Crowdsourcing Site Works to Detect Spread of Zika

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Suzanne Tracy at Scientific Computing Source: “Last month, the Flu Near You crowdsourcing tool expanded its data collection to include Zika, chikungunya and dengue symptoms, such as eye pain, yellow skin/eyes and joint/bone pain. Flu Near You is a free and anonymous Web site and mobile application that allows the public to report their health information by completing brief weekly surveys.

Created by epidemiologists at Harvard, Boston Children’s Hospital and The Skoll Global Threats Fund, the novel participatory disease surveillance tool is intended to complement existing surveillance systems by directly engaging the public in public health reporting. As such, it relies on voluntary participation from the general public, asking participants to take a few seconds each week to report whether they or their family members have been healthy or sick.

Using participant-reported symptoms, the site graphs and maps this information to provide local and national views of illness. Thousands of reports are analyzed and mapped to provide public health officials and researchers with real-time, anonymous information that could help prevent the next pandemic.

The survey, which launched in 2011, is conducted year-round for several reasons.

  • First, it is possible for an influenza outbreak to occur outside of the traditional flu season. For instance, the first wave of pandemic H1N1 hit in the spring of 2009. The project wants to capture any emerging outbreak, should something similar occur again.
  • Second, the project’s symptoms-based health forms allow it to monitor other diseases, such as the recently-added Zika, chikungunya and dengue, which may have different seasons than influenza….(More)

See also: http://flunearyou.org and video: Fight the flu. Save lives

How the FDA aims to speed review of medical devices

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kathleen Hickey at GCN: “The Food and Drug Administration is piloting a new system to speed up the premarket review process for new medical devices.

One of the main bottlenecks in the medical device review process is finding the right expert reviewer. Currently the FDA relies on “the usual suspects” – a core group of reviewers from the FDA Office of Device Evaluation (ODE), according to a GovLab report on the pilot program. However, this pool of experts is limited and may not include those with knowledge of the specific technologies in new medical devices. Finding qualified reviewers outside this core group can take as long as nine months.

To combat the issue, the Department of Health and Human Services is creating a network database of experts — HHS Profiles — based on a customized version of theHarvard Profiles Research Networking Software, a National Institutes of Health-funded open source tool for finding researchers with specific areas of expertise.

Potential expert reviewers create profiles in the system describing their skills and experience. The software then imports and analyzes reviewer contact information, publications and other data sources to create and maintain a searchable library of electronic resumes of HHS experts. Representatives of the Office for Device Evaluation can then search the profiles to identify the most qualified individuals to participate in the regulatory review of a given medical device.

The pilot will compare the efficacy of picking expert reviewers from profiles versus the current methods, including determining whether matching individuals based on their published articles and academic degrees is the best method for finding the right reviewer; the time required for the panel to meet and review a device; and safety outcomes – e.g. product recalls and adverse event reports.

The FDA anticipates the new platform will increase the speed and effectiveness of the medical device regulatory review process and expand the pool of reviewers. Currently the premarket approval review process, done exclusively by internal staff, takes an average of 266 days. Reviewing unique devices takes an average of 18 months.

The pilot program is being conducted this year in partnership with GovLab and its MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance.  Funding is provided by the General Services Administration from its The Great Pitch investment contest….(More)”

Accelerating Discovery with New Tools and Methods for Next Generation Social Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

DARPA: “The explosive growth of global digital connectivity has opened new possibilities for designing and conducting social science research. Once limited by practical constraints to experiments involving just a few dozen participants—often university students or other easily available groups—or to correlational studies of large datasets without any opportunity for determining causation, scientists can now engage thousands of diverse volunteers online and explore an expanded range of important topics and questions. If new tools and methods for harnessing virtual or alternate reality and massively distributed platforms could be developed and objectively validated, many of today’s most important and vexing challenges in social science—such as identifying the primary drivers of social cooperation, instability and resilience—might be made more tractable, with benefits for domains as broad as national security, public health, and economics.

To begin to assess the research opportunities provided by today’s web-connected world and advanced technologies, DARPA today launched its Next Generation Social Science (NGS2) program. The program aims to build and evaluate new methods and tools to advance rigorous, reproducible social science studies at scales necessary to develop and validate causal models of human social behaviors. The program will draw upon and build across a wide array of disciplines—including social sciences like sociology, economics, political science, anthropology, and psychology, as well as information and computer sciences, physics, biology and math.

