Αugmented Nature

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “The rate of extinction is about a thousand times what it used to be before humans. One species goes extinct every 5 minutes. Over the past 30 years 75% of all insects went extinct. 95% of all large predatory fish that roamed the seas are now gone. It probably comes as no surprise we are living in the 6th mass extinction. The big difference with the previous five is that this one is induced by humans.

Αugmented Nature is a set of robotic tools that help animals adapt to the mass extinction. The tools enhance the capacities of so called Ecosystem Engineer species to reclaim and change their own habitats.

The resilience of an ecosystem is strongly related to its biodiversity. Ecosystem engineers are species that engineer their environment and are highly interconnected within the ecosystem. Think for example of a beaver building a dam and creating wetlands that form the habitat for hundreds of other species. By actively enhancing these types of capabilities in endangered species we aim to provide an answer to the sharp decline in biodiversity.

We propose an active and animal-centered alternative to the current conservation efforts. Our premise is that humans are part of nature. Hence, efforts that try to separate species or revert nature to a certain state in the past (re-wilding, preservation) are not realistic. Nature is a dynamic system and evolution is equally driven by species adapting to change but also by transforming the environment for their purposes.

We worked in close collaboration with scientists to develop the next generation of high-tech biologging tags. These experimental interventions are the first step towards a future where instead of mitigating our impact on nature, we aim for a positive impact.  We demonstrate this approach with two example animals: humpback whales and collared peccaries.,,,(More)”.

Prizes are a powerful spur to innovation and breakthroughs

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John Thornhill in the Financial Times: “…All too often today we leave research and innovation in the hands of the so-called professionals, often with disappointing results. Winning a prize often matters less than the stimulus it provides for innovators in neighbouring fields In recent years, there has been an explosion in the number of professional scientists. Unesco estimates that there were 7.8m full-time researchers in 2013.

The number of scientific journals has also increased, making it difficult even for specialists to remain on top of all the latest advances in their field. In spite of this explosion of knowledge and research spending, there has been a striking lack of breakthrough innovations, as economists such as Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen have noted.

Maybe this is because all the low-hanging technological fruit has been eaten. Or perhaps it is because our research and development methodology has gone awry.

Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of Nesta, is one of those who is trying to revive the concept of prizes as a means of encouraging innovation. His public foundation runs the Challenge Prize Centre, offering awards of up to £10m for innovation in the fields of energy and the environment, healthcare, and community wellbeing. “Setting a specific target, opening up to anyone to meet it, and providing a financial reward if they succeed is the opposite of how most R&D is done,” Mr Mulgan says. “We should all focus more on outcomes than inputs.”…
But these prizes are far from being a panacea. Indeed, they can sometimes lead to perverse results, encouraging innovators to fixate on just one, original goal while ignoring serendipitous surprises along the way. Many innovations are the happy byproduct of research rather than its primary outcome. An academic paper on the effectiveness of innovation prizes concluded that they could be a useful addition to the armoury but were no substitute for other proven forms of research and development. The authors also warned that if prizes were poorly designed, managed, and awarded they could prove “ineffective or even harmful”.

That makes it essential to design competitions in careful and precise detail. It also helps if there are periodic payouts along the way to encourage the most promising ideas. Many companies have embraced the concept of open innovation and increasingly look to collaborate with outside partners to develop fresh ideas, sometimes by means of corporate prizes….(More)”.

Neuroscience for Cities Playbook

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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 playbook helps cities in three stages. The first is identifying the core environmental stressors, which have the widest mental and physical effects on city citizen, even a small reduction will make a fundamental difference in quality of life. The second is understanding the unintended human consequences of urban trends such as urban sprawl or automation. The final is highlighting the different opportunities for enhancing the user experience of cities through neuroscience-informed technology and urban planning.

The idea of using neuroscience to help design cities only arose in last ten years, and the technology to make it possible in the last three years. We are now on the cusp of a revolution in how metrics from neuroscience inform urban innovation strategies and increase the quality of life of the cities inhabitants. Developments in neuroscience are showing us new ways to understand how people experience the built environment, revealing new opportunities for innovation and improved experiences, leading in turn to greater productivity, wellbeing and attraction. Neuroscientists are also discovering important insights about outcomes for the less advantaged in our cities, providing compelling evidence in support of interventions to tackle the negative health impacts of city living, and ways to reduce barriers to access and opportunity.

Success will be a reduction in mental and physical health outbreaks; less cases of depression, dementia, anxiety disorders, etc. It can be seen in economic terms; a healthy population is a productive population….(More)”.

The Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism

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Book edited by Mahyar Arefi and Conrad Kickert: “Who shapes our cities? In an age of increasing urban pluralism, globalization and immigration, decreasing public budgets, and an ongoing crisis of authority among designers and planners, the urban environment is shaped by a number of non-traditional stakeholders.

