The View From Your Window Is Worth Cash to This Company

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Jaffe in Atlantic CityLab: “A city window overlooking the street has always been a score in its own right, what with so many apartments stuck opening onto back alleys and dumpsters and fire escapes. And now, a company wants to straight up monetize the view. New York startup Placemeter is paying city residents up to $50 a month for street views captured via old smartphones. The idea is to quantify sidewalk life in the service of making the city a more efficient place.

“Measuring data about how the city moves in real time, being able to make predictions on that, is definitely a good way to help cities work better,” says founder Alex Winter. “That’s the vision of Placemeter—to build a data platform where anyone at any time can know how busy the city is, and use that.”
Here’s how it works: City residents send Placemeter a little information about where they live and what they see from their window. In turn, Placemeter sends participants a kit (complete with window suction cup) to convert their unused smartphone into a street sensor, and agrees to pay cash so long as the device stays on and collects data. The more action outside—the more shops, pedestrians, traffic, and public space—the more the view is worth.
On the back end, Placemeter converts the smartphone images into statistical data using proprietary computer vision. The company first detects moving objects (the green splotches in the video below) and classifies them either as people or as 11 types of vehicles or other common urban elements, such as food carts. A second layer of analysis connects this movement with behavioral patterns based on the location—how many cars are speeding down a street, for instance, or how many people are going into a store….
Efforts to quantify city life with big data aren’t new, but where Placemeter’s clear advance is its ability to count pedestrians. Cities often track sidewalk traffic with little more than a hired hand and a manual clicker and spot locations. With its army of smartphone eyes, Placemeter promises a much wider net of real-time data dynamic enough to recognize not only that a person exists but also that person’s behavior, from walking speed to retail interest to general interaction with streets or public spaces…”

Forget GMOs. The Future of Food Is Data—Mountains of It

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cade Metz at Wired: “… Led by Dan Zigmond—who previously served as chief data scientist for YouTube, then Google Maps—this ambitious project aims to accelerate the work of all the biochemists, food scientists, and chefs on the first floor, providing a computer-generated shortcut to what Hampton Creek sees as the future of food. “We’re looking at the whole process,” Zigmond says of his data team, “trying to figure out what it all means and make better predictions about what is going to happen next.”

The project highlights a movement, spreading through many industries, that seeks to supercharge research and development using the kind of data analysis and manipulation pioneered in the world of computer science, particularly at places like Google and Facebook. Several projects already are using such techniques to feed the development of new industrial materials and medicines. Others hope the latest data analytics and machine learning techniques can help diagnosis disease. “This kind of approach is going to allow a whole new type of scientific experimentation,” says Jeremy Howard, who as the president of Kaggle once oversaw the leading online community of data scientists and is now applying tricks of the data trade to healthcare as the founder of Enlitic.
Zigmond’s project is the first major effort to apply “big data” to the development of food, and though it’s only just getting started—with some experts questioning how effective it will be—it could spur additional research in the field. The company may license its database to others, and Hampton Creek founder and CEO Josh Tetrick says it may even open source the data, so to speak, freely sharing it with everyone. “We’ll see,” says Tetrick, a former college football linebacker who founded Hampton Creek after working on economic and social campaigns in Liberia and Kenya. “That would be in line with who we are as a company.”…
Initially, Zigmond and his team will model protein interactions on individual machines, using tools like the R programming language (a common means of crunching data) and machine learning algorithms much like those that recommend products on Amazon.com. As the database expands, they plan to arrange for much larger and more complex models that run across enormous clusters of computer servers, using the sort of sweeping data-analysis software systems employed by the likes of Google. “Even as we start to get into the tens and hundreds of thousands and millions of proteins,” Zigmond says, “it starts to be more than you can handle with traditional database techniques.”
In particular, Zigmond is exploring the use of deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence that goes beyond ordinary machine learning. Google is using deep learning to drive the speech recognition system in Android phones. Microsoft is using it to translate Skype calls from one language to another. Zigmond believes it can help model the creation of new foods….”

Redesigning that first encounter with online government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nancy Scola in the Washington Post: “Teardowns,” Samuel Hulick calls them, and by that he means his step-by-step dissections of how some of world’s most popular digital services — Gmail, Evernote, Instragram — welcome new users. But the term might give an overly negative sense of what Hulick is up to. The Portland, Ore., user-experience designer highlights both the good and bad in his critiques, and his annotated slideshows, under the banner of UserOnboard, have gained a following among design aficionados.

