Digital solutions to revolutionise community empowerment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Alan Marcus: “…The best responses to Covid-19 have harmonised top-down policies and grassroots organisation. In the UK, more than 700,000 volunteers for the National Health Service are being organised through GoodSAM—an app that, like many gig economy platforms, allows individuals to switch on availability for delivering supplies to vulnerable people.

Perhaps the best example is Taiwan, where officials have kept the rate of infection to a fraction of even highly-rated Singapore. Coordinating public and private groups, the country has deployed a range of online services, including a system for mapping and allocating rationed face masks developed by Digital Minister Audrey Tang and members of an online hacktivist chatroom. …

Effective responses to the crisis show the value of inclusive government and hint at more resilient models for managing our communities. So far, governments, businesses and individuals have pooled resources to deliver country-wide responses. However, this model should be pushed further. Digital tools should be provided to communities to organise themselves, develop locally tailored solutions and get involved in the governance of their town or neighbourhood.

This model requires open communication between local people and the organisations responsible for administrating neighbourhoods—be they governments or businesses. … 

The platform provides significant opportunities for optimising crisis response and elevating quality of life. For example, a popular solution for market vendors forced to close by Covid-19 has been offering delivery services. As well as the businesses, this benefits local people, who can bypass overcrowded superstores or overcapacity online grocery deliveries. While grassroots movements are largely left to organise themselves, this is a missed opportunity for collaboration with local administrators.

By communicating with vendors, the administrator can not only establish an online platform to coordinate their services, but also connect them with local people to help deliver the service, such as van owners who can loan their vehicles. Moreover, the administrator can collect feedback on local infrastructure needed to improve services, such as communal cold lockers for receiving groceries when no-one is home.

By integrating this model into the day-to-day governance of our communities, we can unite community action with top-down resources, empowering local people to co-own the evolution of their neighbourhoods and helping administrators prioritise projects that maximise quality of life.

As Solnit wrote: “A disaster is a lot like a revolution when it comes to disruption and improvisation.” Pushed to their limits, countries are pioneering ways of coordinating local and national action. From this wave of innovation, we can empower communities to become more resilient in crises, more inclusive in their governance and more engaged in the determination of their future….(More)”.

To recover faster from Covid-19, open up: Managerial implications from an open innovation perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Henry Chesbrough: “Covid-19 has severely tested our public health systems. Recovering from Covid-19 will soon test our economic systems. Innovation will have an important role to play in recovering from the aftermath of the coronavirus. This article discusses both how to manage innovation as part of that recovery, and also derives some lessons from how we have responded to the virus so far, and what those lessons imply for managing innovation during the recovery.

Covid-19’s assault has prompted a number of encouraging developments. One development has been the rapid mobilization of scientists, pharmaceutical companies and government officials to launch a variety of scientific initiatives to find an effective response to the virus. As of the time of this writing, there are tests underway of more than 50 different compounds as possible vaccines against the virus.1 Most of these will ultimately fail, but the severity of the crisis demands that we investigate every plausible candidate. We need rapid, parallel experimentation, and it must be the test data that select our vaccine, not internal political or bureaucratic processes.

A second development has been the release of copious amounts of information about the virus, its spread, and human responses to various public health measures. The Gates Foundation, working with the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy have joined forces to publish all of the known medical literature on the coronavirus, in machine-readable form. This was done with the intent to accelerate the analysis of the existing research to identify possible new avenues of attack against Covid-19. The coronavirus itself was synthesized early on in the outbreak by scientists in China, providing the genetic sequence of the virus, and showing where it differed from earlier viruses such as SARS and MERS. This data was immediately shared widely with scientists and researchers around the world. At the same time, GITHUB and the Humanitarian Data Exchange each have an accumulating series of datasets on the geography of the spread of the disease (including positive test cases, hospitalizations, and deaths).

