NYC’s New Tech to Track Every Homeless Person in the City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Wired: “New York is facing a crisis. The city that never sleeps has become the city with the most people who have no home to sleep in. As rising rents outpace income growth across the five boroughs, some 62,000 people, nearly 40 percent of them children, live in homeless shelters—rates the city hasn’t seen since the Great Depression.

As New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio faces reelection in November, his reputation and electoral prospects depend in part on his ability to reverse this troubling trend. In the mayor’s estimation, combatting homelessness effectively will require opening 90 new shelters across the city and expanding the number of outreach workers who canvass the streets every day offering aid and housing. The effort will also require having the technology in place to ensure that work happens as efficiently as possible. To that end, the city is rolling out a new tool, StreetSmart, aims to give city agencies and non-profit groups a comprehensive view of all of the data being collected on New York’s homeless on a daily basis.

Think of StreetSmart as a customer relationship management system for the homeless. Every day in New York, some 400 outreach workers walk the streets checking in on homeless people and collecting information about their health, income, demographics, and history in the shelter system, among other data points. The workers get to know this vulnerable population and build trust in the hope of one day placing them in some type of housing.

StreetSmart-Dashboard.jpg

NYC DEPARTMENT OF HOMELESS SERVICES

Traditionally, outreach workers have entered information about every encounter into a database, keeping running case files. But those databases never talked to each other. One outreach worker in the Bronx might never know she was talking to the same person who’d checked into a Brooklyn shelter a week prior. More importantly, the worker might never know why that person left. What’s more, systems used by city agencies and non-profits seldom overlapped, complicating efforts to keep track of individuals….

The big promise of StreetSmart extends beyond its ability to help outreach workers in the moment. The aggregation of all this information could also help the city proactively design fixes to problems it wouldn’t have otherwise seen. The tool has a map feature that shows where encampments are popping up and where outreach workers are having the most interactions. It can also be used to assess how effective different housing facilities are at keeping people off the streets….(More)”.

Algorithmic accountability

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at TechCrunch: “When Netflix recommends you watch “Grace and Frankie” after you’ve finished “Love,” an algorithm decided that would be the next logical thing for you to watch. And when Google shows you one search result ahead of another, an algorithm made a decision that one page was more important than the other. Oh, and when a photo app decides you’d look better with lighter skin, a seriously biased algorithm that a real person developed made that call.

Algorithms are sets of rules that computers follow in order to solve problems and make decisions about a particular course of action. Whether it’s the type of information we receive, the information people see about us, the jobs we get hired to do, the credit cards we get approved for, and, down the road, the driverless cars that either see us or don’t see us, algorithms are increasingly becoming a big part of our lives.

But there is an inherent problem with algorithms that begins at the most base level and persists throughout its adaption: human bias that is baked into these machine-based decision-makers.

You may remember that time when Uber’s self-driving car ran a red light in San Francisco, or when Google’s photo app labeled images of black people as gorillas. The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles’ facial-recognition algorithm mistakenly tagged someone as a criminal and revoked their driver’s license. And Microsoft’s bot Tay went rogue and decided to become a white supremacist. Those were algorithms at their worst. They have also recently been thrust into the spotlight with the troubles around fake news stories surfacing in Google search results and on Facebook.

But algorithms going rogue have much greater implications; they can result in life-altering consequences for unsuspecting people. Think about how scary it could be with algorithmically biased self-driving cars, drones and other sorts of automated vehicles. Consider robots that are algorithmically biased against black people or don’t properly recognize people who are not cisgender white people, and then make a decision on the basis that the person is not human.

Another important element to consider is the role algorithm’s play in determining what we see in the world, as well as how people see us. Think driverless cars “driven” by algorithms mowing down black people because they don’t recognize black people as human. Or algorithmic software that predicts future criminals, which just so happens to be biased against black people.

A variety of issues can arise as a result of bad or erroneous data, good but biased data because there’s not enough of it, or an inflexible model that can’t account for different scenarios.

The dilemma is figuring out what to do about these problematic algorithmic outcomes. Many researchers and academics are actively exploring how to increase algorithmic accountability. What would it mean if tech companies provided their code in order to make these algorithmic decisions more transparent? Furthermore, what would happen if some type of government board would be in charge of reviewing them?…(More)”.

DIY gun control: The people taking matters into their own hands

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Carrie Arnold at New Scientist: “Since the start of the year, there have been 105 mass shootings in the US, including a murder-suicide shooting at a school in San Bernardino, California, and the murder video recently posted on Facebook.