Now Hulick is partnering with two of those fans, a pair of Code for America fellows, to encourage the public to do the same for, say, the process of applying for food stamps.  It’s called CitizenOnboard.
Using the original UserOnboard is like taking a tour through some of the digital sites you know best — but with an especially design-savvy friend by your side pointing out the kinks. “The user experience,” or UX on these sites, “is often tacked on haphazardly,” says Hulick, who launched UserOnboard in December 2013 and who is also the author of the recent book “The Elements of User Onboarding.” What’s he looking for in a good UX, he says, is something non-designers can spot, too. “If you were the Web site, what tone would you take? How would you guide people through your process?”
Hulick reviews what’s working and what’s not, and adds a bit of sass: Gmail pre-populates its inbox with a few welcome messages: “Preloading some emails is a nice way to deal with the ‘cold start’ problem,” Hulick notes. Evernote nudges new users to check out its blog and other apps: “It’s like a restaurant rolling out the dessert cart while I’m still trying to decide if I even want to eat there.” Instagram’s first backdrop is a photo of someone taking a picture: “I’m learning how to Instagram by osmosis!”….
CitizenOnboard’s pitch is to get the public to do that same work. They suggest starting with state food stamp programs. Hulick tackled his. The onboarding for Oregon’s SNAP service is 118 slides long, but that’s because there is much to address. In one step, applications must, using a drop-down menu, identify how those in their family are related to one another. “It took a while to figure out who should be the relation ‘of’ the other,” Hulick notes in his teardown. “In fact, I’m still not 100% sure I got it right.”…”

Ants Are Cool but Teach Us Nothing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in Bloomberg View: “…For nearly seven decades, starting in boyhood, I’ve studied hundreds of kinds of ants around the world, and this qualifies me, I believe, to offer some advice on ways their lives can be applied to ours. I’ll start with the question I’m most often asked: “What can I do about the ants in my kitchen?” My response comes from the heart: Watch your step, be careful of little lives. Ants especially like honey, tuna and cookie crumbs. So put down bits of those on the floor, and watch as the first scout finds the bait and reports back to her colony by laying an odor trail. Then, as a little column follows her out to the food, you will see social behavior so strange it might be on another planet. Think of kitchen ants not as pests or bugs, but as your personal guest superorganism.
Another question I hear a lot is, “What can we learn of moral value from the ants?” Here again I will answer definitively: nothing. Nothing at all can be learned from ants that our species should even consider imitating. For one thing, all working ants are female. Males are bred and appear in the nest only once a year, and then only briefly. They are pitiful creatures with wings, huge eyes, small brains and genitalia that make up a large portion of their rear body segment. They have only one function in life: to inseminate the virgin queens during the nuptial season. They are built to be robot flying sexual missiles. Upon mating or doing their best to mate, they are programmed to die within hours, usually as victims of predators.
Many kinds of ants eat their dead — and their injured, too. You may have seen ant workers retrieve nestmates that you have mangled or killed underfoot (accidentally, I hope), thinking it battlefield heroism. The purpose, alas, is more sinister.
As ants grow older, they spend more time in the outermost chambers and tunnels of the nest, and are more prone to undertake dangerous foraging trips. They also are the first to attack enemy ants and other intruders. Here indeed is a major difference between people and ants: While we send our young men to war, ants send their old ladies.
The most complex societies of all ant species, and arguably of all animals everywhere, are the leafcutters of the American tropics. In lowland forests and grasslands from Mexico to South America, you find conspicuous long files of reddish ants. Many carry freshly cut pieces of leaves, flowers and twigs. The ants don’t eat this vegetation. They carry it deep into their nests, where they convert it into complex, spongelike structures. On this substrate they grow a fungus, which they do eat. The entire process employs a sequence of specialists: The leafcutters in the field are medium in size. As they head home with their burdens, tiny sister ant workers ride on their backs to protect them from parasitic phorid flies. Inside the nest, workers somewhat smaller than the gatherers scissor the leaf fragments into pieces. Still smaller ants chew the fragments into lumps and add their own fecal material as fertilizer. Even smaller workers use the gooey lumps thus created to construct the gardens. And workers as small as the fly guards plant and tend the fungus.
The largest caste of leafcutter ants have razor-sharp mandibles and the adductor muscles to close them with enough force to slice mammalian skin. These soldiers defend the nest against the most dangerous predators, including anteaters.
Species that have been able to evolve superorganismic colonies — almost purely on the basis of instinct — have as a whole been enormously successful. The 20,000 or so known species of social insects make up only 2 percent of the million known species of insects but three-fourths of the insect biomass.
With complexity, however, comes vulnerability, and that brings me to one of the other superorganism superstars, the domestic honeybee. When disease strikes solitary animals that we have embraced in symbiosis, such as chickens, pigs and dogs, veterinarians can usually diagnose and fix the problem. Honeybees, on the other hand, have by far the most complex lives of all our domestic partners. There are a great many more twists and turns in their adaptation to their environment that, upon failing, can damage some part of the colony life cycle. The intractability thus far of the honeybee colony collapse disorder of Europe and North America, which threatens so much of crop pollination, may represent an intrinsic weakness of superorganisms.
You may occasionally hear human societies described as superorganisms. This is a bit of a stretch. It is true that we form societies dependent on cooperation, labor specialization and frequent acts of altruism. But where social insects are ruled almost entirely by instinct, we base labor division on transmission of culture. Also, unlike social insects, we are too selfish to behave like cells in an organism. Human beings seek their own destiny. They will always revolt against slavery, and refuse to be treated like worker ants.”