As an initial focus, NGS2 will challenge researchers to develop and use these new tools and methods to identify causal mechanisms of “collective identity” formation—how a group of individuals becomes a unified whole, and how under certain circumstances that community breaks down into a chaotic mix of disconnected individuals.

“Social science has done a remarkable job of helping us understand ourselves as the highly social creatures we are, but the field has long acknowledged and rued some frustrating research limitations, including technical and logistical limits to experimentally studying large, representative populations and the challenges of replicating key studies to better understand the limits of our knowledge,” said Adam Russell, DARPA program manager. “As a result, it’s been difficult for social scientists to determine what variables matter most in explaining their observations of human social systems and to move from documenting correlation to identifying causation.”

On top of those methodological and analytic limitations, Russell said, the field is inherently challenged because of its subject matter: human beings, with all their complex variability and seeming unpredictability. “Physicists have joked about how much more difficult their field would be if atoms or electrons had personalities, but that’s exactly the situation faced by social scientists,” he said.

By developing and applying new methods and models to larger, more diverse, and more representative groups of individuals—such as through web-based global gaming and alternate reality platforms—NGS2 seeks to validate new tools that may empower social science in the same way that sophisticated telescopes and microscopes have helped advance astronomy and biology….(More)”

The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ben Shneiderman: “The problems we face in the 21st century require innovative thinking from all of us. Be it students, academics, business researchers of government policy makers. Hopes for improving our healthcare, food supply, community safety and environmental sustainability depend on the pervasive application of research solutions.

The research heroes who take on the immense problems of our time face bigger than ever challenges, but if they adopt potent guiding principles and effective research lifecycle strategies, they can produce the advances that will enhance the lives of many people. These inspirational research leaders will break free from traditional thinking, disciplinary boundaries, and narrow aspirations. They will be bold innovators and engaged collaborators, who are ready to lead, yet open to new ideas, self-confident, yet empathetic to others.

In this book, Ben Shneiderman recognizes the unbounded nature of human creativity, the multiplicative power of teamwork, and the catalytic effects of innovation. He reports on the growing number of initiatives to promote more integrated approaches to research so as to promote the expansion of these efforts. It is meant as a guide to students and junior researchers, as well as a manifesto for senior researchers and policy makers, challenging widely-held beliefs about how applied innovations evolve and how basic breakthroughs are made, and to help plotting the course towards tomorrow’s great advancements….(More)”

How Google Optimized Healthy Office Snacks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zoe Chance, Ravi Dhar, Michelle Hatzis and Michiel Bakker at Harvard Business Review: “Employers need simple, low-cost ways of helping employees make healthy choices. The effects of poor health and obesity cost U.S. companies $225 billion every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and this number is quickly rising. Although some employer-sponsored wellness programs have yielded high returns — Johnson & Johnson reported a 170% return on wellness spending in the 2000s — the employee wellness industry as a whole has struggled to prove its value.

 

Wellness initiatives often fail because they rely on outdated methods of engagement, placing too much emphasis on providing information. Extensive evidence from behavioral economics has shown that information rarely succeeds in changing behavior or building new habits for fitness and food choices. Telling people why and how to improve their health fails to elicit behavior changes because behavior often diverges from intentions. This is particularly true for food choices because our self-control is taxed by any type of depletion, including hunger. And the necessity of making food decisions many times a day means we can’t devote much processing power to each choice, so our eating behaviors tend to be habit- and instinct-driven. With a clearer understanding of the influences on choice — context and impulsivity, for instance — companies can design environments that reinforce employees’ healthy choices, limit potential lapses, and save on health care costs.

Jointly, the Google Food Team and the Yale Center for Customer Insights have been studying how behavioral economics can improve employee health choices. We’ve run multiple field experiments to understand how small “tweaks” can nudge behavior toward desirable outcomes and yield outsized benefits. To guide these interventions, we distilled scattered findings from behavioral science into a simple framework, the four Ps of behavior change:

  • Process
  • Persuasion
  • Possibilities
  • Person

The framework helped us structure a portfolio of strategies for making healthy choices easier and more enticing and making unhealthy choices harder and less tempting. Below, we present a brief example of each point of intervention….(More)”

Community Engagement Matters (Now More Than Ever)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Melody Barnes & Paul Schmitz at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “…Data-driven and evidence-based practices present new opportunities for public and social sector leaders to increase impact while reducing inefficiency. But in adopting such approaches, leaders must avoid the temptation to act in a top-down manner. Instead, they should design and implement programs in ways that engage community members directly in the work of social change. …

Under the sponsorship of an organization called Results for America, we recently undertook a research project that focused on how leaders can and should pursue data-driven social change efforts. For the project, we interviewed roughly 30 city administrators, philanthropists, nonprofit leaders, researchers, and community builders from across the United States. We began this research with a simple premise: Social change leaders now have an unprecedented ability to draw on data-driven insight about which programs actually lead to better results.

