health

Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World

Curated on June 15, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Geoff Mulgan: “A new field of collective intelligence has emerged in the last few years, prompted by a wave of digital technologies that make it possible for organizations and societies to think at large scale. This “bigger mind”—human and machine capabilities working together—has the potential to solve the great challenges of our time. So why do smart technologies not automatically lead to smart results? Gathering insights from diverse fields, including philosophy, computer science, and biology, Big Mind reveals how collective intelligence can guide corporations, governments, universities, and societies to make the most of human brains and digital technologies.

Geoff Mulgan explores how collective intelligence has to be consciously organized and orchestrated in order to harness its powers. He looks at recent experiments mobilizing millions of people to solve problems, and at groundbreaking technology like Google Maps and Dove satellites. He also considers why organizations full of smart people and machines can make foolish mistakes—from investment banks losing billions to intelligence agencies misjudging geopolitical events—and shows how to avoid them.

Highlighting differences between environments that stimulate intelligence and those that blunt it, Mulgan shows how human and machine intelligence could solve challenges in business, climate change, democracy, and public health. But for that to happen we’ll need radically new professions, institutions, and ways of thinking.

Informed by the latest work on data, web platforms, and artificial intelligence, Big Mind shows how collective intelligence could help us survive and thrive….(More)”

Tackling childhood obesity with a text message

Curated on June 14, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Susan McGreevey at Harvard Gazette: “Two interventions that link clinical care with community resources helped improve key health measures in overweight or obese children at the outset of a study, as reported in JAMA Pediatrics.

Developed by investigators at Harvard-affiliated MassGeneral Hospital for Children (MGHfC) and Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, a practice of Atrius Health, both programs not only improved body mass index (BMI) in participants but also increased parents’ sense that they had the information and resources to address their child’s weight problem.

“More and more we recognize that, if we don’t assist families in tackling the social and environmental conditions that impede their ability to make changes to their obesity-related behaviors, we will not be successful in pediatric weight management,” said Elsie Taveras, chief of general pediatrics at MGHfC, who led the study.

“To help us create our interventions, we looked to families with children who had managed to improve their BMI, often under challenging environmental and social settings. These ‘positive outlier’ families provided guidance on the content of health coaching, available resources in the community, language to use in motivating other families to change, and the importance of building parents’ confidence in taking on the challenge of reducing their child’s excess weight.”

The Connect 4 Health trial was conducted from June 2014 through March 2016 at six Harvard Vanguard pediatric practices in the Boston area and enrolled 721 children, ages 2 through 12, with a BMI in the overweight or obese range. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two interventions — enhanced primary care (EPC) or enhanced primary care plus coaching (EPCPC).

Parents of those in both groups received educational materials focusing on key goals — decreasing screen time and consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages, improving diet quality, increasing moderate or vigorous physical activity, improving the quality and duration of sleep, and promoting social and emotional wellness. The EPC intervention — incorporating practices introduced at Harvard Vanguard in recent years — included a monthly text message to parents with links to publicly available resources to support behavioral change and a Neighborhood Resource Guide listing supportive facilities in their communities….(More)”.

Smart Cities: Foundations, Principles and Applications

Curated on June 13, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Houbing Song, Ravi Srinivasan, Tamim Sookoor, Sabina Jeschke: “Smart cities are emerging as a priority for research and development across the world. They open up significant opportunities in several areas, such as economic growth, health, wellness, energy efficiency, and transportation, to promote the sustainable development of cities. This book provides the basics of smart cities, and it examines the possible future trends of this technology. Smart Cities: Foundations, Principles, and Applications provides a systems science perspective in presenting the foundations and principles that span multiple disciplines for the development of smart cities.