What these developments have in common is openness. In fighting a pandemic, speed is crucial, and the sooner we know more and are able to take action, the better for all of us. Opening up mobilizes knowledge from many different places, causing our learning to advance and our progress against the disease to accelerate. Openness unleashes a volunteer army of researchers, working in their own facilities, across different time zones, and different countries. Openness leverages the human capital available in the world to tackle the disease, and also accesses the physical capital (such as plant and equipment) already in place to launch rapid testing of possible solutions. This openness corresponds well to an academic body of work called open innovation (Chesbrough, 2003; Chesbrough, 2019).

Innovation is often analyzed in terms of costs, and the question of whether to “make or buy” often rests on which approach costs less. But in a pandemic, time is so valuable and essential, that the question of costs is far less important than the ability to get to a solution sooner. The Covid-19 disease appears to be doubling every 3–5 days, so a delay of just a few weeks in the search for a new vaccine (they normally take 1–2 years to develop, or more) might witness multiple doublings of size of the population infected with the disease. It is for this reason that Bill Gates is providing funds to construct facilities in advance for producing the leading vaccine candidates. Though the facilities for the losing candidates will not be used, it will save precious time to make the winning vaccine in high volume, once it is found.

Open innovation can help speed things up….(More)”.

Who Do You Trust? The Consequences of Partisanship and Trust in Government for Public Responsiveness to COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Daniel Goldstein and Johannes Wiedemann: “To combat the novel coronavirus, there must be relatively uniform implementation of preventative measures, e.g., social distancing and stay-at-home orders, in order to minimize continued spread. We analyze cellphone mobility data to measure county-level compliance with these critical public health policies. Leveraging staggered roll-out, we estimate the causal effect of stay-at-home orders on mobility using a difference-in-differences strategy, which we find to have significantly curtailed movement.

However, examination of descriptive heterogeneous effects suggests the critical role that several sociopolitical attributes hold for producing asymmetrical compliance across society. We examine measures of partisanship, partisan identity being shared with government leaders, and trust in government (measured by the proxies of voter turnout and social capital). We find that Republican counties comply less, but comply relatively more when directives are given by co-partisan leaders, suggesting citizens are more trusting in the authority of co-partisans. Furthermore, our proxy measures suggest that trust in government increases overall compliance. However, when trust (as measured by social capital) is interacted with county-level partisanship, which we interpret as community-level trust, we find that trust amplifies compliance or noncompliance, depending upon the prevailing community sentiment.

We argue that these results align with a theory of public policy compliance in which individual behavior is informed by one’s level of trust in the experts who craft policy and one’s trust in those who implement it, i.e., politicians and bureaucrats. Moreover, this evaluation is amplified by local community sentiments. Our results are supportive of this theory and provide a measure of the real-world importance of trust in government to citizen welfare. Moreover, our results illustrate the role that political polarization plays in creating asymmetrical compliance with mitigation policies, an outcome that may prove severely detrimental to successful containment of the COVID-19 pandemic….(More)”.

German humanities scholars enlisted to end coronavirus lockdown

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Matthews at THE: “In contrast to other countries, philosophers, historians, theologians and jurists have played a major role advising the state as it seeks to loosen restrictions…

In the struggle against the new coronavirus, humanities academics have entered the fray – in Germany at least.

Arguably to a greater extent than has happened in the UK, France or the US, the country has enlisted the advice of philosophers, historians of science, theologians and jurists as it navigates the delicate ethical balancing act of reopening society while safeguarding the health of the public.

When the German federal government announced a slight loosening of restrictions on 15 April – allowing small shops to open and some children to return to school in May – it had been eagerly awaiting a report written by a 26-strong expert group containing only a minority of natural scientists and barely a handful of virologists and medical specialists.

Instead, this working group from the Leopoldina – Germany’s independent National Academy of Sciences dating back to 1652 – included historians of industrialisation and early Christianity, a specialist on the philosophy of law and several pedagogical experts.

This paucity of virologists earned the group a swipe from Markus Söder, minister-president of badly hit Bavaria, who has led calls in Germany for a tough lockdown (although earlier in the pandemic the Leopoldina did release a report written by more medically focused specialists).

