EU ministers endorse Commission’s plans for research cloud


European Commission: “The European Open Science Cloud, which will support EU science in its global leading by creating a trusted environment for hosting and processing research data, is one important step closer to becoming a reality. Meeting in Brussels today, EU research ministers endorsed the roadmap for its creation. The Conclusions of the Competitiveness Council, proposed by the current Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the EU, are the result of two years of intense negotiations….

According to Commissioner Moedas, much remains to be done to make the EOSC a reality by 2020, but several important aspects stand out:

  1. the Cloud should be a wide, pan-European federation of existing and emerging excellent infrastructures, which respects the governance and funding mechanisms of its components;
  2. membership in this federation would be voluntary; and
  3. the governance structure would include member state ministries, stakeholders and scientists.

 

…In another important step for Open Science, the Commission published today the final recommendations of the Open Science Policy Platform. Established in 2016, the platform comprises important stakeholders who advise the Commission on how to further develop and practically implement Open Science policy in order to improve radically the quality and impact of European science….(More)”.

Mapping the economy in real time is almost ‘within our grasp’


Delphine Strauss at the Financial Times: “The goal of mapping economic activity in real time, just as we do for weather or traffic, is “closer than ever to being within our grasp”, according to Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist. In recent years, “data has become the new oil . . . and data companies have become the new oil giants”, Mr Haldane told an audience at King’s Business School …

But economics and finance have been “rather reticent about fully embracing this oil-rush”, partly because economists have tended to prefer a deductive approach that puts theory ahead of measurement. This needs to change, he said, because relying too much on either theory or real-world data in isolation can lead to serious mistakes in policymaking — as was seen when the global financial crisis exposed the “empirical fragility” of macroeconomic models.

Parts of the private sector and academia have been far swifter to exploit the vast troves of ever-accumulating data now available — 90 per cent of which has been created in the last two years alone. Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Billion Prices Project”, name-checked in Mr Haldane’s speech, now collects enough data from online retailers for its commercial arm to provide daily inflation updates for 22 economies….

The UK’s Office for National Statistics — which has faced heavy criticism over the quality of its data in recent years — is experimenting with “web-scraping” to collect price quotes for food and groceries, for example, and making use of VAT data from small businesses to improve its output-based estimates of gross domestic product. In both cases, the increased sample size and granularity could bring considerable benefits on top of existing surveys, Mr Haldane said.

The BoE itself is trying to make better use of financial data — for example, by using administrative data on owner-occupied mortgages to better understand pricing decisions in the UK housing market. Mr Haldane sees scope to go further with the new data coming on stream on payment, credit and banking flows. …New data sources and techniques could also help policymakers think about human decision-making — which rarely conforms with the rational process assumed in many economic models. Data on music downloads from Spotify, used as an indicator of sentiment, has recently been shown to do at least as well as a standard consumer confidence survey in tracking consumer spending….(More)”.

How the Math Men Overthrew the Mad Men


 in the New Yorker: “Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men—the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence. Yet Math Men are beleaguered, as Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated when he humbled himself before Congress, in April. Math Men’s adoration of data—coupled with their truculence and an arrogant conviction that their “science” is nearly flawless—has aroused government anger, much as Microsoft did two decades ago.

The power of Math Men is awesome. Google and Facebook each has a market value exceeding the combined value of the six largest advertising and marketing holding companies. Together, they claim six out of every ten dollars spent on digital advertising, and nine out of ten new digital ad dollars. They have become more dominant in what is estimated to be an up to two-trillion-dollar annual global advertising and marketing business. Facebook alone generates more ad dollars than all of America’s newspapers, and Google has twice the ad revenues of Facebook.

In the advertising world, Big Data is the Holy Grail, because it enables marketers to target messages to individuals rather than general groups, creating what’s called addressable advertising. And only the digital giants possess state-of-the-art Big Data. “The game is no longer about sending you a mail order catalogue or even about targeting online advertising,” Shoshana Zuboff, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, wrote on faz.net, in 2016. “The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life—your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit.” Success at this “game” flows to those with the “ability to predict the future—specifically the future of behavior,” Zuboff writes. She dubs this “surveillance capitalism.”