Divided into three parts—foundations, principles, and applications—Smart Cities addresses the various challenges and opportunities of creating smart cities and all that they have to offer. It also covers smart city theory modeling and simulation, and examines case studies of existing smart cities from all around the world. In addition, the book:

Addresses how to develop a smart city and how to present the state of the art and practice of them all over the world
Focuses on the foundations and principles needed for advancing the science, engineering, and technology of smart cities—including system design, system verification, real-time control and adaptation, Internet of Things, and test beds
Covers applications of smart cities as they relate to smart transportation/connected vehicle (CV) and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for improved mobility, safety, and environmental protection…(More)”

Handbook of Cyber-Development, Cyber-Democracy, and Cyber-Defense

Curated on June 13, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“Living Reference Work” edited by Elias G. Carayannis, David F. J. Campbell, and Marios Panagiotis Efthymiopoulos: “This volume covers a wide spectrum of issues relating to economic and political development enabled by information and communication technology (ICT). Showcasing contributions from researchers, industry leaders and policymakers, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the challenges and opportunities created by technological innovations that are profoundly affecting the dynamics of economic growth, promotion of democratic principles, and the protection of individual, national, and regional rights. Of particular interest is the influence of ICT on the generation and dissemination of knowledge, which, in turn, empowers citizens and accelerates change across all strata of society. Each essay features literature reviews and key references; definition of critical terms and concepts, case examples; implications for practice, policy and theory; and discussion of future directions. Representing such fields as management, political science, economics, law, psychology and education, the authors cover such timely topics as health care, energy and environmental policy, banking and finance, disaster recovery, investment in research and development, homeland security and diplomacy in the context of ICT and its economic, political and social impact…(More)”

Design and Implementation of Behavioral Informatics Interventions

Curated on June 8, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Liliana Laranjo, Annie Lau and Enrico Coiera in Cognitive Informatics in Health and Biomedicine: “The growing burden of chronic disease is drawing unprecedented attention to the importance of optimizing lifestyle behaviors. Interventions to promote behavior change seem promising, but their full potential can be missed when they are not easily disseminated or accessible to a larger audience. The ability of technology to address these issues, as well as to facilitate the tailoring of interventions, has led to the growing popularity of the field of behavioral informatics (BI).

Behavioral informatics interventions are designed to support patients and healthy consumers in modifying behaviors to improve health, with the help of computers, the Internet, mobile phones, wireless devices, or social media, among other technologies. To date, BI interventions have been applied in several health domains, from the promotion of healthy lifestyle behaviors to mental health and chronic disease self-management.

The effectiveness and impact of BI interventions are largely dependent on their meaningful design, development, evaluation, and implementation. Key elements for success include: performing a comprehensive observation and framing of the particular behavioral challenge within context; recognizing the relevant behavior change theories, models and techniques; having a deep understanding of user characteristics and needs; involving users throughout design and development; and refining the design through user-centred evaluation.

Due to the rapid pace of technology development, the evaluation of interventions and translation of research to practice are met with particular challenges. Innovative methodologies and implementation strategies are increasingly required to bring to fruition the potential of BI interventions in delivering cost-effective, personalized interventions, with broad scalability….(More)”.

Big data allows India to map its fight against human trafficking

Curated on June 5, 2017August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nita Bhalla for Reuters: “An Indian charity is using big data to pinpoint human trafficking hot spots in a bid to prevent vulnerable women and girls vanishing from high-risk villages into the sex trade.

My Choices Foundation uses specially designed technology to identify those villages that are most at risk of modern slavery, then launches local campaigns to sound the alarm….

The analytics tool – developed by Australian firm Quantium – uses a range of factors to identify the most dangerous villages.It draws on India’s census, education and health data and factors such as drought risk, poverty levels, education and job opportunities to identify vulnerable areas….

There are an estimated 46 million people enslaved worldwide, with more than 18 million living in India, according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index. The Index was compiled by the Walk Free Foundation, a global organisation seeking to end modern slavery. Many are villagers lured by traffickers with the promise of a good job and an advance payment, only to find themselves or their children forced to work in fields or brick kilns, enslaved in brothels and sold into sexual slavery.

Almost 20,000 women and children were victims of human trafficking in India in 2016, a rise of nearly 25 percent from the previous year, according to government data.While India has strengthened its anti-trafficking policy in recent years, activists say a lack of public awareness remains one of the biggest impediments…(More)”.

How Data Mining Facebook Messages Can Reveal Substance Abusers

Curated on June 4, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology from the arXiv: “…Substance abuse is a serious concern. Around one in 10 Americans are sufferers. Which is why it costs the American economy more than $700 billion a year in lost productivity, crime, and health-care costs. So a better way to identify people suffering from the disorder, and those at risk of succumbing to it, would be hugely useful.