But “the crisis is a complex one, it’s a systemic crisis” and so it needs to be dissected from every angle, argued Jürgen Renn, director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and one of those who wrote the crucial recommendations.

And Professor Renn – who earlier this year published a book on rethinking science in the Anthropocene – made the argument for green post-virus reconstruction. Urbanisation and deforestation have squashed mankind and wildlife together, making other animal-to-human disease transmissions ever more likely, he argued. “It’s not the only virus waiting out there,” he said.

Germany’s Ethics Council – which traces its roots back to the stem cell debates of the early 2000s and is composed of theologians, jurists, philosophers and other ethical thinkers – also contributed to a report at the end of March, warning that it was up to elected politicians, not scientists, to make the “painful decisions” weighing up the lockdown’s effect on health and its other side-effects….(More)“.

COVID-19 Rapid Evidence Review: Exit through the App Store?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“A rapid evidence review of the technical considerations and societal implications of using technology to transition from the COVID-19 crisis” by the Ada Lovelace Institute:  “The review focuses on three technologies in particular: digital contact tracing, symptom tracking apps and immunity certification. It makes pragmatic recommendations to support well-informed policymaking in response to the crisis. It is informed by the input of more than twenty experts drawn from across a wide range of domains, including technology, policy, human rights and data protection, public health and clinical medicine, behavioural science and information systems, philosophy, sociology and anthropology.

The purpose of this review is to open up, rather than close down, an informed and public dialogue on the technical considerations and societal implications of the use of technology to transition from the crisis.

Key findings

There is an absence of evidence to support the immediate national deployment of symptom tracking applications, digital contact tracing applications and digital immunity certificates. While the Government is right to explore non-clinical measures for transition, for national policy to rely on these apps, they would need to be able to:

  1. Represent accurate information about infection or immunity
  2. Demonstrate technical capabilities to support required functions
  3. Address various practical issues for use, including meeting legal tests
  4. Mitigate social risks and protect against exacerbating inequalities and vulnerabilities

At present the evidence does not demonstrate that tools are able to address these four components adequately. We offer detailed evidence, and recommendations for each application in the report summary.

In particular, we recommend that:

  • Effective deployment of technology to support the transition from the crisis will be contingent on public trust and confidence, which can be strengthened through the establishment of two accountability mechanisms:
    • the Group of Advisors on Technology in Emergencies (GATE) to review evidence, advise on design and oversee implementation, similar to the expert group recently established by Canada’s Chief Science Adviser; and
    • an independent oversight mechanism to conduct real-time scrutiny of policy formulation.
  • Clear and comprehensive primary legislation should be advanced to regulate data processing in symptom tracking and digital contact tracing applications. Legislation should impose strict purpose, access and time limitations…(More)”.

EDPB Adopts Guidelines on the Processing of Health Data During COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hunton Privacy Blog: “On April 21, 2020, the European Data Protection Board (“EDPB”) adopted Guidelines on the processing of health data for scientific purposes in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the Guidelines is to provide clarity on the most urgent matters relating to health data, such as legal basis for processing, the implementation of adequate safeguards and the exercise of data subject rights.

The Guidelines note that the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) provides a specific derogation to the prohibition on processing of sensitive data under Article 9, for scientific purposes. With respect to the legal basis for processing, the Guidelines state that consent may be relied on under both Article 6 and the derogation to the prohibition on processing under Article 9 in the context of COVID-19, as long as the requirements for explicit consent are met, and as long as there is no power imbalance that could pressure or disadvantage a reluctant data subject. Researchers should keep in mind that study participants must be able to withdraw their consent at any time. National legislation may also provide an appropriate legal basis for the processing of health data and a derogation to the Article 9 prohibition. Furthermore, national laws may restrict data subject rights, though these restrictions should apply only as is strictly necessary.

In the context of transfers to countries outside the European Economic Area that have not been deemed adequate by the European Commission, the Guidelines note that the “public interest” derogation to the general prohibition on such transfers may be relied on, as well as explicit consent. The Guidelines add, however, that these derogations should only be relied on as a temporary measure and not for repetitive transfers.

