Microsoft’s Open Notre Dame initiative calls for sharing of open data in restoration effort

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hamza Jawad at Neowin: “On April 15, a disastrous fire ravaged the famous Notre-Dame cathedral in France. In the wake of the episode, tech companies, such as Apple, announced that they would be donating to help in rebuilding efforts. On the other hand, some companies, like Ubisoft, took a different approach to support the restorations that followed.

A few days ago, Microsoft and Iconem announced the “Open Notre Dame” initiative to contribute towards the restoration of the ‘Lady of Paris’. The open data project is said to help gather and analyze existing documents on the monument, while simultaneously producing and sharing its 3D models. Today, the company has once again detailed the workings of this initiative, along with a call for the sharing of open data to help quicken the restoration efforts….

GitHub will host temporal models of the building, which can then be easily shared to and accessed by various other initiatives in a concerted effort to maintain accuracy as much as possible. Many companies, including Ubisoft, have already provided data that will help form the foundation for these open source models. More details regarding the project can be obtained on the original blog post….(More)”.

Data Science for Local Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Jonathan Bright, Bharath Ganesh, Cathrine Seidelin and Thomas Vogl: “The Data Science for Local Government project was about understanding how the growth of ‘data science’ is changing the way that local government works in the UK. We define data science as a dual shift which involves both bringing in new decision making and analytical techniques to local government work (e.g. machine learning and predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and A/B testing) and also expanding the types of data local government makes use of (for example, by repurposing administrative data, harvesting social media data, or working with mobile phone companies). The emergence of data science is facilitated by the growing availability of free, open-source tools for both collecting data and performing analysis.

Based on extensive documentary review, a nationwide survey of local authorities, and in-depth interviews with over 30 practitioners, we have sought to produce a comprehensive guide to the different types of data science being undertaken in the UK, the types of opportunities and benefits created, and also some of the challenges and difficulties being encountered.

Our aim was to provide a basis for people working in local government to start on their own data science projects, both by providing a library of dozens of ideas which have been tried elsewhere and also by providing hints and tips for overcoming key problems and challenges….(More)”

Belgium’s democratic experiment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David van Reybrouck in Politico: “Those looking for a solution to the wave of anger and distrust sweeping Western democracies should have a look at an experiment in European democracy taking place in a small region in eastern Belgium.

Starting in September, the parliament representing the German-speaking region of Belgium will hand some of its powers to a citizens’ assembly drafted by lot. It’ll be the first time a political institution creates a permanent structure to involve citizens in political decision making.

It’s a move Belgian media has rightly hailed as “historic.” I was in parliament the night MPs from all six parties moved past ideological differences to endorse the bill. It was a courageous move, a sign to other politicians — who tend to see their voters as a threat rather than a resource — that citizens should be trusted, not feared, or “spun.”

Nowhere else in the world will everyday citizens be so consistently involved in shaping the future of their community. In times of massive, widespread distrust of party politics, German-speaking Belgians will be empowered to put the issues they care about on the agenda, to discuss potential solutions, and to monitor the follow-up of their recommendations as they pass through parliament and government. Politicians, in turn, will be able to tap independent citizens’ panels to deliberate over thorny political issues.

This experiment is happening on a small scale: Belgium’s German-speaking community, the country’s third linguistic region, is the smallest federal entity in Europe. But its powers are comparable with those of Scotland or the German province of North Rhine-Westphalia, and the lessons of its experiment with a “people’s senate” will have implications for democrats across Europe….(More)”.

The EU Wants to Build One of the World’s Largest Biometric Databases. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Grace Dobush at Fortune: “China and India have built the world’s largest biometric databases, but the European Union is about to join the club.

The Common Identity Repository (CIR) will consolidate biometric data on almost all visitors and migrants to the bloc, as well as some EU citizens—connecting existing criminal, asylum, and migration databases and integrating new ones. It has the potential to affect hundreds of millions of people.

The plan for the database, first proposed in 2016 and approved by the EU Parliament on April 16, was sold as a way to better track and monitor terrorists, criminals, and unauthorized immigrants.