However, to thrash just Facebook and Google is to miss the larger truth: everyone in advertising strives to eliminate risk by perfecting targeting data. Protecting privacy is not foremost among the concerns of marketers; protecting and expanding their business is. The business model adopted by ad agencies and their clients parallels Facebook and Google’s. Each aims to massage data to better identify potential customers. Each aims to influence consumer behavior. To appreciate how alike their aims are, sit in an agency or client marketing meeting and you will hear wails about Facebook and Google’s “walled garden,” their unwillingness to share data on their users. When Facebook or Google counter that they must protect “the privacy” of their users, advertisers cry foul: You’re using the data to target ads we paid for—why won’t you share it, so that we can use it in other ad campaigns?…(More)”

On Dimensions of Citizenship


Introduction by Niall Atkinson, Ann Lui, and Mimi Zeiger to a Special Exhibit and dedicated set of Essays: “We begin by defining citizenship as a cluster of rights, responsibilities, and attachments, and by positing their link to the built environment. Of course architectural examples of this affiliation—formal articulations of inclusion and exclusion—can seem limited and rote. The US-Mexico border wall (“The Wall,” to use common parlance) dominates the cultural imagination. As an architecture of estrangement, especially when expressed as monolithic prototypes staked in the San Diego-Tijuana landscape, the border wall privileges the rhetorical security of nationhood above all other definitions of citizenship—over the individuals, ecologies, economies, and communities in the region. And yet, as political theorist Wendy Brown points out, The Wall, like its many counterparts globally, is inherently fraught as both a physical infrastructure and a nationalist myth, ultimately racked by its own contradictions and paradoxes.

Calling border walls across the world “an ad hoc global landscape of flows and barriers,” Brown writes of the paradoxes that riddle any effort to distinguish the nation as a singular, cohesive form: “[O]ne irony of late modern walling is that a structure taken to mark and enforce an inside/outside distinction—a boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and between friend and enemy—appears precisely the opposite when grasped as part of a complex of eroding lines between the police and the military, subject and patria, vigilante and state, law and lawlessness.”1 While 2018 is a moment when ideologies are most vociferously cast in binary rhetoric, the lived experience of citizenship today is rhizomic, overlapping, and distributed. A person may belong and feel rights and responsibilities to a neighborhood, a voting district, remain a part of an immigrant diaspora even after moving away from their home country, or find affiliation on an online platform. In 2017, Blizzard Entertainment, the maker of World of Warcraft, reported a user community of 46 million people across their international server network. Thus, today it is increasingly possible to simultaneously occupy multiple spaces of citizenship independent from the delineation of a formal boundary.

Conflict often makes visible emergent spaces of citizenship, as highlighted by recent acts both legislative and grassroots. Gendered bathrooms act as renewed sites of civil rights debate. Airports illustrate the thresholds of national control enacted by the recent Muslim bans. Such clashes uncover old scar tissue, violent histories and geographies of spaces. The advance of the Keystone XL pipeline across South Dakota, for example, brought the fight for indigenous sovereignty to the fore.

If citizenship itself designates a kind of border and the networks that traverse and ultimately elude such borders, then what kind of architecture might Dimensions of Citizenship offer in lieu of The Wall? What designed object, building, or space might speak to the heart of what and how it means to belong today? The participants in the United States Pavilion offer several of the clear and vital alternatives deemed so necessary by Samuel R. Delany: The Cobblestone. The Space Station. The Watershed.

Dimensions of Citizenship argues that citizenship is indissociable from the built environment, which is exactly why that relationship can be the source for generating or supporting new forms of belonging. These new forms may be more mutable and ephemeral, but no less meaningful and even, perhaps, ultimately more equitable. Through commissioned projects, and through film, video artworks, and responsive texts, Dimensions of Citizenship exhibits the ways that architects, landscape architects, designers, artists, and writers explore the changing form of citizenship: the different dimensions it can assume (legal, social, emotional) and the different dimensions (both actual and virtual) in which citizenship takes place. The works are valuably enigmatic, wide-ranging, even elusive in their interpretations, which is what contemporary conditions seem to demand. More often than not, the spaces of citizenship under investigation here are marked by histories of inequality and the violence imposed on people, non-human actors, ecologies. Our exhibition features spaces and individuals that aim to manifest the democratic ideals of inclusion against the grain of broader systems: new forms of “sharing economy” platforms, the legacies of the Underground Railroad, tenuous cross-national alliances at the border region, or the seemingly Sisyphean task of buttressing coastline topologies against the rising tides….(More)”.