Legislators have always struggled to address this problem. But in the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s administration, new gun legislation has only expanded, not restricted gun rights. In short order, lawmakers made it easier for certain people with mental illness to buy guns, and pushed to expand the locations where people can carry firearms.

Over the past few years, however, gun owners and sellers have started taking matters into their own hands and have come up with creative solutions to reduce the threat from guns.

From working with public health organisations so gun sellers can recognise the signs of depression in a prospective buyer to developing biometric gun locks, citizen scientists are cobbling together measures they hope will stave off the worst aspects of US gun culture.

The Federation of American Scientists estimates that 320 million firearms circulate in the US – about enough for every man, woman and child. According to the independent policy group Gun Violence Archive, there were 385 mass shootings in 2016, and it looks as if the numbers for 2017 will not differ wildly.

In the absence of regulations against guns, individual gun sellers and owners are trying to help”

Although the number of these incidents is alarming, it is dwarfed by the amount of suicides, which account for more than half of all firearms deaths (see graph, right). And last year, a report from the Associated Press and the USA Today Network showed that accidental shootings kill almost twice as many children as is shown in US government data.

In just one week in 2009, New Hampshire gun shop owner Ralph Demicco sold three guns that were ultimately used by their new owners to end their own lives. Demicco’s horror and dismay that he had inadvertently contributed to their deaths led him to start what has become known as the Gun Shop Project.

The project uses insights from the study of suicide to teach gun sellers to recognise signs of suicidal intent in buyers, and know when to avoid selling a gun. To do this, Demicco teamed up with Catherine Barber, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

Part of what the project does is challenge myths. With suicide, the biggest is that people plan suicides over a long period. But empirical evidence shows that people usually act in a moment of brief but extreme emotion. One study has found that nearly half of people who attempted suicide contemplated their attempt for less than 10 minutes. In the time it takes to find another method, a suicidal crisis often passes, so even a small delay in obtaining a gun could make a difference….Another myth that Demicco and Barber are seeking to dispel is that if you take away someone’s gun, they’ll just find another way to hurt themselves. While that’s sometimes true, Barber says, alternatives are less likely to be fatal. Gun attempts result in death more than 80 per cent of the time; only 2 per cent of pill-based suicide attempts are lethal.

Within a year of its launch in 2009, half of all gun sellers in New Hampshire had hung posters about the warning signs of suicide by the cash registers in their stores. The programme has expanded to 21 states, and Barber is now analysing data to see how well it is working.

Another grass-roots project is trying to prevent children from accidentally shooting themselves. Kai Kloepfer, an undergraduate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been working on a fingerprint lock to prevent anyone other than the owner using a gun. He has founded a start-up called Biofire Technologies to improve the lock’s reliability and bring it into production….

Grass-roots schemes like the Gun Shop Project have a better chance of being successful, because gun users are already buying in. But it may take years for the project to become big enough to have a significant effect on national statistics.

Regulatory changes might be needed to make any improvements stick in the long term. At the very least, new regulations shouldn’t block the gun community’s efforts at self-governance.

Change will not come quickly, regardless. Barber sees parallels between the Gun Shop Project and campaigns against drink driving in the 1980s and 90s.

“One commercial didn’t change rates of drunk driving. It was an ad on TV, a scene in a movie, repeated over and over, that ultimately had an impact,” she says….(More)

How maps and machine learning are helping to eliminate malaria

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Allie Lieber at The Keyword: “Today is World Malaria Day, a moment dedicated to raising awareness and improving access to tools to prevent malaria. The World Health Organization says nearly half of the world’s population is at risk for malaria, and estimates that in 2015 there were 212 million malaria cases resulting in 429,000 deaths. In places with high transmission rates, children under five account for 70 percent of malaria deaths.

DiSARM (Disease Surveillance and Risk Monitoring), a project led by the Malaria Elimination Initiative and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundationand Clinton Health Access Initiative, is fighting the spread of malaria by mapping the places where malaria could occur. With the help of Google Earth Engine, DiSARM creates high resolution “risk maps” that help malaria control programs identify the areas where they should direct resources for prevention and treatment.

We sat down with Hugh Sturrock, who leads the DiSARM project and is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the University of California, San Francisco’s Global Health Group, to learn more about DiSARM’s fight against malaria, and how Google fits in….

How does DiSARM use Google Earth Engine to help fight malaria?