Bridging the Knowledge Gap: In Search of Expertise

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Beth Simone Noveck, The GovLab, for Democracy: “In the early 2000s, the Air Force struggled with a problem: Pilots and civilians were dying because of unusual soil and dirt conditions in Afghanistan. The soil was getting into the rotors of the Sikorsky UH-60 helicopters and obscuring the view of its pilots—what the military calls a “brownout.” According to the Air Force’s senior design scientist, the manager tasked with solving the problem didn’t know where to turn quickly to get help. As it turns out, the man practically sitting across from him had nine years of experience flying these Black Hawk helicopters in the field, but the manager had no way of knowing that. Civil service titles such as director and assistant director reveal little about skills or experience.
In the fall of 2008, the Air Force sought to fill in these kinds of knowledge gaps. The Air Force Research Laboratory unveiled Aristotle, a searchable internal directory that integrated people’s credentials and experience from existing personnel systems, public databases, and users themselves, thus making it easy to discover quickly who knew and had done what. Near-term budgetary constraints killed Aristotle in 2013, but the project underscored a glaring need in the bureaucracy.
Aristotle was an attempt to solve a challenge faced by every agency and organization: quickly locating expertise to solve a problem. Prior to Aristotle, the DOD had no coordinated mechanism for identifying expertise across 200,000 of its employees. Dr. Alok Das, the senior scientist for design innovation tasked with implementing the system, explained, “We don’t know what we know.”
This is a common situation. The government currently has no systematic way of getting help from all those with relevant expertise, experience, and passion. For every success on Challenge.gov—the federal government’s platform where agencies post open calls to solve problems for a prize—there are a dozen open-call projects that never get seen by those who might have the insight or experience to help. This kind of crowdsourcing is still too ad hoc, infrequent, and unpredictable—in short, too unreliable—for the purposes of policy-making.
Which is why technologies like Aristotle are so exciting. Smart, searchable expert networks offer the potential to lower the costs and speed up the process of finding relevant expertise. Aristotle never reached this stage, but an ideal expert network is a directory capable of including not just experts within the government, but also outside citizens with specialized knowledge. This leads to a dual benefit: accelerating the path to innovative and effective solutions to hard problems while at the same time fostering greater citizen engagement.
Could such an expert-network platform revitalize the regulatory-review process? We might find out soon enough, thanks to the Food and Drug Administration…”

How Local Governments Can Use Instameets to Promote Citizen Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chris Shattuck at Arc3Communications: “With more than 200 million active monthly users, Instagram reports that it shares more than 20 million photos every day with a combined average of 1.6 billion likes.
Instagram engagement is also more than 15 times that of Facebook with a user base that is predominately young, female and affluent, according to a recent report by L2, a think tank for digital innovation.
Therefore, it’s no wonder that 92 percent of prestige brands prominently incorporate Instagram into their social media strategies, according to the same report.
However, many local governments have been slow to adopt this rapidly maturing platform, even though many of their constituents are already actively using it.
So how can local governments utilize the power of Instagram to promote citizen engagement that is still organic and social?
Creating Instameets to promote local government events, parks, civic landmarks and institutional buildings may be part of that answer.
Once an Instagram meetup community is created for a city any user can suggest a “meet-up” where members get together at a set place, date and time to snap away at a landmark, festival, or other event of note – preferably with a unique hashtag so that photos can be easily shared.
For example, where other marketing efforts to brand the City of Atlanta failed, #weloveatl has become a popular, organic hashtag that crosses cultural and economic boundaries for photographers looking to share their favorite things about Atlanta and benefit the Atlanta Community Food Bank.
And in May, users were able to combine that energy with a worldwide Instameet campaign to photograph Streets Alive Atlanta, a major initiative by the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition.
This organic collaboration provides a unique example for local governments seeking to promote their cities and use Instameets….”

