OECD Report: “Governments can use artificial intelligence (AI) to design better policies and make better and more targeted decisions, enhance communication and engagement with citizens, and improve the speed and quality of public services. The Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region is seeking to leverage the immense potential of AI to promote the digital transformation of the public sector. The OECD, in collaboration with CAF, Development Bank of Latin America, prepared this report to help national governments in the LAC region understand the current regional baseline of activities and capacities for AI in the public sector; to identify specific approaches and actions they can take to enhance their ability to use this emerging technology for efficient, effective and responsive governments; and to collaborate across borders in pursuit of a regional vision for AI in the public sector. This report incorporates a stocktaking of each country’s strategies and commitments around AI in the public sector, including their alignment with the OECD AI Principles. It also includes an analysis of efforts to build key governance capacities and put in place critical enablers for AI in the public sector. It concludes with a series of recommendations for governments in the LAC region….(More)”.
Mapping of exposed water tanks and swimming pools based on aerial images can help control dengue
Press Release by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo: “Brazilian researchers have developed a computer program that locates swimming pools and rooftop water tanks in aerial photographs with the aid of artificial intelligence to help identify areas vulnerable to infestation by Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that transmits dengue, zika, chikungunya and yellow fever.
The innovation, which can also be used as a public policy tool for dynamic socio-economic mapping of urban areas, resulted from research and development work by professionals at the University of São Paulo (USP), the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and the São Paulo State Department of Health’s Endemic Control Superintendence (SUCEN), as part of a project supported by FAPESP. An article about it is published in the journal PLOS ONE.
“Our work initially consisted of creating a model based on aerial images and computer science to detect water tanks and pools, and to use them as a socio-economic indicator,” said Francisco Chiaravalloti Neto, last author of the article. He is a professor in the Epidemiology Department at USP’s School of Public Health (FSP), with a first degree in engineering.
As the article notes, previous research had already shown that dengue tends to be most prevalent in deprived urban areas, so that prevention of dengue, zika and other diseases transmitted by the mosquito can be made considerably more effective by use of a relatively dynamic socio-economic mapping model, especially given the long interval between population censuses in Brazil (ten years or more).
“This is one of the first steps in a broader project,” Chiaravalloti Neto said. Among other aims, he and his team plan to detect other elements of the images and quantify real infestation rates in specific areas so as to be able to refine and validate the model.
“We want to create a flow chart that can be used in different cities to pinpoint at-risk areas without the need for inspectors to call on houses, buildings and other breeding sites, as this is time-consuming and a waste of the taxpayer’s money,” he added…(More)”.
The Use of Artificial Intelligence as a Strategy to Analyse Urban Informality
Article by Agustina Iñiguez: “Within the Latin American and Caribbean region, it has been recorded that at least 25% of the population lives in informal settlements. Given that their expansion is one of the major problems afflicting these cities, a project is presented, supported by the IDB, which proposes how new technologies are capable of contributing to the identification and detection of these areas in order to intervene in them and help reduce urban informality.
Informal settlements, also known as slums, shantytowns, camps or favelas, depending on the country in question, are uncontrolled settlements on land where, in many cases, the conditions for a dignified life are not in place. Through self-built dwellings, these sites are generally the result of the continuous growth of the housing deficit.
For decades, the possibility of collecting information about the Earth’s surface through satellite imagery has been contributing to the analysis and production of increasingly accurate and useful maps for urban planning. In this way, not only the growth of cities can be seen, but also the speed at which they are growing and the characteristics of their buildings.
Advances in artificial intelligence facilitate the processing of a large amount of information. When a satellite or aerial image is taken of a neighbourhood where a municipal team has previously demarcated informal areas, the image is processed by an algorithm that will identify the characteristic visual patterns of the area observed from space. The algorithm will then identify other areas with similar characteristics in other images, automatically recognising the districts where informality predominates. It is worth noting that while satellites are able to report both where and how informal settlements are growing, specialised equipment and processing infrastructure are also required…(More)”
Citizen science and the right to research: building local knowledge of climate change impacts
Paper by Sarita Albagli & Allan Yu Iwama: “The article presents results of a research project aiming to develop theoretical and empirical contributions on participatory approaches and methods of citizen science for risk mapping and adaptation to climate change. In the first part, the paper presents a review of the literature on key concepts and perspectives related to participatory citizen science, introducing the concept of the “right to research”. It highlights the mutual fertilization with participatory mapping methods to deal with disaster situations associated to climate change. In the second part, the paper describes and presents the results and conclusions of an action-research developed on the coastline between the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2017–2018. It involved affected communities as protagonists in mapping and managing risks of natural disasters caused by extreme climate events, by combining citizen science approaches and methods with Participatory Geographic Information Systems (PGIS) and social cartography. The article concludes by pointing out the contributions and limits of the “right to research” as a relevant Social Science approach to reframe citizen science from a democratic view….(More)”.