The book surveys the kaleidoscope of views on the agency of urbanism, providing an overview of the various scholarly debates and territories that pertain to bottom-up efforts such as everyday urbanism, DIY urbanism, guerilla urbanism, tactical urbanism, and lean urbanism. Uniquely, this books seeks connections between the various movements by curating a range of views on the past, present, and future of bottom-up urbanism. The contributors also connect the recent trend of bottom-up efforts in the West with urban informality in the Global South, drawing parallels and finding contrast between social and institutional structures across the globe. The book appeals to urbanists in the widest sense of the word: those who shape, study, and improve our urban spaces….(More)”.

The Global Council on Extended Intelligence

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“The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) and the MIT Media Lab are joining forces to launch a global Council on Extended Intelligence (CXI) composed of individuals who agree on the following:

One of the most powerful narratives of modern times is the story of scientific and technological progress. While our future will undoubtedly be shaped by the use of existing and emerging technologies – in particular, of autonomous and intelligent systems (A/IS) – there is no guarantee that progress defined by “the next” is beneficial. Growth for humanity’s future should not be defined by reductionist ideas of speed or size alone but as the holistic evolution of our species in positive alignment with the environmental and other systems comprising the modern algorithmic world.

We believe all systems must be responsibly created to best utilize science and technology for tangible social and ethical progress. Individuals, businesses and communities involved in the development and deployment of autonomous and intelligent technologies should mitigate predictable risks at the inception and design phase and not as an afterthought. This will help ensure these systems are created in such a way that their outcomes are beneficial to society, culture and the environment.

Autonomous and intelligent technologies also need to be created via participatory design, where systems thinking can help us avoid repeating past failures stemming from attempts to control and govern the complex-adaptive systems we are part of. Responsible living with or in the systems we are part of requires an awareness of the constrictive paradigms we operate in today. Our future practices will be shaped by our individual and collective imaginations and by the stories we tell about who we are and what we desire, for ourselves and the societies in which we live.

These stories must move beyond the “us versus them” media mentality pitting humans against machines. Autonomous and intelligent technologies have the potential to enhance our personal and social skills; they are much more fully integrated and less discrete than the term “artificial intelligence” implies. And while this process may enlarge our cognitive intelligence or make certain individuals or groups more powerful, it does not necessarily make our systems more stable or socially beneficial.

We cannot create sound governance for autonomous and intelligent systems in the Algorithmic Age while utilizing reductionist methodologies. By proliferating the ideals of responsible participant design, data symmetry and metrics of economic prosperity prioritizing people and the planet over profit and productivity, The Council on Extended Intelligence will work to transform reductionist thinking of the past to prepare for a flourishing future.

Three Priority Areas to Fulfill Our Vision

1 – Build a new narrative for intelligent and autonomous technologies inspired by principles of systems dynamics and design.

“Extended Intelligence” is based on the hypothesis that intelligence, ideas, analysis and action are not formed in any one individual collection of neurons or code…..

2 – Reclaim our digital identity in the algorithmic age

Business models based on tracking behavior and using outdated modes of consent are compounded by the appetites of states, industries and agencies for all data that may be gathered….

3 – Rethink our metrics for success

Although very widely used, concepts of exponential growth and productivity such as the gross domestic product (GDP) index are insufficient to holistically measure societal prosperity. … (More)”.

City-as-a-Service

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Circle Economy: Today during the WeMakeThe.City festival, Circle Economy launched the ‘City-as-a-Service’ publication, which offers a first glimpse into the ‘circular city of the future’. This publication is an initial and practical exploration of how service models will shape the way in which societal needs can be met in a future urban environment and how cities can take a leadership role in a transition towards a circular economy….

Housing, nutrition, mobility, and clothing are primary human needs and directly linked to material extraction. For each of these needs, Circle Economy has examined the potential impacts that service models can have.

By subscribing to a car-sharing service, for example, consumers are able to choose smaller, cheaper and more efficient cars when driving solo. In the Netherlands alone, this would save 2,200 kton of CO2 annually and will reduce annual spending on motoring by 10%. For textiles, a service model could potentially help us avoid “bad buys” that are never worn, which would result in a 15% cost saving for consumers and 23 kton of CO2 in the Netherlands. …

In an increasingly urban world, cities have to play a leading role to drive sustainable transitions and will lead the way on delivering the positive effects of a circular economy – and hence help to close the circularity gap. The circular economy offers a clear roadmap towards realizing the low-carbon, human-centered and prosperous circular city of the future. The ‘City-As-A-Service’ vision is a key next step into this promising future. Ultimately, service models could be a game changer for cities. In fact, city governments can influence this by providing the right boundary conditions and incentives in their policymaking…..(More)”.