The Guidelines highlight the importance of complying with the GDPR’s data protection principles, particularly with respect to transparency. Ideally, notice of processing as part of a research project should be provided to the relevant data subject before the project commences, if data has not been collected directly from the individual, in order to allow the individual to exercise their rights under the GDPR. There may be instances where, considering the number of data subjects, the age of the data and the safeguards in place, it would be impossible or require disproportionate effort to provide notice, in which case researchers may be able to rely on the exemptions set out under Article 14 of the GDPR.

The Guidelines also highlight that processing for scientific purposes is generally not considered incompatible with the purposes for which data is originally collected, assuming that the principles of data minimization, integrity, confidentiality and data protection by design and by default are complied with (See Guidelines)”.

Mind the app – considerations on the ethical risks of COVID-19 apps

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Luciano Floridi: “There is a lot of talk about apps to deal with the pandemic. Some of the best solutions use the Bluetooth connection of mobile phones to determine the contact between people and therefore the probability of contagion.

In theory, it’s simple. In practice, it is a minefield of ethical problems, not only technical ones. To understand them, it is useful to distinguish between the validation and the verification of a system. 
The validation of a system answers the question: “are we building the right system?”. The answer is no if the app

  • is illegal;
  • is unnecessary, for example, there are better solutions; 
  • is a disproportionate solution to the problem, for example, there are only a few cases in the country; 
  • goes beyond the purpose for which it was designed, for example, it is used to discriminate people; 
  • continues to be used even after the end of the emergency.

Assuming the app passes the validation stage, then it needs to be verified.
The verification of a system answers the question: “are we building the system in the right way?”. Here too the difficulties are considerable. I have become increasingly aware of them as I collaborate with two national projects about a coronavirus app, as an advisor on their ethical implications. 
For once, the difficult problem is not privacy. Of course, it is trivially true that there are and there might always be privacy issues. The point is that, in this case, they can be made much less pressing than other issues. However, once (or if you prefer, even if) privacy is taken care of, other difficulties appear to remain intractable. A Bluetooth-based app can use anonymous data, recorded only in the mobile phone, used exclusively to send alerts in case of the contact with people infected. It is not easy but it is feasible, as demonstrated by the approach adopted by the Pan-European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing initiative (PEPP-PT). The apparently intractable problems are the effectiveness and fairness of the app.

To be effective, an app must be adopted by many people. In Britain, I was told that it would be useless if used by less than 20% of the population. According to the PEPP-PT, real effectiveness seems to be reached around the threshold of 60% of the whole population. This means that in Italy, for example, the app should be consistently and correctly used by something between 11m to 33m people, out of a population of 55m. Consider that in 2019 Facebook Messenger was used by 23m Italians. Even the often-mentioned app TraceTogether has been downloaded by an insufficient number of people in Singapore.


Given that it is unlikely that the app will be adopted so extensively just voluntarily, out of social responsibility, and that governments are reluctant to impose it as mandatory (and rightly so, for it would be unfair, see below), it is clear that it will be necessary to encourage its use, but this only shifts the problem….

Therefore, one should avoid the risk of transforming the production of the app into a signalling process. To do so, the verification should not be severed from, but must feedback on, the validation. This means that if the verification fails so should the validation, and the whole project ought to be reconsidered. It follows that a clear deadline by when (and by whom) the whole project may be assessed (validation + verification) and in case be terminated, or improved, or even simply renewed as it is, is essential. At least this level of transparency and accountability should be in place.

An app will not save us. And the wrong app will be worse than useless, as it will cause ethical problems and potentially exacerbate health-related risks, e.g. by generating a false sense of security, or deepening the digital divide. A good app must be part of a wider strategy, and it needs to be designed to support a fair future. If this is not possible, better do something else, avoid its positive, negative and opportunity costs, and not play the political game of merely signalling that something (indeed anything) has been tried…(More)”.

