumer spending can be estimated in different US cities by combining data such as wages from business applications and footfall from mobility trend reports. As a more complex example: eurozone capitalization rates are, at the time of the writing of this article, available only through January 2021. However, a revamped nowcasting model can estimate current capitalization rates in various European countries by employing a handful of real-time and high-frequency variables for each, such as retail confidence indicators, stock-exchange indices, price expectations, construction estimates, base-metals prices and output, and even deposits into financial institutions. The choice of variable should, of course, be guided by industry and sector experts.

Similarly, published figures for gross value added (GVA) at the sector level in Europe are available only up to the second quarter of 2020. However, by utilizing selected variables, the new approach to nowcasting can provide an estimate of GVA through the first quarter of 2021. It can also highlight the different experiences of each region and industry sector in the recent recovery. Note that the sectors reliant on in-person interactions and of a nonessential nature have been slow to recover, as have the countries more reliant on international markets (exhibit)….(More)”.

For Whose Benefit? Transparency in the development and procurement of COVID-19 vaccines

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Transparency International Global Health: “The COVID-19 pandemic has required an unprecedented public health response, with governments dedicating massive amounts of resources to their health systems at extraordinary speed. Governments have had to respond quickly to fast-changing contexts, with many competing interests, and little in the way of historical precedent to guide them.

Transparency here is paramount; publicly available information is critical to reducing the inherent risks of such a situation by ensuring governmental decisions are accountable and by enabling non-governmental expert input into the global vaccination process.

This report analyses transparency of two key stages of the vaccine development in chronological order: the development and subsequent buying of vaccines.

Given the scope, rapid progression and complexity of the global vaccination process, this is not an exhaustive analysis. First, all the following analysis is limited to 20 leading COVID-19 vaccines that were in, or had completed, phase 3 clinical trials as of 11th January 2021. Second, we have concentrated on transparency of two of the initial stages of the process: clinical trial transparency and the public contracting for the supply of vaccines. The report provides concrete recommendations on how to overcome current opacity in order to contribute to achieving the commitment of world leaders to ensure equal, fair and affordable access to COVID-19 vaccines for all countries….(More)”.

The Case for Better Governance of Children’s Data: A Manifesto

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
The Case for Better Governance of Children’s Data: A Manifesto

Report by Jasmina Byrne, Emma Day and Linda Raftree: “Every child is different, with unique identities and their capacities and circumstances evolve over their lifecycle. Children are more vulnerable than adults and are less able to understand the long-term implications of consenting to their data collection. For these reasons, children’s data deserve to be treated differently.

While responsible data use can underpin many benefits for children, ensuring that children are protected, empowered and granted control of their data is still a challenge.

To maximise the benefits of data use for children and to protect them from harm requires a new model of data governance that is fitting for the 21st century.

UNICEF has worked with 17 global experts to develop a Manifesto that articulates a vision for a better approach to children’s data.

This Manifesto includes key action points and a call for a governance model purposefully designed to deliver on the needs and rights of children. It is the first step in ensuring that children’s rights are given due weight in data governance legal frameworks and processes as they evolve around the world….(More)”

Culture, Institutions and Social Equilibria: A Framework

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson: “This paper proposes a new framework for studying the interplay between culture and institutions. We follow the recent sociology literature and interpret culture as a \repertoire”, which allows rich cultural responses to changes in the environment and shifts in political power. Specifically, we start with a culture set, which consists of attributes and the feasible connections between them. Combinations of attributes produce cultural configurations, which provide meaning, interpretation and justification for individual and group actions. Cultural figurations also legitimize and support different institutional arrangements. Culture matters as it shapes the set of feasible cultural figurations and via this channel institutions.

Yet, changes in politics and institutions can cause a rewiring of existing attributes, generating very different cultural configurations. Cultural persistence may result from the dynamics of political and economic factors – rather than being a consequence of an unchanging culture. We distinguish cultures by how fluid they are – whereby more fluid cultures allow a richer set of cultural configurations. Fluidity in turn depends on how specific (vs. abstract) and entangled (vs. free-standing) attributes in a culture set are. We illustrate these ideas using examples from African, England, China, the Islamic world, the Indian caste system and the Crow. In all cases, our interpretation highlights that culture becomes more of a constraint when it is less fluid (more hardwired), for example because its attributes are more specific or entangled. We also emphasize that less fluid cultures are not necessarily “bad cultures”, and may create a range of benefits, though they may reduce the responsiveness of culture to changing circumstances. In many instances, including in the African, Chinese and English cases, we show that there is a lot of fluidity and very different, almost diametrically-opposed, cultural configurations are feasible, often compete with each other for acceptance and can gain the upper hand depending on political factors….(More)”