My City Forecast: Urban planning communication tool for citizen with national open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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 to improve budget effectiveness and the vitality of the city. However, implementing a compact city is possible in various ways. Given that there can be some designated withdrawal areas for budget savings, compact city policies can include disadvantages for citizens. At this turning point for urban structures, citizen–government mutual understanding and cooperation is necessary for every step of urban management, including planning.

Concurrently, along with the recent rapid growth of big data utilization and computer technologies, a new conception of cooperation between citizens and government has emerged. With emerging technologies based on civic knowledge, citizens have started to obtain the power to engage directly in urban management by obtaining information, thinking about their city’s problems, and taking action to help shape the future of their city themselves (Knight Foundation, 2013). This development is also supported by the open government data movement, which promotes the availability of government information online (Kingston, Carver, Evans, & Turton, 2000). CityDashboard is one well-known example of real-time visualization and distribution of urban information. CityDashboard, a web tool launched in 2012 by University College London, aggregates spatial data for cities around the UK and displays the data on a dashboard and a map. These new technologies are expected to enable both citizens and government to see their urban situation in an interface presenting an overhead view based on statistical information.

However, usage of statistics and governmental data is as yet limited in the actual process of urban planning…

To help improve this situation and increase citizen participation in urban management, we have developed a web-based urban planning communication tool using open government data for enhanced citizen–government cooperation. The main aim of the present research is to evaluate the effect of our system on users’ awareness of and attitude toward the urban situation. We have designed and developed an urban simulation system, My City Forecast (http://mycityforecast.net,) that enables citizens to understand how their environment and region are likely to change by urban management in the future (up to 2040)….(More)”.

Personal Data v. Big Data: Challenges of Commodification of Personal Data

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Maria Bottis and  George Bouchagiar in the Open Journal of Philosophy: “Any firm today may, at little or no cost, build its own infrastructure to process personal data for commercial, economic, political, technological or any other purposes. Society has, therefore, turned into a privacy-unfriendly environment. The processing of personal data is essential for multiple economically and socially useful purposes, such as health care, education or terrorism prevention. But firms view personal data as a commodity, as a valuable asset, and heavily invest in processing for private gains. This article studies the potential to subject personal data to trade secret rules, so as to ensure the users’ control over their data without limiting the data’s free movement, and examines some positive scenarios of attributing commercial value to personal data….(More)”.

Rational Inattention: A Disciplined Behavioral Model

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Paper by Bartosz Mackowiak, Filip Matejka and Mirko Wiederholt: “This survey paper argues that rational inattention matters. It is likely to become an important part of Economics, because it bridges a gap between classical economics and behavioral economics. Actions look behavioral, since agents cannot process all available information; yet agents optimize in the sense that they try to deal optimally with their cognitive limitations – hence the term ”rational inattention.” We show how rational inattention describes the adaptation of agents’ behavioral biases due to policy and other changes of the economic environment. Then, we survey the existing literature, and discuss what the unifying mechanisms behind the results in these papers are. Finally, we lay out implications for policy, and propose what we believe are the most fruitful steps for future research in this area. Economics is about adjustments to scarcity.

Rational inattention studies adjustments to scarcity of attention. Understanding how people summarize, filter, and digest the abundant available information is key to understanding many phenomena in economics. Several crucial findings in economics, even some whole subfields, have been built around the assumptions of imperfect or asymmetric information. However, nowadays, many more forms of information than ever before are available due to new technologies, yet we are able to digest little of it. Which form of imperfect information we possess and act upon is thus largely not determined by which information is given to us, but by which information we choose to attend to….(More)”.

Doing Research In and On the Digital: Research Methods across Fields of Inquiry

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Book edited by Cristina Costa and Jenna Condie: “As a social space, the web provides researchers both with a tool and an environment to explore the intricacies of everyday life. As a site of mediated interactions and interrelationships, the ‘digital’ has evolved from being a space of information to a space of creation, thus providing new opportunities regarding how, where and, why to conduct social research.

Doing Research In and On the Digital aims to deliver on two fronts: first, by detailing how researchers are devising and applying innovative research methods for and within the digital sphere, and, secondly, by discussing the ethical challenges and issues implied and encountered in such approaches.

In two core Parts, this collection explores:

  • content collection: methods for harvesting digital data
  • engaging research informants: digital participatory methods and data stories .

With contributions from a diverse range of fields such as anthropology, sociology, education, healthcare and psychology, this volume will particularly appeal to post-graduate students and early career researchers who are navigating through new terrain in their digital-mediated research endeavours….(More)”.