The system will target the fingerprints and identity data for visitors and immigrants initially, and represents the first step towards building a truly EU-wide citizen database. At the same time, though, critics argue its mere existence will increase the potential for hacks, leaks, and law enforcement abuse of the information….

The European Parliament and the European Council have promised to address those concerns, through “proper safeguards” to protect personal privacy and to regulate officers’ access to data. In 2016, they passed a law regarding law enforcement’s access to personal data, alongside General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR.

But total security is a tall order. Germany is currently dealing with multipleinstances of police officers allegedly leaking personal information to far-right groups. Meanwhile, a Swedish hacker went to prison for hacking into Denmark’s public records system in 2012 and dumping online the personal data of hundreds of thousands of citizens and migrants….(More)”.


Nagging misconceptions about nudge theory

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cass Sunstein at The Hill: “Nudges are private or public initiatives that steer people in particular directions but that also allow them to go their own way.

A reminder is a nudge; so is a warning. A GPS device nudges; a default rule, automatically enrolling people in some program, is a nudge.

To qualify as a nudge, an initiative must not impose significant economic incentives. A subsidy is not a nudge; a tax is not a nudge; a fine or a jail sentence is not a nudge. To count as such, a nudge must fully preserve freedom of choice.

In 2009, University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler and I co-wrote a book that drew on research in psychology and behavioral economics to help people and institutions, both public and private, improve their decision-making.

In the 10 years since “Nudge” was published, there has been an extraordinary outpouring of new thought and action, with particular reference to public policy.

Behavioral insight teams, or “nudge units” of various sorts, can be found in many nations, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, Japan and Qatar.

Those teams are delivering. By making government more efficient, and by improving safety and health, they are helping to save a lot of money and a lot of lives. And in many countries, including the U.S., they don’t raise partisan hackles; both Democrats and Republicans have enthusiastically embraced them.   

Still, there are a lot of mistakes and misconceptions out there, and they are diverting attention and hence stalling progress. Here are the three big ones:

1. Nudges do not respect freedom. …

2. Nudges are based on excessive trust in government...

3. Nudges cannot achieve a whole lot.…(More)”.

How Technology Could Revolutionize Refugee Resettlement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Krishnadev Calamur in The Atlantic: “… For nearly 70 years, the process of interviewing, allocating, and accepting refugees has gone largely unchanged. In 1951, 145 countries came together in Geneva, Switzerland, to sign the Refugee Convention, the pact that defines who is a refugee, what refugees’ rights are, and what legal obligations states have to protect them.

This process was born of the idealism of the postwar years—an attempt to make certain that those fleeing war or persecution could find safety so that horrific moments in history, such as the Holocaust, didn’t recur. The pact may have been far from perfect, but in successive years, it was a lifeline to Afghans, Bosnians, Kurds, and others displaced by conflict.

The world is a much different place now, though. The rise of populism has brought with it a concomitant hostility toward immigrants in general and refugees in particular. Last October, a gunman who had previously posted anti-Semitic messages online against HIAS killed 11 worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Many of the policy arguments over resettlement have shifted focus from humanitarian relief to security threats and cost. The Trump administration has drastically cut the number of refugees the United States accepts, and large parts of Europe are following suit.

If it works, Annie could change that dynamic. Developed at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, Lund University in Sweden, and the University of Oxford in Britain, the software uses what’s known as a matching algorithm to allocate refugees with no ties to the United States to their new homes. (Refugees with ties to the United States are resettled in places where they have family or community support; software isn’t involved in the process.)

Annie’s algorithm is based on a machine learning model in which a computer is fed huge piles of data from past placements, so that the program can refine its future recommendations. The system examines a series of variables—physical ailments, age, levels of education and languages spoken, for example—related to each refugee case. In other words, the software uses previous outcomes and current constraints to recommend where a refugee is most likely to succeed. Every city where HIAS has an office or an affiliate is given a score for each refugee. The higher the score, the better the match.

This is a drastic departure from how refugees are typically resettled. Each week, HIAS and the eight other agencies that allocate refugees in the United States make their decisions based largely on local capacity, with limited emphasis on individual characteristics or needs….(More)”.

How Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly helped climate action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog post by Frances Foley: “..In July 2016, the new government – led by Fine Gael, backed by independents – put forward a bill to establish a national-level Citizens’ Assembly to look at the biggest issues of the day. These included the challenges of an ageing population; the role fixed-term parliaments; referendums; the 8th Amendment on abortion; and climate change.

Citizens from every region, every socio-economic background, each ethnicity and age group and from right across the spectrum of political opinion convened over the course of two weekends between September and November 2017. The issue seemed daunting in scale and complexity, but the participants had been well-briefed and had at their disposal a line up of experts, scientists, advocates and other witnesses who would help them make sense of the material. By the end, citizens had produced a radical series of recommendations which went far beyond what any major Irish party was promising, surprising even the initiators of the process….

As expected, the passage for some of the proposals through the Irish party gauntlet has not been smooth. The 8-hour long debate on increasing the carbon tax, for example, suggests that mixing deliberative and representative democracy still produces conflict and confusion. It is certainly clear that parliaments have to adapt and develop if citizens’ assemblies are ever to find their place in our modern democracies.

But the most encouraging move has been the simple acknowledgement that many of the barriers to implementation lie at the level of governance. The new Climate Action Commission, with a mandate to monitor climate action across government, should act as the governmental guarantor of the vision from the Citizens’ Assembly. Citizens’ proposals have themselves stimulated a review of internal government processes to stop their demands getting mired in party wrangling and government bureaucracy. By their very nature, the success of citizens’ assemblies can also provide an alternative vision of how decisions can be made – and in so doing shame political parties and parliaments into improving their decision-making practices.

Does the Irish Citizens’ Assembly constitute a case of rapid transition? In terms of its breadth, scale and vision, the experiment is impressive. But in terms of speed, deliberative processes are often criticised for being slow, unwieldly and costly. The response to this should be to ask what we’re getting: whilst an Assembly is not the most rapid vehicle for change – most serious processes take several months, if not a couple of years – the results, both in specific outcomes and in cultural or political shifts – can be astounding….

In respect to climate change, this harmony between ends and means is particularly significant. The climate crisis is the most severe collective decision-making challenge of our times, one that demands courage, but also careful thought….(More)”.

Whose Commons? Data Protection as a Legal Limit of Open Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Phillips and Bartha M. Knoppers in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics: “Open science has recently gained traction as establishment institutions have come on-side and thrown their weight behind the movement and initiatives aimed at creation of information commons. At the same time, the movement’s traditional insistence on unrestricted dissemination and reuse of all information of scientific value has been challenged by the movement to strengthen protection of personal data. This article assesses tensions between open science and data protection, with a focus on the GDPR.

Powerful institutions across the globe have recently joined the ranks of those making substantive commitments to “open science.” For example, the European Commission and the NIH National Cancer Institute are supporting large-scale collaborations, such as the Cancer Genome Collaboratory, the European Open Science Cloud, and the Genomic Data Commons, with the aim of making giant stores of genomic and other data readily available for analysis by researchers. In the field of neuroscience, the Montreal Neurological Institute is midway through a novel five-year project through which it plans to adopt open science across the full spectrum of its research. The commitment is “to make publicly available all positive and negative data by the date of first publication, to open its biobank to registered researchers and, perhaps most significantly, to withdraw its support of patenting on any direct research outputs.” The resources and influence of these institutions seem to be tipping the scales, transforming open science from a longstanding aspirational ideal into an existing reality.

Although open science lacks any standard, accepted definition, one widely-cited model proposed by the Austria-based advocacy effort openscienceASAP describes it by reference to six principles: open methodology, open source, open data, open access, open peer review, and open educational resources. The overarching principle is “the idea that scientific knowledge of all kinds should be openly shared as early as is practical in the discovery process.” This article adopts this principle as a working definition of open science, with a particular emphasis on open sharing of human data.

As noted above, many of the institutions committed to open science use the word “commons” to describe their initiatives, and the two concepts are closely related. “Medical information commons” refers to “a networked environment in which diverse sources of health, medical, and genomic information on large populations become widely shared resources.” Commentators explicitly link the success of information commons and progress in the research and clinical realms to open science-based design principles such as data access and transparent analysis (i.e., sharing of information about methods and other metadata together with medical or health data).