Leaders today know that babies born to mothers enrolled in certain home visiting programs have healthier birth outcomes. (The Nurse-Family Partnership, which matches first-time mothers with registered nurses, is a prime example of this type of intervention.3) They know that students in certain reading programs reach higher literacy levels. (Reading Partners, for instance, has shown impressive results with a program that provides one-on-one reading instruction to struggling elementary school students.4) They know that criminal offenders who enter job-training and support programs when they leave prison are less likely to re-offend and more likely to succeed in gaining employment. (The Center for Employment Opportunities has achieved such outcomes by offering life-skills education, short-term paid transitional employment, full-time job placement, and post-placement services.5)

Results for America, which launched in 2012, seeks to enable governments at all levels to apply data-driven approaches to issues related to education, health, and economic opportunity. In 2014, the organization published a book called Moneyball for Government. (The title is a nod to Moneyball, a book by Michael Lewis that details how the Oakland A’s baseball club used data analytics to build championship teams despite having a limited budget for player salaries.) The book features contributions by a wide range of policymakers and thought leaders (including Melody Barnes, a co-author of this article). The editors of Moneyball for Government, Jim Nussle and Peter Orszag, outline three principles that public officials should follow as they pursue social change:

  • “Build evidence about the practices, policies, and programs that will achieve the most effective and efficient results so that policymakers can make better decisions.
  • “Invest limited taxpayer dollars in practices, policies, and programs that use data, evidence, and evaluation to demonstrate they work.
  • “Direct funds away from practices, policies, and programs that consistently fail to achieve measurable outcomes.”6

These concepts sound simple. Indeed, they have the ring of common sense. Yet they do not correspond to the current norms of practice in the public and nonprofit sectors. According to one estimate, less than 1 percent of federal nondefense discretionary spending goes toward programs that are backed by evidence. In a 2014 report, Lisbeth Schorr and Frank Farrow note that the influence of evidence on decision-making—“especially when compared to the influence of ideology, politics, history, and even anecdotes”—has been weak among policymakers and social service providers. (Schorr is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Policy, and Farrow is director of the center.)

That needs to change. There is both an economic and a moral imperative for adopting data-driven approaches. Given persistently limited budgets, public and nonprofit leaders must direct funds to programs and initiatives that use data to show that they are achieving impact. Even if unlimited funds were available, moreover, leaders would have a responsibility to design programs that will deliver the best results for beneficiaries….

The Need for “Patient Urgency”

The inclination to move fast in creating and implementing data-driven programs and practices is understandable. After all, the problems that communities face today are serious and immediate. People’s lives are at stake. If there is evidence that a particular intervention can (for example) help more children get a healthy start in life—or help them read at grade level, or help them develop marketable skills—then setting that intervention in motion is pressingly urgent.

But acting too quickly in this arena entails a significant risk. All too easily, the urge to initiate programs expeditiously translates into a preference for top-down forms of management. Leaders, not unreasonably, are apt to assume that bottom-up methods will only slow the implementation of programs that have a record of delivering positive results.

A former director of data and analytics for a US city offers a cautionary tale that illustrates this idea. “We thought if we got better results for people, they would demand more of it,” she explains. “Our mayor communicated in a paternal way: ‘I know better than you what you need. I will make things better for you. Trust me.’ The problem is that they didn’t trust us. Relationships matter. Not enough was done to ask people what they wanted, to honor what they see and experience. Many of our initiatives died—not because they didn’t work but because they didn’t have community support.”

To win such support, policymakers and other leaders must treat community members as active partners. “Doing to us, not with us, is a recipe for failure,” says Fuller, who has deep experience in building community-led coalitions. “If we engage communities, then we have a solution and we have the leadership necessary to demand that solution and hold people accountable for it.” Engaging a community is not an activity that leaders can check off on a list. It’s a continuous process that aims to generate the support necessary for long-term change. The goal is to encourage intended beneficiaries not just to participate in a social change initiative but also to champion it.

