“The Open Science Prize is a new initiative from the Wellcome Trust, US National Institutes of Health and Howard Hughes Medical Institute to encourage and support the prototyping and development of services, tools and/or platforms that enable open content – including publications, datasets, code and other research outputs – to be discovered, accessed and re-used in ways that will advance research, spark innovation and generate new societal benefits….
The volume of digital objects for research available to researchers and the wider public is greater now than ever before, and so, consequently, are the opportunities to mine and extract value from existing open content and to generate new discoveries and other societal benefits. A key obstacle in realizing these benefits is the discoverability of open content, and the ability to access and utilize it.
The goal of this Prize is to stimulate the development of novel and ground-breaking tools and platforms to enable the reuse and repurposing of open digital research objects relevant to biomedical or health applications. A Prize model is necessary to help accelerate the field of open biomedical research beyond what current funding mechanisms can achieve. We also hope to demonstrate the huge potential value of Open Science approaches, and to generate excitement, momentum and further investment in the field….(More)”.
Rethinking how we collect, share, and use development results data
Development Gateway: “The international development community spends a great deal of time, effort, and money gathering data on thousands of indicators embedded in various levels of Results Frameworks. These data comprise outputs (school enrollment, immunization figures), program outcomes (educational attainment, disease prevalence), and, in some cases, impacts (changes in key outcomes over time).
Ostensibly, we use results data to allocate resources to the places, partners, and programs most likely to achieve lasting success. But is this data good enough – and is it used well enough – to genuinely increase development impact in priority areas?
Experience suggests that decision-makers at all levels may often face inadequate, incorrect, late, or incomplete results data. At the same time, a figurative “Tower of Babel” of both project-level M&E and program-level outcome data can make it difficult for agencies and organizations to share and use data effectively. Further, potential users may not have the skills, resources, or enabling environment to meaningfully analyze and apply results data to decisions. With these challenges in mind, the development community needs to re-think its investments in results data, making sure that the right users are able to collect, share, and use this information to maximum effect.
Our Initiative
To this end, Development Gateway (DG), with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to “diagnose” the results data ecosystem in three countries, identifying ways to improve data quality, sharing, and use in the health and agriculture sectors. Some of our important questions include:
- Quality: Who collects data and how? Is data quality adequate? Does the data meet actual needs? How much time does data collection demand? How can data collection, quality, and reporting be improved?
- Sharing: How can we compare results data from different donors, governments, and implementers? Is there demand for comparability? Should data be shared more freely? If so, how?
- Use: How is results data analyzed and used to inform actual policies and plans? Does (or can) access to results data improve decision-making? Do the right people have the right data? How else can (or should) we promote data use?…(More)”
Can you crowdsource water quality data?
Pratibha Mistry at The Water Blog (Worldbank): “The recently released Contextual Framework for Crowdsourcing Water Quality Data lays out a strategy for citizen engagement in decentralized water quality monitoring, enabled by the “mobile revolution.”
According to the WHO, 1.8 billion people lack access to safe drinking water worldwide
. Poor source water quality, non-existent or insufficient treatment, and defects in water distribution systems and storage mean these consumers use water that often doesn’t meet the WHO’s Guidelines for Drinking Water Quality.
The crowdsourcing framework develops a strategy to engage citizens in measuring and learning about the quality of their own drinking water. Through their participation, citizens provide utilities and water supply agencies with cost-effective water quality data in near-real time. Following a typical crowdsourcing model: consumers use their mobile phones to report water quality information to a central service. That service receives the information, then repackages and shares it via mobile phone messages, websites, dashboards, and social media. Individual citizens can thus be educated about their water quality, and water management agencies and other stakeholders can use the data to improve water management; it’s a win-win.
Several groups, from the private sector to academia to non-profits, have taken a recent interest in developing a variety of so-called mWASH apps (mobile phone applications for the water, sanitation, and hygiene WASH sector). A recent academic study analyzed how mobile phones might facilitate the flow of water quality data between water suppliers and public health agencies in Africa. USAID has invested in piloting a mobile application in Tanzania to help consumers test their water for E. coli….(More)”
Four steps to precision public health
By contrast, a campaign against yellow fever launched this year in sub-Saharan Africa defines risk at the level of entire nations, often hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. More granular assessments have been deemed too complex.
The use of data to guide interventions that benefit populations more efficiently is a strategy we call precision public health. It requires robust primary surveillance data, rapid application of sophisticated analytics to track the geographical distribution of disease, and the capacity to act on such information1.
