Deepfake Maps Could Really Mess With Your Sense of the World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Will Knight at Wired: “Satellite images showing the expansion of large detention camps in Xinjiang, China, between 2016 and 2018 provided some of the strongest evidence of a government crackdown on more than a million Muslims, triggering international condemnation and sanctions.

Other aerial images—of nuclear installations in Iran and missile sites in North Korea, for example—have had a similar impact on world events. Now, image-manipulation tools made possible by artificial intelligence may make it harder to accept such images at face value.

In a paper published online last month, University of Washington professor Bo Zhao employed AI techniques similar to those used to create so-called deepfakes to alter satellite images of several cities. Zhao and colleagues swapped features between images of Seattle and Beijing to show buildings where there are none in Seattle and to remove structures and replace them with greenery in Beijing.

Zhao used an algorithm called CycleGAN to manipulate satellite photos. The algorithm, developed by researchers at UC Berkeley, has been widely used for all sorts of image trickery. It trains an artificial neural network to recognize the key characteristics of certain images, such as a style of painting or the features on a particular type of map. Another algorithm then helps refine the performance of the first by trying to detect when an image has been manipulated….(More)”.

Establishing a Data Trust: From Concept to Reality

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Blog by Stefaan Verhulst, Aditi Ramesh & Andrew Young, Peter Rabley & Christopher Keefe: “As ever-more areas of our public and private lives succumb to a process of datafication, it is becoming increasingly urgent to find new ways of managing the data lifecycle: how data is collected, stored, used, and reused. In particular, legacy notions of control and data access need to be reimagined for the twenty-first century, in ways that give more prominence to the public good and common interests – in a manner that is responsible and sustainable. That is particularly true for mapping data which is why The GovLab and FutureState, with the support of The Rockefeller Foundation, are partnering with PLACE to assist them in designing a new operational and governance approach for creating, storing and accessing mapping data: a Data Trust. 

PLACE is a non-profit formed out of a belief that mapping data is an integral part of the modern digital ecosystem and critical to unlocking economic, social and environmental opportunities for sustainable and equitable growth, development and climate resiliency; however, this data is not available or affordable in too many places around the world. PLACE’s goal is to bridge this part of the digital divide.

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Five key considerations inform the design of such a new framework:

  • Governing Data as a Commons: The work of Elinor Ostrom (among others) has highlighted models that go beyond private ownership and management. As a non-excludable and non-rivalrous asset, data fits this model well: one entity’s control or “ownership” of data doesn’t limit another entity’s (non-excludable); and one entity’s consumption or use of data doesn’t prevent another entity from similarly doing so (non-rivalrous). A new framework for governance would emphasize the central role of  “data as a commons.”
  • Avoiding a “Tragedy of the Commons”: Any commons is susceptible to a “tragedy of the commons”: a phenomenon in which entities or individuals free-ride on shared resources, depleting their value or usability for all, resulting in a failure to invest in maintenance, improvement and innovation and in the process contributing negatively to the public interest . Any reimagined model for data governance needs to acknowledge this risk, and build in methods and processes to avoid a tragedy of the commons and ensure “data sustainability.” As further described below we believe that sustainability can best be achieved through a membership model.
  • Tackling Data Asymmetries and Re-Distribution of Responsibilities: Everyone is a participant in today’s “data commons,” but not all stakeholders benefit equally. One way to ensure the sustainability of a data commons is to require that larger players—e.g., the most profitable platforms, and other entities that disproportionately benefit from network effects—assume greater responsibilities to maintain the commons. These responsibilities can take many forms—financial, technical know-how, regulatory or legal prowess—and will vary by entity and each entity’s specialization. The general idea is that all stakeholders should have equal rights and access—but some will have greater responsibilities and may be required to contribute more.
  • Independent Trustees and Strong Engagement: Who should govern the data as a commons? Another way to avoid a tragedy of the commons is to ensure that a clear set of rules, principles and guidelines determine what is acceptable (and not), and what constitutes fair play and reasonable data access and use. These guidelines should be designed and administered by independent trustees, whose responsibilities, powers, terms and selection mechanisms are clearly defined and bounded. The trustees should be drawn from across geographies and sectors, representing as wide a range of interests and expertise as possible.In addition, trustees should steer responsible data access in a manner that is informed by input from experts, stakeholders, data subjects, and intended beneficiaries, using innovative ways of engagement and deliberations.
  • Inclusion and Protection: A data trust designed for the commons must “work” for all and especially the most vulnerable and marginalized among us. The identity of some people and communities is inextricably linked to location and, therefore, requires us to be especially mindful of the risks of abuse for such communities. How can we prevent surveillance or bias against indigenous groups, for example? Equally important, how can we empower communities with more understanding of and voice in how data is collected and used about their place? Such communities are front-and-center in the design of the Trust and its governance….(More)”.