If we map where malaria is most likely to occur, we can target those areas for action. Every time someone is diagnosed with malaria in Swaziland and Zimbabwe, a team goes to the village where the infection occurred and collects a GPS point with the precise infection location. Just looking at these points won’t allow you to accurately determine the risk of malaria, though. You also need satellite imagery of conditions like rainfall, temperature, slope and elevation, which affect mosquito breeding and parasite development.

To determine the risk of malaria, DiSARM combines the precise location of the malaria infection,  with satellite data of conditions like rainfall, temperature, vegetation, elevation, which affect mosquito breeding. DiSARM’s mobile app can be used by the malaria programs and field teams to target interventions.

Google Earth Engine collects and organizes the public satellite imagery data we need. In the past we had to obtain those images from a range of sources: NASA, USGS and different universities around the world. But with Google Earth Engine, it’s all in one place and can be processed using Google computers. We combine satellite imagery data from Google Earth Engine with the locations of malaria cases collected by a country’s national malaria control program, and create models that let us generate maps identifying areas at greatest risk.

The DiSARM interface gives malaria programs a near real-time view of malaria and predicts risk at specific locations, such as health facility service areas, villages and schools. Overlaying data allows malaria control programs to identify high-risk areas that have insufficient levels of protection and better distribute their interventions….(More)”

Conditional Citizens: Rethinking Children and Young People’s Participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Catherine Hartung: “This book challenges readers to recognise the conditions that underpin popular approaches to children and young people’s participation, as well as the key processes and institutions that have enabled its rise as a global force of social change in new times. The book draws on the vast international literature, as well as interviews with key practitioners, policy-makers, activists, delegates and academics from Japan, South Africa, Brazil, Nicaragua, Australia, the United Kingdom, Finland, the United States and Italy to examine the emergence of the young citizen as a key global priority in the work of the UN, NGOs, government and academia. In so doing, the book engages contemporary and interdisciplinary debates around citizenship, rights, childhood and youth to examine the complex conditions through which children and young people are governed and invited to govern themselves.

The book argues that much of what is considered ‘children and young people’s participation’ today is part of a wider neoliberal project that emphasises an ideal young citizen who is responsible and rational while simultaneously downplaying the role of systemic inequality and potentially reinforcing rather than overcoming children and young people’s subjugation. Yet the book also moves beyond mere critique and offers suggestive ways to broaden our understanding of children and young people’s participation by drawing on 15 international examples of empirical research from around the world, including the Philippines, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, North America, Finland, South Africa, Australia and Latin America. These examples provoke practitioners, policy-makers and academics to think differently about children and young people and the possibilities for their participatory citizenship beyond that which serves the political agendas of dominant interest groups…(More)”.

Not everyone in advanced economies is using social media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at Pew: “Despite the seeming ubiquity of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, many in Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia and Japan do not report regularly visiting social media sites. But majorities in all of the 14 countries surveyed say they at least use the internet.

Social media use is relatively common among people in Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia and the U.S. Around seven-in-ten report using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, but that still leaves a significant minority of the population in those countries (around 30%) who are non-users.

At the other end of the spectrum, in France, only 48% say they use social networking sites. That figure is even lower in Greece (46%), Japan (43%) and Germany (37%). In Germany, this means that more than half of internet users say they do not use social media. 

The differences in reported social media use across the 14 countries are due in part to whether people use the internet, since low rates of internet access limit the potential social media audience. While fewer than one-in-ten Dutch (5%), Swedes (7%) and Australians (7%) don’t access the internet or own a smartphone, that figure is 40% in Greece, 33% in Hungary and 29% in Italy.

However, internet access doesn’t guarantee social media use. In Germany, for example, 85% of adults are online, but less than half of this group report using Facebook, Twitter or Xing. A similar pattern is seen in some of the other developed economies polled, including Japan and France, where social media use is low relative to overall internet penetration….(More)

The U.S. Federal AI Personal Assistant Pilot

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

/AI-Assistant-Pilot: “Welcome to GSA’s Emerging Citizen Technology program’s pilot for the effective, efficient and accountable introduction and benchmark of public service information integration into consumer-available AI Personal Assistants (IPAs) including Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, and Facebook Messenger’s chatbot service — and in the process lay a strong foundation for opening our programs to self-service programs in the home, mobile devices, automobiles and further.

This pilot will require rapid development and will result in public service concepts reviewed by the platforms of your choosing, as well as the creation of a new field of shared resources and recommendations that any organization can use to deliver our program data into these emerging services.

Principles

The demand for more automated, self-service access to United States public services, when and where citizens need them, grows each day—and so do advances in the consumer technologies like Intelligent Personal Assistants designed to meet those challenges.