The availability and use of precise data is becoming the norm in wealthy countries. But large swathes of the developing world are not reaping its advantages. In Guinea, it took months to assemble enough data to clearly identify the start of the largest Ebola outbreak in history. This should take days. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of childhood mortality in the world; it is also where we know the least about causes of death…..
The value of precise disease tracking was baked into epidemiology from the start. In 1854, John Snow famously located cholera cases in London. His mapping of the spread of infection through contaminated water dealt a blow to the idea that the disease was caused by bad air. These days, people and pathogens move across the globe swiftly and in great numbers. In 2009, the H1N1 ‘swine flu’ influenza virus took just 35 days to spread from Mexico and the United States to China, South Korea and 12 other countries…
The public-health community is sharing more data faster; expectations are higher than ever that data will be available from clinical trials and from disease surveillance. In the past two years, the US National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust in London and the Gates Foundation have all instituted open data policies for their grant recipients, and leading journals have declared that sharing data during disease emergencies will not impede later publication.
Meanwhile, improved analysis, data visualization and machine learning have expanded our ability to use disparate data sources to decide what to do. A study published last year4 used precise geospatial modelling to infer that insecticide-treated bed nets were the single most influential intervention in the rapid decline of malaria.
However, in many parts of the developing world, there are still hurdles to the collection, analysis and use of more precise public-health data. Work towards malaria elimination in South Africa, for example, has depended largely on paper reporting forms, which are collected and entered manually each week by dozens of subdistricts, and eventually analysed at the province level. This process would be much faster if field workers filed reports from mobile phones.
Sources: Ref. 8/Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
…Frontline workers should not find themselves frustrated by global programmes that fail to take into account data on local circumstances. Wherever they live — in a village, city or country, in the global south or north — people have the right to public-health decisions that are based on the best data and science possible, that minimize risk and cost, and maximize health in their communities…(More)”
How The Tech Community Mobilized To Help Refugees
Steven Melendez at FastCompany: “Thousands of techies the world over have banded together to help refugees flooding Europe to stay connected.
The needs of the waves of migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, and other points—more than a million in 2015—go beyond just shelter, safety, and sustenance.
“You can imagine, crossing to a border or coming to a place you don’t know. Information needs are massive,” says Alyoscia D’Onofrio, senior director at the governance technical unit of the International Rescue Committee, which assists refugees and displaced people around the world.
“One of the big differences between this crisis response and many that have gone before is that you’re got probably a much tech-savvier population on the move and probably much better access to handsets and networks.”
Helping to connect those newcomers to information—and each other—is a group of 15,000 digital volunteers who call themselves the Techfugees.
“We are here not to solve the biggest problems of hygiene, water, clean energy because these are sectors that need a lot of expertise,” says Joséphine Goube, the CEO of the nonprofit that quickly came together last year.
Instead, often with the aid of smartphones many migrants and asylum seekers bring with them, the continent’s tech community aids refugees and asylum seekers in getting back online to find their footing in unfamiliar places….
The IRC has received substantial funding from tech companies to support its efforts, and individual tech workers have flocked to dozens of conferences and hackathons organized by Techfugees around the world since an initial conference in London last October.
“We were actually overwhelmed by the response to our conference,” says Goube, “It just went viral.”
Affiliates of the group have since helped provide infrastructure for refugees to connect to Wi-Fi—even in places with limited electricity—and energize their phones through solar-powered charging hubs. They’ve also developed websites and apps to teach new arrivals everything from basic coding skills that could help them earn a living to how to navigate government bureaucracies in their new countries.
“Things that seem very trivial to us can actually be very complicated,” says Vincent Olislagers, a member of a team developing an interactive chatbot called HealthIntelligence, which is designed to provide refugees in Norway with information about using the country’s health care system. The tool was developed after the team met with a recent arrival to the country who had difficulty arranging hospital transportation for his pregnant wife due to language barriers and financial constraints.
“He had to call, for his wife, his caretaker at the refugee center,” Olislagers says. “The caretaker had to send an ambulance at the right location.”