Can national statistical offices shape the data revolution?
Article by Juan Daniel Oviedo, Katharina Fenz, François Fonteneau, and Simon Riedl: “In recent years, breakthrough technologies in artificial intelligence (AI) and the use of satellite imagery made it possible to disrupt the way we collect, process, and analyze data. Facilitated by the intersection of new statistical techniques and the availability of (big) data, it is now possible to create hypergranular estimates.
National statistical offices (NSOs) could be at the forefront of this change. Conventional tasks of statistical offices, such as the coordination of household surveys and censuses, will remain at the core of their work. However, just like AI can enhance the capabilities of doctors, it also has the potential to make statistical offices better, faster, and eventually cheaper.
Still, many countries struggle to make this happen. In a COVID-19 world marked by constrained financial and statistical capacities, making innovation work for statistical offices is of prime importance to create better lives for all…
In the case of Colombia, this novel method facilitated a scale-up from existing poverty estimates that contained 1,123 data points to 78,000 data points, which represents a 70-fold increase. This results in much more granular estimates highlighting Colombia’s heterogeneity between and within municipalities (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Poverty shares (%) Colombia, in 2018
Traditional methods don´t allow for cost-efficient hypergranular estimations but serve as a reference point, due to their ground-truthing capacity. Hence, we have combined existing data with novel AI techniques, to go down to granular estimates of up to 4×4 kilometers. In particular, we have trained an algorithm to connect daytime and nighttime satellite images….(More)”.
The promise and the premise: How digital media present big data
Paper by Gastón Becerra: “This paper analyzes the thematic and discursive construction of big data by the Argentine digital press. Using text mining techniques — topic modelling and enriched associative networks — together with qualitative and quantitative content analysis — in both discourse and images — over 2,026 articles, we sought to identify the topics wherein big data is treated, the promises and risks it addresses, its definition within the semantic field in which is explicitly expressed, and the pictures that illustrate it. Results herein presented compare how big data is portrayed in news about politics, business, and technological innovations, as well as in focal pieces targeted to a generic and massive audience, and critical reflections about its risks. Although in each of those thematic contexts big data is anchored differently, there is a common idea that associates big data with a socio-technological premise and an epistemic promise: because of the availability of large volumes of data, something new that will allow better decisions can be known. Our exploration contributes to a more detailed knowledge on how the news media social systems make sense of novel phenomena such as big data….(More)”.
Abundance: On the Experience of Living in a World of Information Plenty
Book by Pablo J. Boczkowski: “The book examines the experience of living in a society that has more information available to the public than ever before. It focuses on the interpretations, emotions, and practices of dealing with this abundance in everyday life. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and survey research conducted in Argentina, the book inquiries into the role of cultural and structural factors that mediate between the availability of information and the actual consequences for individuals, media, politics, and society. Providing the first book-length account of the topic in the Global South, it concludes that the experience of information abundance is tied to an overall unsettling of society, a reconstitution of how we understand and perform our relationships with others, and a twin depreciation of facts and appreciation of fictions….(More)”.
The coloniality of collaboration: sources of epistemic obedience in data-intensive astronomy in Chile
Paper by Sebastián Lehuedé: “Data collaborations have gained currency over the last decade as a means for data- and skills-poor actors to thrive as a fourth paradigm takes hold in the sciences. Against this backdrop, this article traces the emergence of a collaborative subject position that strives to establish reciprocal and technical-oriented collaborations so as to catch up with the ongoing changes in research.
