Medium Article by Tim Dutton: “The race to become the global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) has officially begun. In the past fifteen months, Canada, China, Denmark, the EU Commission, Finland, France, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Nordic-Baltic region, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, the UAE, and the UK have all released strategies to promote the use and development of AI. No two strategies are alike, with each focusing on different aspects of AI policy: scientific research, talent development, skills and education, public and private sector adoption, ethics and inclusion, standards and regulations, and data and digital infrastructure. This... (More >)
Satellites can advance sustainable development by highlighting poverty
Cordis: “Estimating poverty is crucial for improving policymaking and advancing the sustainability of a society. Traditional poverty estimation methods such as household surveys and census data incur huge costs however, creating a need for more efficient approaches. With this in mind, the EU-funded USES project examined how satellite images could be used to estimate household-level poverty in rural regions of developing countries. “This promises to be a radically more cost-effective way of monitoring and evaluating the Sustainable Development Goals,” says Dr Gary Watmough, USES collaborator and Interdisciplinary Lecturer in Land Use and Socioecological Systems at the University of Edinburgh,... (More >)
‘Data is a fingerprint’: why you aren’t as anonymous as you think online
Olivia Solon at The Guardian: “In August 2016, the Australian government released an “anonymised” data set comprising the medical billing records, including every prescription and surgery, of 2.9 million people. Names and other identifying features were removed from the records in an effort to protect individuals’ privacy, but a research team from the University of Melbourne soon discovered that it was simple to re-identify people, and learn about their entire medical history without their consent, by comparing the dataset to other publicly available information, such as reports of celebrities having babies or athletes having surgeries. The government pulled the... (More >)
What if people were paid for their data?
The Economist: “Data Slavery” Jennifer Lyn Morone, an American artist, thinks this is the state in which most people now live. To get free online services, she laments, they hand over intimate information to technology firms. “Personal data are much more valuable than you think,” she says. To highlight this sorry state of affairs, Ms Morone has resorted to what she calls “extreme capitalism”: she registered herself as a company in Delaware in an effort to exploit her personal data for financial gain. She created dossiers containing different subsets of data, which she displayed in a London gallery in... (More >)
Neuroscience for Cities Playbook
Tool resulting from a collaboration between Future Cities Catapult, Centric Lab and University College London: “It brings forward a framework of how neuroscience research can be put into practice in cities. This has been presented as a set of new tools, methodologies and strategies for organisations big and small, to adopt neuroscience insights into their supply chain. With an aim to reach out to a wide audience from businesses to urban planners and academicians and policymakers, We are sure you will find the playbook a useful resource to explore the potential applications of this important area of research. This... (More >)
My City Forecast: Urban planning communication tool for citizen with national open data
Paper by Y. Hasegawa, Y. Sekimoto, T. Seto, Y. Fukushima et al in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems: “In urban management, the importance of citizen participation is being emphasized more than ever before. This is especially true in countries where depopulation has become a major concern for urban managers and many local authorities are working on revising city master plans, often incorporating the concept of the “compact city.” In Japan, for example, the implementation of compact city plans means that each local government decides on how to designate residential areas and promotes citizens moving to these areas in order... (More >)
Can Smart Cities Be Equitable?
Homi Kharas and Jaana Remes at Project Syndicate: “Around the world, governments are making cities “smarter” by using data and digital technology to build more efficient and livable urban environments. This makes sense: with urban populations growing and infrastructure under strain, smart cities will be better positioned to manage rapid change. But as digital systems become more pervasive, there is a danger that inequality will deepen unless local governments recognize that tech-driven solutions are as important to the poor as they are to the affluent. While offline populations can benefit from applications running in the background of daily life... (More >)
Balancing Act: Innovation vs. Privacy in the Age of Data Portability
Thursday, July 12, 2018 @ 2 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, NY 11201 RSVP here. The ability of people to move or copy data about themselves from one service to another — data portability — has been hailed as a way of increasing competition and driving innovation. In many areas, such as through the Open Banking initiative in the United Kingdom, the practice of data portability is fully underway and propagating. The launch of GDPR in Europe has also elevated the issue among companies and individuals alike. But recent online security breaches and other experiences of personal data being transferred surreptitiously... (More >)
Essentials of the Right of Access to Public Information: An Introduction
Introduction by Blanke, Hermann-Josef and Perlingeiro, Ricardo in the book “The Right of Access to Public Information : An International Comparative Legal Survey”: “The first freedom of information law was enacted in Sweden back in 1766 as the “Freedom of the Press and the Right of Access to Public Records Act”. It sets an example even today. However, the “triumph” of the freedom of information did not take place until much later. Many western legal systems arose from the American Freedom of Information Act, which was signed into law by President L.B. Johnson in 1966. This Act obliges all... (More >)
The distributed power of smartphones for medical research
Adi Gaskell: “One of the more significant areas of promise in health technology is the ability for data to be generated by us as individuals, and for AI to provide insights based upon this live stream of lifestyle data. An example of what’s possible comes via a project researchers at Imperial College London have undertaken with the Vodafone Foundation. The project aims to tap into the power of users smartphones to crunch cancer related data whilst they sleep. Such distributed computing projects have been popular for some time, but this is one of the first to utilize the power... (More >)