Bickel and co say they have developed just such a technique, which allows them to spot sufferers simply by looking at their social media messages such as Facebook posts. The technique even provides new insights into the way abuse of different substances influences people’s social media messages.

The new technique comes from the analysis of data collected between 2007 and 2012 as part of a project that ran on Facebook called myPersonality. Users who signed up were offered various psychometric tests and given feedback on their scores. Many also agreed to allow the data to be used for research purposes.

One of these tests asked over 13,000 users with an average age of 23 about the substances they used. In particular, it asked how often they used tobacco, alcohol, or other drugs, and assessed each participant’s level of use. The users were then divided into groups according to their level of substance abuse.

This data set is important because it acts as a kind of ground truth, recording the exact level of substance use for each person.

The team next gathered two other Facebook-related data sets. The first was 22 million status updates posted by more than 150,000 Facebook users. The other was even larger: the “like” data associated with 11 million Facebook users.

Finally, the team worked out how these data sets overlapped. They found almost 1,000 users who were in all the data sets, just over 1,000 who were in the substance abuse and status update data sets, and 3,500 who were in the substance abuse and likes data sets.

These users with overlapping data sets provide rich pickings for data miners. If people with substance use disorders have certain unique patterns of behavior, it may be possible to spot these in their Facebook status updates or in their patterns of likes.

So Bickel and co got to work first by text mining most of the Facebook status updates and then data mining most of the likes data set. Any patterns they found, they then tested by looking for people with similar patterns in the remaining data and seeing if they also had the same level of substance use.

The results make for interesting reading. The team says its technique was hugely successful. “Our best models achieved 86% for predicting tobacco use, 81% for alcohol use and 84% for drug use, all of which significantly outperformed existing methods,” say Bickel and co…. (More) (Full Paper: arxiv.org/abs/1705.05633: Social Media-based Substance Use Prediction).

Our path to better science in less time using open data science tools

Curated on May 31, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Julia S. Stewart Lowndes et al in Nature: “Reproducibility has long been a tenet of science but has been challenging to achieve—we learned this the hard way when our old approaches proved inadequate to efficiently reproduce our own work. Here we describe how several free software tools have fundamentally upgraded our approach to collaborative research, making our entire workflow more transparent and streamlined. By describing specific tools and how we incrementally began using them for the Ocean Health Index project, we hope to encourage others in the scientific community to do the same—so we can all produce better science in less time.

**Figure 1: Better science in less time, illustrated by the Ocean Health Index project.**

Future Libraries

Curated on May 29, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

ARUP: “Libraries are going through a renaissance, both in terms of the social infrastructure they provide and in terms of a diversification of the services and experiences offered. In corporate environments they are playing an increasingly important role in the provision of collaborate workspace and innovation. In communities they are evolving into hubs for education, health, entertainment and work….

This report brings to light significant trends that will influence the future of public, academic and corporate libraries and outlines the implications on their design, operation and user experience. It is the result of a collective exploration through series of workshop events held in London, Melbourne, San Francisco and Sydney, attended by experts in the design and management of libraries. This piece of research presents a glimpse into the future. It explores what we may expect to see as the physical and the digital arena continues to evolve and aims to serve as a foundation for further discussion around the future role of libraries in the communities they serve….(More)”

Advocacy and Policy Change Evaluation: Theory and Practice

Curated on May 27, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Annette Gardner and Claire Brindis: “This is the first book-length treatment of the concepts, designs, methods, and tools needed to conduct effective advocacy and policy change evaluations. By integrating insights from different disciplines, Part I provides a conceptual foundation for navigating advocacy tactics within today’s turbulent policy landscape. Part II offers recommendations for developing appropriate evaluation designs and working with unique advocacy and policy change–oriented instruments. Part III turns toward opportunities and challenges in this growing field. In addition to describing actual designs and measures, the chapters includes suggestions for addressing the specific challenges of working in a policy setting, such as a long time horizon for achieving meaningful change.

To illuminate and advance this area of evaluation practice, the authors draw on over 30 years of evaluation experience; collective wisdom based on a new, large-scale survey of evaluators in the field; and in-depth case studies on diverse issues—from the environment, to public health, to human rights. Ideal for evaluators, change makers, and funders, this book is the definitive guide to advocacy and policy change evaluation….(More)”.