“This work takes patient urgency,” Fuller argues. “If you aren’t patient, you only get illusory change. Lasting change is not possible without community. You may be gone in 5 or 10 years, but the community will still be there. You need a sense of urgency to push the process forward and maintain momentum.” The tension between urgency and patience is a productive tension. Navigating that tension allows leaders and community members to achieve the right level of engagement.

Rich Harwood, president of the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, makes this point in a post on his website: “Understanding and strengthening a community’s civic culture is as important to collective efforts as using data, metrics and measuring outcomes. … A weak civic culture undermines the best intentions and the most rigorous of analyses and plans. For change to happen, trust and community ownership must form, people need to engage with one another, and we need to create the right underlying conditions and capabilities for change to take root and spread.”…(More)

Visualizing Potential Outbreaks of the Zika Virus

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Google’s Official Blog: “The recent Zika virus outbreak has caused concern around the world. We’ve seen more than a 3,000 percent increase in global search interest since November, and last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a Public Health Emergency. The possible correlation with Zika, microcephaly and other birth defects is particularly alarming.

But unlike many other global pandemics, the spread of Zika has been harder to identify, map and contain. It’s believed that 4 in 5 people with the virus don’t show any symptoms, and the primary transmitter for the disease, the Aedes mosquito species, is both widespread and challenging to eliminate. That means that fighting Zika requires raising awareness on how people can protect themselves, as well as supporting organizations who can help drive the development of rapid diagnostics and vaccines. We also have to find better ways to visualize the threat so that public health officials and NGO’s can support communities at risk….

A volunteer team of Google engineers, designers, and data scientists is helping UNICEF build a platform to process data from different sources (i.e., weather and travel patterns) in order to visualize potential outbreaks. Ultimately, the goal of this open source platform is to identify the risk of Zika transmission for different regions and help UNICEF, governments and NGO’s decide how and where to focus their time and resources. This set of tools is being prototyped for the Zika response, but will also be applicable to future emergencies….

We already include robust information for 900+ health conditions directly on Search for people in the U.S. We’ve now also added extensive information about Zika globally in 16 languages, with an overview of the virus, symptom information, and Public Health Alerts from that can be updated with new information as it becomes available.

We’re also working with popular YouTube creators across Latin America, including Sesame Street and Brazilian physician Drauzio Varella, to raise awareness about Zika prevention via their channels.

We hope these efforts are helpful in fighting this new public health emergency, and we will continue to do our part to help combat this outbreak.

And if you’re curious about what that 3,000 percent search increase looks like, take a look:….(More)

Design for policy and public services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Centre for Public Impact: “Traditional approaches to policymaking have left policymakers and citizens looking for alternative solutions. Despite the best of intentions, the standard model of dispassionate expert analysis and subsequent implementation by a professional bureaucracy has, generally, led to siloed solutions and outcomes for citizens that fall short of what might be possible.

The discipline of design may well provide an answer to this problem by offering a collection of methods which allow civil servants to generate insights based on citizens’ needs, aspirations and behaviours. In doing so, it changes the view of citizens from seeing them as anonymous entities to complex humans with complex needs to match. The potential of this new approach is already becoming clear – just ask the medical teams and patients at Norway’s Oslo University Hospital. Women with a heightened risk of developing breast cancer had previously been forced to wait up to three months before receiving an appointment for examination and diagnosis. A redesign reduced this wait to just three days.

In-depth user research identified the principal issues and pinpointed the lack of information about the referral process as a critical problem. The designers also interviewed 40 hospital employees of all levels to find out about their daily schedules and processes. Governments have always drawn inspiration from fields such as sociology and economics. Design methods are not (yet) part of the policymaking canon, but such examples help explain why this may be about to change….(More)”Screen Shot 2016-03-07 at 8.52.52 AM

HeroX enables breakthroughs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About HeroX, “The World’s Problem Solver Community”: “On October 21, 2004, Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne reached the edge of space, an altitude of 100km, becoming the first privately built spacecraft to perform this feat, twice within two weeks.

In so doing, they won the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE, ushering in a new era of commercial space exploration and applications.

It was the inaugural incentive prize competition of the XPRIZE Foundation, which has gone on to create an incredible array of incentive prizes to solve the world’s Grand Challenges — ocean health, literacy, space exploration, among many others.

In 2011, City Light Capital partnered with XPRIZE to envision a platform that would make the power of incentive challenges available to anyone. The result was the spin-off of HeroX in 2013.

HeroX was co-founded in 2013 by XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis, challenge designer Emily Fowler and entrepreneur Christian Cotichini as a means to democratize the innovation model of XPRIZE.