The Tragedy of Climate Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Bryan Doerries: “How terrible it is to know when, in the end, knowing gains you nothing,” laments the blind prophet Tiresias in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Oedipus had summoned him to reveal the source of the pestilence and ecological disaster ravaging Thebes. But Tiresias knew that the king would reject the truth. Today’s climate scientists and epidemiologists can relate.

Like Tiresias, modern-day scientists know where the planet is headed and why. They found out not through prophecies, but through countless double-blind experiments, randomized trials, and rigorous peer review. Their evidence is unimpeachable, and the consensus among them is overwhelming. But their secular augury cannot seem to overcome the willful indifference of politicians or the public. Knowing gains them nothing, because so few are listening.

If there is a way for scientists to get through to people and their leaders, the key will be to change not what they say, but how they say it. The language of science is dispassionate by design. By contrast, the manifold crises our planet faces are urgent and intense, and the individual and collective decisions that are fueling those crises have high emotional and ethical stakes. A virulent pandemic has taken the lives of three million people. The Earth is in the throes of a sixth mass extinction. And the problems are set to escalate.

We need a language to convey the gravity and complexity of the global tragedy that is unfolding, and the ancient Greeks supply it. Their tragedies are stories of people learning too late (usually by milliseconds). Their characters doggedly pursue what they believe to be right, barely comprehending the forces they face – chance, fate, habits, governments, gods, the weather. By the time they do, the characters have unwittingly made an irreversible – and devastating – mistake.

For centuries, Greek tragedies have been viewed as pessimistic expressions of a fatalistic society, which depict the futility of fighting destiny. But, for the Greeks, the effect of these stories may have been counterintuitive. By showing people just how narrow and fleeting their power to determine their own future was, the tragedies discouraged apathy. Highlighting how devastating self-delusion can be encouraged awareness. And providing the language for describing difficult experiences enhanced agency….(More)”

Open data for improved land governance

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Guide by the Land Portal: “This Open Up Guide on Land Governance is a resource  aimed to be used by governments from developing countries to collect and release land-related data to improve data quality, availability, accessibility and use for improved citizen engagement, decision making and innovation. It sets out:

  1. Key datasets for land management accountability, and how they should be collected, stored, shared and published for improving land governance and transparency;
  2. Good data policies and frameworks, including metadata, standards and governance frameworks if available;
  3. Existing gaps or challenges in the policies and frameworks; and
  4. Use cases from real-life examples to illustrate the potential impact and transformation this type of data can provide in local contexts.

The Open Up Guide has been prepared for use by national and local government agencies with a mandate for or an interest in making their land governance data open and available for others to re-use. Land governance data generally comprises the data and information that agencies collect as they carry out their core land administration functions of land tenure, use, development and value. Some countries already collect and manage their land governance data in open and re-usable formats. Others may be seeking advice on how to start, how to expand their activities or how to test what they do against best practice.

Open land governance data, published in accordance with a government’s law and regulations, provides efficient and transparent government services and enables individuals, communities and businesses to run their lives ethically and with integrity.

The Guide is also intended to assist communities monitoring whether environmental protections are being upheld, and to support rights claims over geographical areas inhabited for generations; and for civil society organisations that can make use of land governance data to understand patterns of land deals, support environmental and social advocacy, and investigate and address corruption….(More)”.

To Map Billions of Cicadas, It Takes Thousands of Citizen Scientists

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Article by Linda Poon and Marie Patino: “At the end of May, Dan Mozgai will spend his vacation from his day job chasing cicadas. The bugs won’t be hard to find; in about a week, billions of the beady-eyed crawlers from Brood X will start coming up from their 17-year-long underground, blanketing parts of 15 states in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest with their cacophony of shrill mating calls. 

Mozgai isn’t an entomologist — he does online marketing for DirecTV. But since2007, he’s worked closely with academic researchers to track various broods of periodical cicadas,as part of one of the oldest citizen science efforts in the U.S. 