The team is working with Norwegian health officials and refugee aid groups to ultimately make the chatbot available as part of a standard package of materials provided to refugees entering the country. The project was a finalist in an October hackathon organized by Techfugees in Oslo. The hackathon’s ultimate winner was a group called KomInn, which pairs families fluent in Norwegian with newcomers who come to their homes to practice the language over dinner. That group developed a digital tool to streamline finding matches, which had previously been a laborious process, says Goube….(More)”
The Government Isn’t Doing Enough to Solve Big Problems with AI
Mike Orcutt at MIT Technology Review: “The government should play a bigger role in developing new tools based on artificial intelligence, or we could miss out on revolutionary applications because they don’t have obvious commercial upside.
That was the message from prominent AI technologists and researchers at a Senate committee hearing last week. They agreed that AI is in a crucial developmental moment, and that government has a unique opportunity to shape its future. They also said that the government is in a better position than technology companies to invest in AI applications aimed at broad societal problems.
Today just a few companies, led by Google and Facebook, account for the lion’s share of AI R&D in the U.S. But Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft Research, told the committee members that there are important areas that are rich and ripe for AI innovation, such as homelessness and addiction, where the industry isn’t making big investments. The government could help support those pursuits, Horvitz said.
For a more specific example, take the plight of a veteran seeking information online about medical options, says Andrew Moore, dean of the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. If an application that could respond to freeform questions, search multiple government data sets at once, and provide helpful information about a veteran’s health care options were commercially attractive, it might be available already, he says.
There is a “real hunger for basic research” says Greg Brockman, cofounder and chief technology officer of the nonprofit research company OpenAI, because technologists understand that they haven’t made the most important advances yet. If we continue to leave the bulk of it to industry, not only could we miss out on useful applications, but also on the chance to adequately explore urgent scientific questions about ethics, safety, and security while the technology is still young, says Brockman. Since the field of AI is growing “exponentially,” it’s important to study these things now, he says, and the government could make that a “top line thing that they are trying to get done.”….(More)”.
The age of analytics: Competing in a data-driven world
Updated report by the McKinsey Global Institute: “Back in 2011, the McKinsey Global Institute published a report highlighting the transformational potential of big data. Five years later, we remain convinced that this potential has not been overhyped. In fact, we now believe that our 2011 analyses gave only a partial view. The range of applications and opportunities has grown even larger today. The convergence of several technology trends is accelerating progress. The volume of data continues to double every three years as information pours in from digital platforms, wireless sensors, and billions of mobile phones. Data storage capacity has increased, while its cost has plummeted. Data scientists now have unprecedented computing power at their disposal, and they are devising ever more sophisticated algorithms….
There has been uneven progress in capturing value from data and analytics…
- The EU public sector: Our 2011 report analyzed how the European Union’s public sector could use data and analytics to make government services more efficient, reduce fraud and errors in transfer payments, and improve tax collection, potentially achieving some €250 billion worth of annual savings. But only about 10 to 20 percent of this has materialized. Some agencies have moved more interactions online, and many (particularly tax agencies) have introduced pre-filled forms. But across Europe and other advanced economies, adoption and capabilities vary greatly. The complexity of existing systems and the difficulty of attracting scarce analytics talent with public-sector salaries have slowed progress. Despite this, we see even wider potential today for societies to use analytics to make more evidence-based decisions in many aspects of government.
US health care: To date, only 10 to 20 percent of the opportunities we outlined in 2011 have been realized by the US health-care sector. A range of barriers—including a lack of incentives, the difficulty of process and organizational changes, a shortage of technical talent, data-sharing challenges, and regulations—have combined to limit adoption. Within clinical operations, the biggest success has been the shift to electronic medical records, although the vast stores of data they contain have not yet been fully mined. While payers have been slow to capitalize on big data for accounting and pricing, a growing industry now aggregates and synthesizes clinical records, and analytics have taken on new importance in public health surveillance. Many pharmaceutical firms are using analytics in R&D, particularly in streamlining clinical trials. While the health-care sector continues to lag in adoption, there are enormous unrealized opportunities to transform clinical care and deliver personalized medicine… (More)”
Uber supports Brazilian health awareness campaign
Springwise: “Being a parent is a busy job and anything that can make the life of a parent easier, cheaper or simpler is likely to be met by an eager — if slightly bleary eyed — audience. We recently wrote about a lift sharing service parents can order for their kids, and now Uber have decided to reach out to the same demographic, offering a discount to parents who are vaccinating their children.