What Is Big Data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

datascience@berkeley Blog: ““Big Data.” It seems like the phrase is everywhere. The term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013 External link, appeared in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary by 2014 External link, and Gartner’s just-released 2014 Hype Cycle External link shows “Big Data” passing the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and on its way down into the “Trough of Disillusionment.” Big Data is all the rage. But what does it actually mean?
A commonly repeated definition External link cites the three Vs: volume, velocity, and variety. But others argue that it’s not the size of data that counts, but the tools being used, or the insights that can be drawn from a dataset.
To settle the question once and for all, we asked 40+ thought leaders in publishing, fashion, food, automobiles, medicine, marketing and every industry in between how exactly they would define the phrase “Big Data.” Their answers might surprise you! Take a look below to find out what big data is:

  1. John Akred, Founder and CTO, Silicon Valley Data Science
  2. Philip Ashlock, Chief Architect of Data.gov
  3. Jon Bruner, Editor-at-Large, O’Reilly Media
  4. Reid Bryant, Data Scientist, Brooks Bell
  5. Mike Cavaretta, Data Scientist and Manager, Ford Motor Company
  6. Drew Conway, Head of Data, Project Florida
  7. Rohan Deuskar, CEO and Co-Founder, Stylitics
  8. Amy Escobar, Data Scientist, 2U
  9. Josh Ferguson, Chief Technology Officer, Mode Analytics
  10. John Foreman, Chief Data Scientist, MailChimp
  11. …

FULL LIST at datascience@berkeley Blog”

In democracy and disaster, emerging world embraces 'open data'

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeremy Wagstaff’ at Reuters: “Open data’ – the trove of data-sets made publicly available by governments, organizations and businesses – isn’t normally linked to high-wire politics, but just may have saved last month’s Indonesian presidential elections from chaos.
Data is considered open when it’s released for anyone to use and in a format that’s easy for computers to read. The uses are largely commercial, such as the GPS data from U.S.-owned satellites, but data can range from budget numbers and climate and health statistics to bus and rail timetables.
It’s a revolution that’s swept the developed world in recent years as governments and agencies like the World Bank have freed up hundreds of thousands of data-sets for use by anyone who sees a use for them. Data.gov, a U.S. site, lists more than 100,000 data-sets, from food calories to magnetic fields in space.
Consultants McKinsey reckon open data could add up to $3 trillion worth of economic activity a year – from performance ratings that help parents find the best schools to governments saving money by releasing budget data and asking citizens to come up with cost-cutting ideas. All the apps, services and equipment that tap the GPS satellites, for example, generate $96 billion of economic activity each year in the United States alone, according to a 2011 study.
But so far open data has had a limited impact in the developing world, where officials are wary of giving away too much information, and where there’s the issue of just how useful it might be: for most people in emerging countries, property prices and bus schedules aren’t top priorities.
But last month’s election in Indonesia – a contentious face-off between a disgraced general and a furniture-exporter turned reformist – highlighted how powerful open data can be in tandem with a handful of tech-smart programmers, social media savvy and crowdsourcing.
“Open data may well have saved this election,” said Paul Rowland, a Jakarta-based consultant on democracy and governance…”
 

Out in the Open: This Man Wants to Turn Data Into Free Food (And So Much More)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in Wired: “Let’s say your city releases a list of all trees planted on its public property. It would be a godsend—at least in theory. You could filter the data into a list of all the fruit and nut trees in the city, transfer it into an online database, and create a smartphone app that helps anyone find free food.

Such is promise of “open data”—the massive troves of public information our governments now post to the net. The hope is that, if governments share enough of this data with the world at large, hackers and entrepreneurs will find a way of putting it to good use. But although so much of this government data is now available, the revolution hasn’t exactly happened.
In far too many cases, the data just sits there on a computer server, unseen and unused. Sometimes, no one knows about the data, or no one knows what to do with it. Other times, the data is just too hard to work with. If you’re building that free food app, how do you update your database when the government releases a new version of the spreadsheet? And if you let people report corrections to the data, how do you contribute that data back to the city?
These are the sorts of problems that obsess 25-year-old software developer Max Ogden, and they’re the reason he built Dat, a new piece of open source software that seeks to restart the open data revolution. Basically, Dat is a way of synchronizing data between two or more sources, tracking any changes to that data, and handling transformations from one data format to another. The aim is a simple one: Ogden wants to make it easier for governments to share their data with a world of software developers.
That’s just the sort of thing that government agencies are looking for, says Waldo Jaquith, the director of US Open Data Institute, the non-profit that is now hosting Dat…
Git is a piece of software originally written by Linux creator Linus Torvalds. It keeps track of code changes and makes it easier to integrate code submissions from outside developers. Ogden realized what developers needed wasn’t a GitHub for data, but a Git for data. And that’s what Dat is.
Instead of CouchDB, Dat relies on a lightweight, open-source data storage system from Google called LevelDB. The rest of the software was written in JavaScript by Ogden and his growing number of collaborators, which enables them to keep things minimal and easily run the software on multiple operating systems, including Windows, Linux and Macintosh OS X….”
“

Technology’s Crucial Role in the Fight Against Hunger

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Crowdsourcing, predictive analytics and other new tools could go far toward finding innovative solutions for America’s food insecurity.