He’ll be joined by ten of thousands of other volunteers across the Brood X territory who will use the mobile app Cicada Safari, where userscan add geotagged photos and videos onto a live map, as dozens of student researchers behind the scenes verify each submission. Videos will be especially helpful this year, as it provides audio data for the researchers, says Gene Kritsky, an entomologist at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, and the creator behind Cicada Safari. He’s been testing the new app with smaller broods for two years in anticipation for this moment. https://0b26ee1773bac5736a29111147e28a6b.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Brood X,  is one of the largest, and mostly broadly distributed geographically, of periodical cicadas, which emerge every 13 or 17 years. They’ll stick around for just a few weeks, through June, to mate and lay eggs.

“With the smartphone technology and the GPS location services, it was just a perfect way to do citizen science,” Kritsky says. Some 87,000 people have signed up as of the beginning of May, and they’ve already documented several early risers, especially around Cincinnati and Washington, D.C. — two of the expected hotspot…(More)”.

Citizen Science Is Helping Tackle Stinky Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Lucrezia Lozza: “Marta has lived with a bad smell lingering in her hometown in central Spain, Villanueva del Pardillo, for a long time. Fed up, in 2017 she and her neighbors decided to pursue the issue. “The smell is disgusting,” Marta says, pointing a finger at a local yeast factory.

Originally, she thought of recording the “bad smell days” on a spreadsheet. When this didn’t work out, after some research she found Odour Collect, a crowdsourced map that allows users to enter a geolocalized timestamp of bad smells in their neighborhood.

After noise, odor nuisances are the second cause of environmental complaints. Odor regulations vary among countries and there’s little legislation about how to manage smells. For instance, in Spain some municipalities regulate odors, but others do not. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency does not regulate odor as a pollutant, so states and local jurisdictions are in charge of the issue.

Only after Marta started using Odour Collect to record the unpleasant smells in her town did she discover that the map was part of ‘D-NOSES’, a European project aimed at bringing citizens, industries and local authorities together to monitor and minimize odor nuisances. D-NOSES relies heavily on citizen science: Affected communities gather odor observations through two maps — Odour Collect and Community Maps — with the goal of implementing new policies in their area. D-NOSES launched several pilots in Europe — in Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, and Portugal — and two outside the continent in Uganda and in Chile.

“Citizen science promotes transparency between all the actors,” said Nora Salas Seoane, Social Sciences Researcher at Fundación Ibercivis, one of the partners of D-NOSES…(More)”.

Citizen assembly takes on Germany’s climate pledges

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Martin Kuebler at Deutsche Welle: “A group of 160 German citizens chosen at random from across the country will launch an experiment in participatory democracy this week, aiming to inspire public debate and get the government to follow through with its pledge to reach net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050.

The Bürgerrat Klima, or Citizen Assembly, will follow the example set in the last few years by countries like Ireland, the United Kingdom and France. The concept, intended to directly involve citizens in the climate decisions that will shape their lives in the coming decades, is seen as a way for people to push for stronger climate policies and political action — though the previous experiments abroad have met with varying degrees of success.

Inspired by a 99-person Citizens’ Assembly, the Irish government adopted a series of reforms in its 2019 climate bill aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 51% before the end of this decade. These included recommendations “to ensure climate change is at the centre of policy-making,” and covered everything from clean tech and power generation to electric vehicles and plans to retrofit older buildings.

But in France, where 150 participants submitted bold proposals that included a ban on domestic flights and making ecocide a crime, lawmakers have been less enthusiastic about taking the measures on board. A new climate and resilience bill, which aims to cut France’s CO2 emissions by 40% over the next decade and is due to be adopted later this year, has incorporated less than half of the group’s ideas. Greenpeace has said the proposed bill would have been “ambitious 15 or 20 years ago.”…(More)”.

How we mapped billions of trees in West Africa using satellites, supercomputers and AI

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Martin Brandt and Kjeld Rasmussen in The Conversation: “The possibility that vegetation cover in semi-arid and arid areas was retreating has long been an issue of international concern. In the 1930s it was first theorized that the Sahara was expanding and woody vegetation was on the retreat. In the 1970s, spurred by the “Sahel drought”, focus was on the threat of “desertification”, caused by human overuse and/or climate change. In recent decades, the potential impact of climate change on the vegetation has been the main concern, along with the feedback of vegetation on the climate, associated with the role of the vegetation in the global carbon cycle.

Using high-resolution satellite data and machine-learning techniques at supercomputing facilities, we have now been able to map billions of individual trees and shrubs in West Africa. The goal is to better understand the real state of vegetation coverage and evolution in arid and semi-arid areas.