But what legal, as well as ethical and social, factors will ultimately shape the contours of open science? Should all restrictions be fought, or should some be allowed to persist, and if so, in what form? Given that a commons is not a free-for-all, in that its governing rules shape its outcomes, how might we tailor law and policy to channel open science to fulfill its highest aspirations, such as universalizing practical access to scientific knowledge and its benefits, and avoid potential pitfalls? This article primarily concerns research data, although passing reference is also made to the approach to the terms under which academic publications are available, which are subject to similar debates….(More)”.

There Are Better Ways to Do Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Peter Coy: “The Brexit disaster has stained the reputation of direct democracy. The United Kingdom’s trauma began in 2016, when then-Prime Minister David Cameron miscalculated that he could strengthen Britain’s attachment to the European Union by calling a referendum on it. The Leave campaign made unkeepable promises about Brexit’s benefits. Voters spent little time studying the facts because there was a vanishingly small chance that any given vote would make the difference by breaking a tie. Leave won—and Google searches for “What is the EU” spiked after the polls closed.

Brexit is only one manifestation of a global problem. Citizens want elected officials to be as responsive as Uber drivers, but they don’t always take their own responsibilities seriously. This problem isn’t new. America’s Founding Fathers worried that democracy would devolve into mob rule; the word “democracy” appears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

While fears about democratic dysfunction are understandable, there are ways to make voters into real participants in the democratic process without giving in to mobocracy. Instead of referendums, which often become lightning rods for extremism, political scientists say it’s better to make voters think like jurors, whose decisions affect the lives and fortunes of others.

Guided deliberation, also known as deliberative democracy, is one way to achieve that. Ireland used it in 2016 and 2017 to help decide whether to repeal a constitutional amendment that banned abortion in most cases. A 99-person Citizens’ Assembly was selected to mirror the Irish population. It met over five weekends to evaluate input from lawyers and obstetricians, pro-life and pro-choice groups, and more than 13,000 written submissions from the public, guided by a chairperson from the Irish supreme court. Together they concluded that the legislature should have the power to allow abortion under a broader set of conditions, a recommendation that voters approved in a 2018 referendum; abortion in Ireland became legal in January 2019.

Done right, deliberative democracy brings out the best in citizens. “My experience shows that some of the most polarising issues can be tackled in this manner,” Louise Caldwell, an Irish assembly member, wrote in a column for the Guardian in January. India’s village assemblies, which involve all the adults in local decision-making, are a form of deliberative democracy on a grand scale. A March article in the journal Science says that “evidence from places such as Colombia, Belgium, Northern Ireland, and Bosnia shows that properly structured deliberation can promote recognition, understanding, and learning.” Even French President Emmanuel Macron has used it, convening a three-month “great debate” to solicit the public’s views on some of the issues raised by the sometimes-violent Yellow Vest movement. On April 8, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe presented one key finding: The French have “zero tolerance” for new taxes…(More)”.

Predictive Big Data Analytics using the UK Biobank Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ivo D Dinov et al: “The UK Biobank is a rich national health resource that provides enormous opportunities for international researchers to examine, model, and analyze census-like multisource healthcare data. The archive presents several challenges related to aggregation and harmonization of complex data elements, feature heterogeneity and salience, and health analytics. Using 7,614 imaging, clinical, and phenotypic features of 9,914 subjects we performed deep computed phenotyping using unsupervised clustering and derived two distinct sub-cohorts. Using parametric and nonparametric tests, we determined the top 20 most salient features contributing to the cluster separation. Our approach generated decision rules to predict the presence and progression of depression or other mental illnesses by jointly representing and modeling the significant clinical and demographic variables along with the derived salient neuroimaging features. We reported consistency and reliability measures of the derived computed phenotypes and the top salient imaging biomarkers that contributed to the unsupervised clustering. This clinical decision support system identified and utilized holistically the most critical biomarkers for predicting mental health, e.g., depression. External validation of this technique on different populations may lead to reducing healthcare expenses and improving the processes of diagnosis, forecasting, and tracking of normal and pathological aging….(More)”.