National Geographic recently sent three photographers to explore hunger in the United States. It was an effort to give a face to a very troubling statistic: Even today, one-sixth of Americans do not have enough food to eat. Fifty million people in this country are “food insecure” — having to make daily trade-offs among paying for food, housing or medical care — and 17 million of them skip at least one meal a day to get by. When choosing what to eat, many of these individuals must make choices between lesser quantities of higher-quality food and larger quantities of less-nutritious processed foods, the consumption of which often leads to expensive health problems down the road.
This is an extremely serious, but not easily visible, social problem. Nor does the challenge it poses become any easier when poorly designed public-assistance programs continue to count the sauce on a pizza as a vegetable. The deficiencies caused by hunger increase the likelihood that a child will drop out of school, lowering her lifetime earning potential. In 2010 alone, food insecurity cost America $167.5 billion, a figure that includes lost economic productivity, avoidable health-care expenses and social-services programs.
As much as we need specific policy innovations, if we are to eliminate hunger in America food insecurity is just one of many extraordinarily complex and interdependent “systemic” problems facing us that would benefit from the application of technology, not just to identify innovative solutions but to implement them as well. In addition to laudable policy initiatives by such states as Illinois and Nevada, which have made hunger a priority, or Arkansas, which suffers the greatest level of food insecurity but which is making great strides at providing breakfast to schoolchildren, we can — we must — bring technology to bear to create a sustained conversation between government and citizens to engage more Americans in the fight against hunger.

Identifying who is genuinely in need cannot be done as well by a centralized government bureaucracy — even one with regional offices — as it can through a distributed network of individuals and organizations able to pinpoint with on-the-ground accuracy where the demand is greatest. Just as Ushahidi uses crowdsourcing to help locate and identify disaster victims, it should be possible to leverage the crowd to spot victims of hunger. As it stands, attempts to eradicate so-called food deserts are often built around developing solutions for residents rather than with residents. Strategies to date tend to focus on the introduction of new grocery stores or farmers’ markets but with little input from or involvement of the citizens actually affected.

Applying predictive analytics to newly available sources of public as well as private data, such as that regularly gathered by supermarkets and other vendors, could also make it easier to offer coupons and discounts to those most in need. In addition, analyzing nonprofits’ tax returns, which are legally open and available to all, could help map where the organizations serving those in need leave gaps that need to be closed by other efforts. The Governance Lab recently brought together U.S. Department of Agriculture officials with companies that use USDA data in an effort to focus on strategies supporting a White House initiative to use climate-change and other open data to improve food production.

Such innovative uses of technology, which put citizens at the center of the service-delivery process and streamline the delivery of government support, could also speed the delivery of benefits, thus reducing both costs and, every bit as important, the indignity of applying for assistance.

Being open to new and creative ideas from outside government through brainstorming and crowdsourcing exercises using social media can go beyond simply improving the quality of the services delivered. Some of these ideas, such as those arising from exciting new social-science experiments involving the use of incentives for “nudging” people to change their behaviors, might even lead them to purchase more healthful food.

Further, new kinds of public-private collaborative partnerships could create the means for people to produce their own food. Both new kinds of financing arrangements and new apps for managing the shared use of common real estate could make more community gardens possible. Similarly, with the kind of attention, convening and funding that government can bring to an issue, new neighbor-helping-neighbor programs — where, for example, people take turns shopping and cooking for one another to alleviate time away from work — could be scaled up.

Then, too, advances in citizen engagement and oversight could make it more difficult for lawmakers to cave to the pressures of lobbying groups that push for subsidies for those crops, such as white potatoes and corn, that result in our current large-scale reliance on less-nutritious foods. At the same time, citizen scientists reporting data through an app would be able do a much better job than government inspectors in reporting what is and is not working in local communities.

As a society, we may not yet be able to banish hunger entirely. But if we commit to using new technologies and mechanisms of citizen engagement widely and wisely, we could vastly reduce its power to do harm.