Combining insights from the modernity/coloniality group, political theory and science and technology studies, the article argues that this positionality engenders epistemic obedience by bracketing off critical questions regarding with whom and for whom knowledge is generated. In particular, a dis-embedding of the data producers, the erosion of local ties, and a data conformism are identified as fresh sources of obedience impinging upon the capacity to conduct research attuned to the needs and visions of the local context. A discursive-material analysis of interviews and field notes stemming from the case of astronomy data in Chile is conducted, examining the vision of local actors aiming to gain proximity to the mega observatories producing vast volumes of data in the Atacama Desert.
Given that these observatories are predominantly under the control of organisations from the United States and Europe, the adoption of a collaborative stance is now seen as the best means to ensure skills and technology transfer to local research teams. Delving into the epistemological dimension of data colonialism, this article warns that an increased emphasis on collaboration runs the risk of reproducing planetary hierarchies in times of data-intensive research….(More)”.
We need to regulate mind-reading tech before it exists
Abel Wajnerman Paz at Rest of the World: “Neurotechnology” is an umbrella term for any technology that can read and transcribe mental states by decoding and modulating neural activity. This includes technologies like closed-loop deep brain stimulation that can both detect neural activity related to people’s moods and can suppress undesirable symptoms, like depression, through electrical stimulation.
Despite their evident usefulness in education, entertainment, work, and the military, neurotechnologies are largely unregulated. Now, as Chile redrafts its constitution — disassociating it from the Pinochet surveillance regime — legislators are using the opportunity to address the need for closer protection of people’s rights from the unknown threats posed by neurotechnology.
Although the technology is new, the challenge isn’t. Decades ago, similar international legislation was passed following the development of genetic technologies that made possible the collection and application of genetic data and the manipulation of the human genome. These included the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights in 1997 and the International Declaration on Human Genetic Data in 2003. The difference is that, this time, Chile is a leading light in the drafting of neuro-rights legislation.
In Chile, two bills — a constitutional reform bill, which is awaiting approval by the Chamber of Deputies, and a bill on neuro-protection — will establish neuro-rights for Chileans. These include the rights to personal identity, free will, mental privacy, equal access to cognitive enhancement technologies, and protection against algorithmic bias….(More)”.
Why governing data is key for the future of cities
Article by Carlos Santiso and Marcelo Facchina: “Technology is changing city dwellers lives, as well as how urban centres evolve to meet their needs. The pandemic has accelerated this transformation, and the digital transition has generated an explosion of data, especially in cities. In this context, the ability of local governments to manage urban problems will be paramount for the recovery, and the pandemic has helped us better understand the missing elements we need to govern cities effectively. For instance, the World Bank’s World Development Report of 2021 underscored that a data infrastructure policy is one of the building blocks of a good data governance framework, both to foster the local data economy and promote digital inclusion.
It is inconceivable not to consider cities as an integral part of the solution to challenges like tackling social exclusion, improving public services and reducing insecurity, among others. A key issue that has become increasingly prominent in city agendas is the good governance of data; that is how data is handled and for what purpose, its quality and integrity, as well as the privacy and security concerns related to its collection and use. In other words, city governments need to preserve people’s trust in the way they handle data to improve lives.
A modern local government cannot be sustained without good data governance, secure data infrastructure, and digital talent to extract public value from data. Data policy must therefore act as an enabler of transformation strategies, defining the scope, direction, responsibilities and procedures for the effective and responsible use of data for more responsive and resilient cities.
At the national level, “delivery units” have gained relevance as instruments for managing change in governments and driving the effective implementation of strategic priorities. These management models led by central government have proven to be effective instruments for achieving government targets, priority goals and major projects.
The model is even being expanded to subnational governments, like in the case of Colombia. Municipalities interact directly with citizens in providing public services, and innovations like the “delivery units”, can help improve citizen satisfaction with government services. In a recent study, we show how Latin American cities, for example Recife and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, have leveraged these innovations in public management as a strategic planning tool, building on the pioneering experience of New York. Another interesting case is Buenos Aires, in Argentina, where systematic monitoring of government commitments by the Compliance Management Unit achieved a significant decrease in murder rates (43%) and road accidents (33%) between 2015 and 2019.
The pivotal role of new technologies and the strategic use of data by municipal governments can also improve delivery of services, making them more accessible, agile, efficient and less costly. In another recent study, we look at the case of 12 cities around the world and in the region, including Boston, Seoul, London, Buenos Aires, Medellin, Mexico and Recife that are seeking to strengthen their strategic management with more intensive use of data to better meet the growing expectations of their citizens….(More)”.