Crowdbreaks: Tracking Health Trends using Public Social Media Data and Crowdsourcing


Paper by Martin Mueller and Marcel Salath: “In the past decade, tracking health trends using social media data has shown great promise, due to a powerful combination of massive adoption of social media around the world, and increasingly potent hardware and software that enables us to work with these new big data streams.

At the same time, many challenging problems have been identified. First, there is often a mismatch between how rapidly online data can change, and how rapidly algorithms are updated, which means that there is limited reusability for algorithms trained on past data as their performance decreases over time. Second, much of the work is focusing on specific issues during a specific past period in time, even though public health institutions would need flexible tools to assess multiple evolving situations in real time. Third, most tools providing such capabilities are proprietary systems with little algorithmic or data transparency, and thus little buy-in from the global public health and research community.

Here, we introduce Crowdbreaks, an open platform which allows tracking of health trends by making use of continuous crowdsourced labelling of public social media content. The system is built in a way which automatizes the typical workflow from data collection, filtering, labelling and training of machine learning classifiers and therefore can greatly accelerate the research process in the public health domain. This work introduces the technical aspects of the platform and explores its future use cases…(More)”.

Smarter Crowdsourcing for Anti-Corruption: A Handbook of Innovative Legal, Technical, and Policy Proposals and a Guide to their Implementation


Paper by Noveck, Beth Simone; Koga, Kaitlin; Aceves Garcia, Rafael; Deleanu, Hannah; Cantú-Pedraza, Dinorah: “Corruption presents a fundamental threat to the stability and prosperity of Mexico and combating it demands approaches that are both principled and practical. In 2017, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) approved project ME-T1351 to support Mexico in its fight against corruption using Open Innovation. Thus, the IDB partnered with the Governance Lab at NYU to support Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Service (Secretaría de la Función Pública) to identify innovative ideas and then turns them into practical implementation plans for the measurement, detection, and prevention of corruption in Mexico using the GovLab’s open innovation methodology named Smarter Crowdsourcing.

The purpose of Smarter Crowdsourcing was to identify concrete solutions that include the use of data analysis and technology to tackle corruption in the public sector. This document contains 13 implementation plans laying out practical ways to address corruption. The plans emerged from “Smarter Crowdsourcing Anti-Corruption,” a method that is an agile process, which begins with robust problem definition followed by online sourcing of global expertise to surface innovative solutions. Smarter Crowdsourcing Anti-Corruption focused on six specific challenges: (i) measuring corruption and its costs, (ii) strengthening integrity in the judiciary, (iii) engaging the public in anti-corruption efforts, (iv) whistleblowing, (v) effective prosecution, and (vi) tracking and analyzing money flows…(More)”.

Playing Games While Building Savings


Corporate Insights: “Nearly half of all Americans play video games, yet only a third have more than a thousand dollars saved for an emergency. A new fintech startup called Blast hopes to combine the increasingly popular pastime with saving for the future. Unlike other attempts to gamify savings that create entirely new experiences, Blast works alongside existing games with three ways for users to increase their balances when they play: automated micro-deposits, mission rewards and weekly prizes. By linking to games that people already enjoy, Blast avoids the difficult task of creating a hit game to reach a wide audience.

Much like Acorns—co-founded by Blast’s creator, Walter Cruttenden—and other micro-savings apps that make small automatic deposits to users’ savings, Blast automatically moves small amounts into savings whenever users accomplish in-game tasks. These “triggers” are user-controlled and available for popular online games like League of Legends and Counter Strike: Global Offensive. For example, users can choose to deposit $1.00 every time they win a match or $0.10 every time they defeat an enemy player. The linked savings account provided by Wells Fargo earns 1.00% APY, and Blast can withdraw funds from a linked checking or PayPal account.

Blast partners with game publishers to reward users for playing their games, doling out set amounts to users who engage (or re-engage) with games made by its partners…(More)”. 