HeroX exists to enable anyone, anywhere in the world, to create a challenge that addresses any problem or opportunity, build a community around that challenge and activate the circumstances that can lead to a breakthrough innovation.

This innovation model has existed for centuries.

The Ansari XPRIZE was inspired by the 1927 Orteig Prize, in which Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis. The $25,000 prize had been offered by hotelier Raymond Orteig to spur tourism. Lindbergh’s flight lead to a boom in air travel the world over.

A similar challenge had launched 200 years earlier with the 1716 Longitude Prize, which sought a technology to more accurately measure longitude at sea. Nearly 60 years later, a British clockmaker named John Harrison invented the chronometer, which spurred Trans-Atlantic migration on a massive scale.

In 1795, Napoleon offered a 12,000 franc prize for a better method of preserving food, which was often spoiled by the time it reached the front lines of his armies. The breakthrough innovation to Napoleon’s prize led to the creation of the canning industry.

HeroX incentive prize challenges are designed to do the same — to harness the collective mind power of a community to innovate upon any problem or opportunity. Anyone can change the world. HeroX can help.

The only question is, “What do you want to solve?”… (More)

Do Universities, Research Institutions Hold the Key to Open Data’s Next Chapter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Miller at Government Technology: “Government produces a lot of data — reams of it, roomfuls of it, rivers of it. It comes in from citizen-submitted forms, fleet vehicles, roadway sensors and traffic lights. It comes from utilities, body cameras and smartphones. It fills up servers and spills into the cloud. It’s everywhere.

And often, all that data sits there not doing much. A governing entity might have robust data collection and it might have an open data policy, but that doesn’t mean it has the computing power, expertise or human capital to turn those efforts into value.

The amount of data available to government and the computing public promises to continue to multiply — the growing smart cities trend, for example, installs networks of sensors on everything from utility poles to garbage bins.

As all this happens, a movement — a new spin on an old concept — has begun to take root: partnerships between government and research institutes. Usually housed within universities and laboratories, these partnerships aim to match strength with strength. Where government has raw data, professors and researchers have expertise and analytics programs.

Several leaders in such partnerships, spanning some of the most tech-savvy cities in the country, see increasing momentum toward the concept. For instance, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in September helped launch the MetroLab Network, an organization of more than 20 cities that have partnered with local universities and research institutes for smart-city-oriented projects….

Two recurring themes in projects that universities and research organizations take on in cooperation with government are project evaluation and impact analysis. That’s at least partially driven by the very nature of the open data movement: One reason to open data is to get a better idea of how well the government is operating….

Open data may have been part of the impetus for city-university partnerships, in that the availability of more data lured researchers wanting to work with it and extract value. But those partnerships have, in turn, led to government officials opening more data than ever before for useful applications.

Sort of.

“I think what you’re seeing is not just open data, but kind of shades of open — the desire to make the data open to university researchers, but not necessarily the broader public,” said Beth Noveck, co-founder of New York University’s GovLab.

shipping+crates

GOVLAB: DOCKER FOR DATA 

Much of what GovLab does is about opening up access to data, and that is the whole point of Docker for Data. The project aims to simplify and quicken the process of extracting and loading large data sets so they will respond to Structured Query Language commands by moving the computing power of that process to the cloud. The docker can be installed with a single line of code, and its website plays host to already-extracted data sets. Since its inception, the website has grown to include more than 100 gigabytes of data from more than 8,000 data sets. From Baltimore, for example, one can easily find information on public health, water sampling, arrests, senior centers and more. Photo via Shutterstock.

That’s partially because researchers are a controlled group who can be forced to sign memorandums of understanding and trained to protect privacy and prevent security breaches when government hands over sensitive data. That’s a top concern of agencies that manage data, and it shows in the GovLab’s work.

It was something Noveck found to be very clear when she started working on a project she simply calls “Arnold” because of project support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The project involves building a better understanding of how different criminal justice jurisdictions collect, store and share data. The motivation is to help bridge the gaps between people who manage the data and people who should have easy access to it. When Noveck’s center conducted a survey among criminal justice record-keepers, the researchers found big differences between participants.

“There’s an incredible disparity of practices that range from some jurisdictions that have a very well established, formalized [memorandum of understanding] process for getting access to data, to just — you send an email to a guy and you hope that he responds, and there’s no organized way to gain access to data, not just between [researchers] and government entities, but between government entities,” she said….(More)