In September, Uber offered a discount to parents in Brazil taking their children to get vaccinated. The promotion was linked to ‘Multivaccination 2016’: a national campaign aiming to raise awareness about the importance of vaccinations and encouraging parents to update their child’s vaccination card regularly. The initiative was launched by Brazil’s Minister of Health and for one Saturday only parents travelling with their children in certain cities could enter the promotional code “UberGotinha”. In return they received BRL 20 (USD 6) in credit to cover journeys to and from participating health centers….(More)”
Fighting Exclusion, Inequality and Distrust: The Open Government Challenge
Remarks by Manish Bapna delivered at the Open Government Partnership Global Summit: “To the many heads of state, ministers, mayors, civil society colleagues gathered in this great hall, this is an important moment to reflect on the remarkable challenges of the past year.
We have seen the rise of various forms of populism and nationalism in the United States, Britain, the Philippines, Italy, and many other countries. This has led to surprise election results and an increase in anti-immigrant and anti-government movements.
We have seen the tragic results of conflict-driven migration, as captured in the iconic image of a three-year-old boy whose body washed up on the Turkish shore.
We have seen governments struggle to respond to the refugee crisis. Some open their arms while others close their doors.
We have seen deadly terrorist attacks in cities around the world – including this one — that have forced governments to walk a fine line between the need to protect their people and the risk of infringing on their civil liberties.
And we continue to confront two inter-linked challenges: the moral challenge of 700 million people in extreme poverty, living on less than $2 a day, and the existential challenge of a changing climate.
All of these point to a failure of governance and, if we are honest, to a lack of open government that truly connects, engages and meets the needs of all people.
World’s Problems Can’t Be Solved Without Open Government
The crux of the matter is this: While open government alone can’t fix the world’s problems, they can’t be solved without it.
Too many people feel excluded and marginalized. They believe that only elites reap the benefits of growth and globalization. They feel left out of decision-making. They distrust public institutions.
How we collectively confront these challenges will be OGP’s most important test….
Here are five essential steps we can take – we, the people here today – to help accelerate the shift toward open government.
The first step: We must protect civic space – the rights to free speech, assembly and association – because these bedrock rights are at the heart of a functioning society. Serious violations of these rights have been recently reported by CIVICUS in over 100 countries. In 25 active OGP countries, these rights are repressed or obstructed….
The second step: We must foster citizen-centered governance.
We cherish OGP as a unique platform where government and civil society are equal partners in a way that amplifies the concerns of ordinary citizens.
We commend the many OGP countries that have made significant strides. But we recognize that for others, this remains a major struggle.
As heads of state and ministers, we need you to embrace the concept of co-creation. …
The third step: We must make changes that are transformational, not incremental.
Drawing on our commitment to open government and the urgency of this moment, we must be willing to go further, faster…..
Transforming government brings us to the fourth step.
We need to make a real difference in people’s lives.
This is our Partnership’s ultimate aim. Because when open government works, it improves every facet of people’s lives.
• This means giving all people safe drinking water and clean air.
• It means reliable electricity so children can have light to do homework and play.
• It means health clinics where the sick can go to get quality care, where medicines are available
• And it means building trust in public officials who are untainted by corruption….
The fifth and final step: We need to reinvigorate the Partnership’s political leadership….(More)”
The data-driven social worker
NESTA: “Newcastle City Council has been using data to change the way it delivers long-term social work to vulnerable children and families.
Social workers have data analysts working alongside them. This is helping them to identify common factors among types of cases, understand the root causes of social problems and create more effective (and earlier) interventions.
What is it?
Social work teams have an embedded data analyst, whose role is to look for hypotheses to test and analysis to perform that offers insight into how best to support families.
Their role is not purely quantitative; they are expected to identify patterns, and undertake deep-dive or case study analysis. The data analysts also test what works, measuring the success of externally commissioned services, along with cost information.
While each social worker only has knowledge of their own individual cases, data analysts have a bird’s-eye view of the whole team’s activity, enabling them to look across sets of families for common patterns.
How does it work?
Data analysts are responsible for maintaining ChildStat, a data dashboard that social workers use to help manage their caseloads. The data insights found by the embedded analysts can highlight the need to work in a different way.
For example, one unit works with children at risk of physical abuse. Case file analysis of the mental health histories of the parents found that 20% of children had parents with a personality disorder, while 60-70% had a parent who had experienced sexual or physical abuse as children themselves.
Traditional social work methods may not have uncovered this insight, which led Newcastle to look for new responses to working with these types of families.
Data analysis has also helped to identify the factors that are most predictive of a child becoming NEET (not in education, employment or training), enabling the team to review their approach to working with families and focus on earlier intervention….(More)”