Mapping how data can help address COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Andrew J. Zahuranec and Stefaan G. Verhulst: “The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a global health crisis the likes of which the modern world has never seen. Amid calls to action from the United Nations Secretary-General, the World Health Organization, and many national governments, there has been a proliferation of initiatives using data to address some facet of the pandemic. In March, The GovLab at NYU put out its own call to action, which identifies key steps organizations and decision-makers can take to build the data infrastructure needed to tackle pandemics. This call has been signed by over 400 data leaders from around the world in the public and private sector and in civil society.

But questions remain as to how many of these initiatives are useful for decision-makers. While The GovLab’s living repository contains over 160 data collaboratives, data competitions, and other innovative work, many of these examples take a data supply-side approach to the COVID-19 response. Given the urgency of the situation, some organizations create projects that align with the available data instead of trying to understand what insights those responding to the crisis actually want, including issues that may not be directly related to public health.

We need to identify and ask better questions to use data effectively in the current crisis. Part of that work means understanding what topics can be addressed through enhanced data access and analysis.

Using The GovLab’s rapid-research methodology, we’ve compiled a list of 12 topic areas related to COVID-19 where data and analysis is needed. …(More)”.

Mobile applications to support contact tracing in the EU’s fight against COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Common EU Toolbox for Member States by eHealth Network: “Mobile apps have potential to bolster contact tracing strategies to contain and reverse the spread of COVID-19. EU Member States are converging towards effective app solutions that minimise the processing of personal data, and recognise that interoperability between these apps can support public health authorities and support the reopening of the EU’s internal borders.

This first iteration of a common EU toolbox, developed urgently and collaboratively by the e-Health Network with the support of the European Commission, provides a practical guide for Member States. The common approach aims to exploit the latest privacy-enhancing technological solutions that enable at-risk individuals to be contacted and, if necessarily, to be tested as quickly as possible, regardless of where she is and the app she is using. It explains the essential requirements for national apps, namely that they be:

  • voluntary;
  • approved by the national health authority;
  • privacy-preserving – personal data is securely encrypted; and
  • dismantled as soon as no longer needed.

The added value of these apps is that they can record contacts that a person may not notice or remember. These requirements on how to record contacts and notify individuals are anchored in accepted epidemiological guidance, and reflect best practice on cybersecurity, and accessibility. They cover how to prevent the appearance of potentially harmful unapproved apps, success criteria and collectively monitoring the effectiveness of the apps, and the outline of a communications strategy to engage with stakeholders and the people affected by these initiatives.

Work will continue urgently to develop further and implement the toolbox, as set out in the Commission Recommendation of 8 April, including addressing other types of apps and the use of mobility data for modelling to understand the spread of the disease and exit from the crisis….(More)”.

Global AI Ethics Consortium

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “…The newly founded Global AI Ethics Consortium (GAIEC) on Ethics and the Use of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the Fight Against COVID-19 and other Pandemics aims to:

  1. Support immediate needs for expertise related to the COVID-19 crisis and the emerging ethical questions related to the use of AI in managing the pandemic.
  2. Create a repository that includes avenues of communication for sharing and disseminating current research, new research opportunities, and past research findings.
  3. Coordinate internal funding and research initiatives to allow for maximum opportunities to pursue vital research related to health crises and the ethical use of AI.
  4. Discuss research findings and opportunities for new areas of collaboration.

Read the Statement of Purpose and find out more about the Global AI Ethics Consortium and its founding members: Christoph Lütge (TUM Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence, Technical University of Munich), Jean-Gabriel Ganascia (LIP6-CNRS, Sorbonne Université), Mark Findlay (Centre for AI and Data Governance, Law School, Singapore Management University), Ken Ito and Kan Hiroshi Suzuki (The University of Tokyo), Jeannie Marie Paterson (Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, University of Melbourne), Huw Price (Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge), Stefaan G. Verhulst (The GovLab, New York University), Yi Zeng (Research Center for AI Ethics and Safety, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence), and Adrian Weller (The Allan Turing Institute).

If you or your organization is interested in the GAIEC — Global AI Ethics Consortium please contact us at [email protected]…(More)”.