The U.S. General Services Administration’s (GSA) Emerging Citizen Technology program, part of the Technology Transformation Service’s Innovation Portfolio, launched an open-sourced pilot to guide dozens of federal programs make public service information available to consumer Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) for the home and office, such as Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant, and Facebook Messenger.

These same services that help power our homes today will empower the self-driving cars of tomorrow, fuel the Internet of Things, and more. As such, the Emerging Citizen Technology program is working with federal agencies to prepare a solid understanding of the business cases and impact of these advances.

From privacy, security, accessibility, and performance to how citizens can benefit from more efficient and open access to federal services, the program is working with federal agencies to consider all aspects of its implementation. Additionally, by sharing openly with private-sector innovators, small businesses, and new entries into the field, the tech industry will gain increased transparency into working with the federal government….(More)”.

Can Democracy Survive the Internet?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nathaniel Persily in the Journal of Democracy: “…The actual story of the 2016 digital campaign is, of course, quite different, and we are only beginning to come to grips with what it might mean for campaigns going forward. Whereas the stories of the last two campaigns focused on the use of new tools, most of the 2016 story revolves around the online explosion of campaign-relevant communication from all corners of cyberspace. Fake news, social-media bots (automated accounts that can exist on all types of platforms), and propaganda from inside and outside the United States—alongside revolutionary uses of new media by the winning campaign—combined to upset established paradigms of how to run for president.

Indeed, the 2016 campaign broke down all the established distinctions that observers had used to describe campaigns: between insiders and outsiders, earned media and advertising, media and nonmedia, legacy media and new media, news and entertainment, and even foreign and domestic sources of campaign communication. How does one characterize a campaign, for example, in which the chief strategist is also the chairman of a media website (Breitbart) that is the campaign’s chief promoter and whose articles the candidate retweets to tens of millions of his followers, with those tweets then picked up and rebroadcast on cable-television news channels, including one (RT, formerly known as Russia Today) that is funded by a foreign government?

The 2016 election represents the latest chapter in the disintegration of the legacy institutions that had set bounds for U.S. politics in the postwar era. It is tempting (and in many ways correct) to view the Donald Trump campaign as unprecedented in its breaking of established norms of politics. Yet this type of campaign could only be successful because established institutions—especially the mainstream media and politicalparty organizations—had already lost most of their power, both in the United States and around the world….(More)”

Too Much of a Good Thing? Frequent Flyers and the Implications for the Coproduction of Public Service Delivery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Benjamin Y. Clark and Jeffrey L. Brudney: “The attention on coproduction and specifically technology-enabled coproduction has grown substantially. This attention had provided findings that highlight the benefits for citizens and governments. Previous research on technologically-enabled coproduction (Internet, smartphones, and centralized non-emergency municipal call centers), show that these technologies have brought coproduction within reach of citizens (Meijer 2011; Kim and Lee 2012; Norris and Reddick 2013; Clark, Brudney, and Jang 2013; Linders 2012; Clark et al. 2016; Clark and Shurik 2016) and have the potential to improve perceptions of government performance (Clark and Shurik 2016). The advent of technologically-enabled coproduction has also made it possible for some residents to participate at levels not previously possible. These high volume coproducers, now known as “frequent flyers,” have the potential to become pseudo-bureaucrats. This chapter seeks to understand if we need to be concerned about this development. Additionally, we seek to understand what individual & neighborhood characteristics affect the intensity of coproduction of public services and if there are diffusion effects of frequent flyers.

To address these questions, we use surveys of San Francisco, California, residents conducted in 2011, 2013, and 2015. Our results suggest that the frequent flyers are largely representative of their communities. Our study finds some evidence that racial and ethnic minorities might be more likely to be a part of this group than the white majority. And perhaps most interestingly we find that neighbors appear to be learning from one another — the more frequent flyers that live in a neighborhood, the more likely it is that you are going to be a frequent flyer….(More)”

Working with Change: Systems Approaches to Public Sector Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation: “The draft report “Working with Change: Systems Approaches to Public Sector Challenges” is now available online. In addition to the framework that was introduced previously on Hackpad, the team working on systems thinking at the Observatory has added four in-depth case studies from Canada, Finland, Iceland and the Netherlands to the analysis. The empirical cases show that systems change in the public sector is possible; moreover, that it can work in diverse settings: child protection in the Netherlands, responding to domestic violence in Iceland, engaging with the sharing economy in Canada, and in experimental policy design in Finland. The final version of the report is expected in June 2017. (Download the draft report here).