Help NASA create the world’s largest landslide database


EarthSky: “Landslides cause thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in property damage each year. Surprisingly, very few centralized global landslide databases exist, especially those that are publicly available.

Now NASA scientists are working to fill the gap—and they want your help collecting information. In March 2018, NASA scientist Dalia Kirschbaum and several colleagues launched a citizen science project that will make it possible to report landslides you have witnessed, heard about in the news, or found on an online database. All you need to do is log into the Landslide Reporter portal and report the time, location, and date of the landslide – as well as your source of information. You are also encouraged to submit additional details, such as the size of the landslide and what triggered it. And if you have photos, you can upload them.

Kirschbaum’s team will review each entry and submit credible reports to the Cooperative Open Online Landslide Repository (COOLR) — which they hope will eventually be the largest global online landslide catalog available.

Landslide Reporter is designed to improve the quantity and quality of data in COOLR. Currently, COOLR contains NASA’s Global Landslide Catalog, which includes more than 11,000 reports on landslides, debris flows, and rock avalanches. Since the current catalog is based mainly on information from English-language news reports and journalists tend to cover only large and deadly landslides in densely populated areas, many landslides never make it into the database….(More)”.

The promise and peril of military applications of artificial intelligence


Michael C. Horowitz at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: “Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a moment in the national security space. While the public may still equate the notion of artificial intelligence in the military context with the humanoid robots of the Terminatorfranchise, there has been a significant growth in discussions about the national security consequences of artificial intelligence. These discussions span academia, business, and governments, from Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom’s concern about the existential risk to humanity posed by artificial intelligence to Tesla founder Elon Musk’s concern that artificial intelligence could trigger World War III to Vladimir Putin’s statement that leadership in AI will be essential to global power in the 21st century.

What does this really mean, especially when you move beyond the rhetoric of revolutionary change and think about the real world consequences of potential applications of artificial intelligence to militaries? Artificial intelligence is not a weapon. Instead, artificial intelligence, from a military perspective, is an enabler, much like electricity and the combustion engine. Thus, the effect of artificial intelligence on military power and international conflict will depend on particular applications of AI for militaries and policymakers. What follows are key issues for thinking about the military consequences of artificial intelligence, including principles for evaluating what artificial intelligence “is” and how it compares to technological changes in the past, what militaries might use artificial intelligence for, potential limitations to the use of artificial intelligence, and then the impact of AI military applications for international politics.

The potential promise of AI—including its ability to improve the speed and accuracy of everything from logistics to battlefield planning and to help improve human decision-making—is driving militaries around the world to accelerate their research into and development of AI applications. For the US military, AI offers a new avenue to sustain its military superiority while potentially reducing costs and risk to US soldiers. For others, especially Russia and China, AI offers something potentially even more valuable—the ability to disrupt US military superiority. National competition in AI leadership is as much or more an issue of economic competition and leadership than anything else, but the potential military impact is also clear. There is significant uncertainty about the pace and trajectory of artificial intelligence research, which means it is always possible that the promise of AI will turn into more hype than reality. Moreover, safety and reliability concerns could limit the ways that militaries choose to employ AI…(More)”,

Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top Down Management of Foreign Aid Doesn’t Work


Book by Dan Honig: “Foreign aid organizations collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually, with mixed results. Part of the problem in these endeavors lies in their execution. When should foreign aid organizations empower actors on the front lines of delivery to guide aid interventions, and when should distant headquarters lead?

In Navigation by Judgment, Dan Honig argues that high-quality implementation of foreign aid programs often requires contextual information that cannot be seen by those in distant headquarters. Tight controls and a focus on reaching pre-set measurable targets often prevent front-line workers from using skill, local knowledge, and creativity to solve problems in ways that maximize the impact of foreign aid. Drawing on a novel database of over 14,000 discrete development projects across nine aid agencies and eight paired case studies of development projects, Honig concludes that aid agencies will often benefit from giving field agents the authority to use their own judgments to guide aid delivery. This “navigation by judgment” is particularly valuable when environments are unpredictable and when accomplishing an aid program’s goals is hard to accurately measure.

Highlighting a crucial obstacle for effective global aid, Navigation by Judgment shows that the management of aid projects matters for aid effectiveness….(More)”.