Finding a shrub in the desert – from space

Since the 1970s, satellite data have been used extensively to map and monitor vegetation in semi-arid areas worldwide. Images are available in “high” spatial resolution (with NASA’s satellites Landsat MSS and TM, and ESA’s satellites Spot and Sentinel) and “medium or low” spatial resolution (NOAA AVHRR and MODIS).

To accurately analyse vegetation cover at continental or global scale, it is necessary to use the highest-resolution images available – with a resolution of 1 metre or less – and up until now the costs of acquiring and analysing the data have been prohibitive. Consequently, most studies have relied on moderate- to low-resolution data. This has not allowed for the identification of individual trees, and therefore these studies only yield aggregate estimates of vegetation cover and productivity, mixing herbaceous and woody vegetation.

In a new study covering a large part of the semi-arid Sahara-Sahel-Sudanian zone of West Africa, published in Nature in October 2020, an international group of researchers was able to overcome these limitations. By combining an immense amount of high-resolution satellite data, advanced computing capacities, machine-learning techniques and extensive field data gathered over decades, we were able to identify individual trees and shrubs with a crown area of more than 3 m2 with great accuracy. The result is a database of 1.8 billion trees in the region studied, available to all interested….(More)”

Supercomputing, machine learning, satellite data and field assessments allow to map billions of individual trees in West Africa. Martin Brandt, Author provided

Using Data and Citizen Science for Gardening Success

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Article by Elizabeth Waddington: “…Data can help you personally by providing information you can use. And it also allows you to play a wider role in boosting understanding of our planet and tackling the global crises we face in a collaborative way. Consider the following examples.

Grow Observatory

This is one great example of data gathering and citizen science. Grow Observatory is a European citizen’s observatory through which people work together to take action on climate change, build better soil, grow healthier food and corroborate data from the new generation of Copernicus satellites.

Twenty-four Grow communities in 13 European countries created a network of over 6,500 ground-based soil sensors and collected a lot of soil-related data. And many insights have helped people learn about and test regenerative food growing techniques.

On their website, you can explore sensor locations, or make use of dynamic soil moisture maps. With the Grow Observatory app, you can get crop and planting advice tailored to your location, and get detailed, science-based information about regenerative growing practices. Their water planner also allows small-scale growers to learn more about how much water their plants will need in their location over the coming months if they live in one of the areas which currently have available data…

Cooperative Citizen Science: iNaturalist, Bioblitzes, Bird Counts, and More

Wherever you live, there are many different ways to get involved and help build data. From submitting observations on wildlife in your garden through apps like iNaturalist to taking part in local Bioblitzes, bird counts, and more – there are plenty of ways we can collect data that will help us – and others – down the road.

Collecting data through our observations, and, crucially, sharing that data with others can help us create the future we all want to see. We, as individuals, can often feel powerless. But citizen science projects help us to see the collective power we can wield when we work together. Modern technology means we can be hyper-connected, and affect wider systems, even when we are alone in our own gardens….(More)”

Establishment of Sustainable Data Ecosystems

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Report and Recommendations for the evolution of spatial data infrastructures by S. Martin, Gautier, P., Turki, and S., Kotsev: “The purpose of this study is to identify and analyse a set of successful data ecosystems and to address recommendations that can act as catalysts of data-driven innovation in line with the recently published European data strategy. The work presented here tries to identify to the largest extent possible actionable items.

Specifically, the study contributes with insights into the approaches that would help in the evolution of existing spatial data infrastructures (SDI), which are usually governed by the public sector and driven by data providers, to self-sustainable data ecosystems where different actors (including providers, users, intermediaries.) contribute and gain social and economic value in accordance with their specific objectives and incentives.

The overall approach described in this document is based on the identification and documentation of a set of case studies of existing data ecosystems and use cases for developing applications based on data coming from two or more data ecosystems, based on existing operational or experimental applications. Following a literature review on data ecosystem thinking and modelling, a framework consisting of three parts (Annex I) was designed. An ecosystem summary is drawn, giving an overall representation of the ecosystem key aspects. Two additional parts are detailed. One dedicated to ecosystem value dynamic illustrating how the ecosystem is structured through the resources exchanged between stakeholders, and the associated value.

Consequently, the ecosystem data flows represent the ecosystem from a complementary and more technical perspective, representing the flows and the data cycles associated to a given scenario. These two parts provide good proxies to evaluate the health and the maturity of a data ecosystem…(More)”.