Digital Skills Toolkit

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the International Telecommunications Union: “This toolkit provides stakeholders with guidance on developing a digital skills strategy. It is intended for policymakers, along with partners in the private sector, non-governmental organizations, and academia. Its overarching aim is to facilitate the development of a comprehensive digital skills strategy at country level. It is also possible to use this guide to focus on selected priorities that require a fresh approach.

Why do countries need a digital skills strategy?

Digital skills underpin nearly every aspect of work and life. From filling in a government form to communicating for work, it is difficult to find a job or life-task that does not require a basic level of digital functioning. And with new technologies emerging every day, we need lifelong opportunities to learn new skills that will allow us to succeed in an era of ongoing digital transformation. Digital skills are essential in opening the door to a wide range of opportunities in the 21st century. Countries that implement comprehensive digital skills strategies ensure their populations have the skills they need to be more employable, productive, creative, and successful while ensuring they remain safe, secure and healthy online. Critically, digital skills strategies need to be updated regularly to respond to the emergence of new technologies and their impact on the digital economy and digital society. The digital economy has created a huge shortage of people with the necessary digital skills. ITU research shows that there will be tens of millions of jobs for people with advanced digital skills in the coming years. In Europe, for example, estimates suggest there will be 500,000 unfilled positions for ICT professionals by 2020. Every region faces similar challenges. In addition to existing skills gaps, experts forecast that advances in areas like artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, 3D printing, and other technologies will usher in a new era that will radically alter patterns of consumption, production, and employment. Many countries view digital skills as one of the core foundations of the digital transformation….(More)”

Big Data in the Arts and Humanities: Theory and Practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Giovanni Schiuma and Daniela Carlucci: “As digital technologies occupy a more central role in working and everyday human life, individual and social realities are increasingly constructed and communicated through digital objects, which are progressively replacing and representing physical objects. They are even shaping new forms of virtual reality. This growing digital transformation coupled with technological evolution and the development of computer computation is shaping a cyber society whose working mechanisms are grounded upon the production, deployment, and exploitation of big data. In the arts and humanities, however, the notion of big data is still in its embryonic stage, and only in the last few years, have arts and cultural organizations and institutions, artists, and humanists started to investigate, explore, and experiment with the deployment and exploitation of big data as well as understand the possible forms of collaborations based on it.

Big Data in the Arts and Humanities: Theory and Practice explores the meaning, properties, and applications of big data. This book examines therelevance of big data to the arts and humanities, digital humanities, and management of big data with and for the arts and humanities. It explores the reasons and opportunities for the arts and humanities to embrace the big data revolution. The book also delineates managerial implications to successfully shape a mutually beneficial partnership between the arts and humanities and the big data- and computational digital-based sciences.

Big data and arts and humanities can be likened to the rational and emotional aspects of the human mind. This book attempts to integrate these two aspects of human thought to advance decision-making and to enhance the expression of the best of human life….(More)“.

How Do You Control 1.4 Billion People?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Robert Foyle Hunwick at The New Republic: China’s “social credit system”, which becomes mandatory in 2020, aims to funnel all behavior into a credit score….The quoted text is from a 2014 State Council resolution which promises that every involuntary participant will be rated according to their “commercial sincerity,” “social security,” “trust breaking” and “judicial credibility.”

Some residents welcome it. Decades of political upheaval and endemic corruption has bred widespread mistrust; most still rely on close familial networks (guanxi) to get ahead, rather than public institutions. An endemic lack of trust is corroding society; frequent incidents of “bystander effect”—people refusing to help injured strangers for fear of being held responsible—have become a national embarrassment. Even the most enthusiastic middle-class supporters of the ruling Communist Party (CCP) feel perpetually insecure. “Fraud has become ever more common,” Lian Weiliang, vice chairman of the CCP’s National Development and Reform Commission, recently admitted. “Swindlers must pay a price.”

The solution, apparently, lies in a data-driven system that automatically separates the good, the bad, and the ugly…

once compulsory state “social credit” goes national in 2020, these shadowy algorithms will become even more opaque. Social credit will align with Communist Party policy to become another form of law enforcement. Since Beijing relaxed its One Child Policy to cope with an aging population (400 million seniors by 2035), the government has increasingly indulged in a form of nationalist natalism to encourage more two-child families. Will women be penalized for staying single, and rewarded for swapping their careers for childbirth? In April, one of the country’s largest social-media companies banned homosexual content from its Weibo platform in order to “create a bright and harmonious community environment” (the decision was later rescinded in favor of cracking down on all sexual content). Will people once again be forced to hide non-normative sexual orientations in order to maintain their rights? An investigation by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab also warns that social credit policies would be used to discourage protest.

State media has defended social credit against Orwellian charges, arguing that China’s maturing economy requires a “well-functioning” apparatus like the U.S.’s FICO credit score system. But, counters Lubman, “the U.S. systems, maintained by three companies, collect only financially related information.” In the UK, citizens are entitled to an Equifax report itemizing their credit status. In China, only the security services have access to an individual’s dang’an, the personal file containing every scrap of information the state keeps on them, from exam results to their religious and political views….(More)”.

Blockchain To Solve Bahamas’ ‘Major Workforce Waste’

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Tribune 242: “The Government’s first-ever use of blockchain technology will tackle what was yesterday branded “an enormous waste of human capital”.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), unveiling a $200,000 ‘technical co-operation’ project, revealed that the Minnis administration plans to deploy the technology as a way to determine the success of an apprenticeship programme targeted at 1,350 Bahamians aged between 16-40 years-old, and who are either unemployed or school leavers.

Documents obtained by Tribune Business reveal that the Government is also looking to blockchain to combat the widespread problem of lost/missing student records and certifications, which the IDB described as a major constraint to developing a skilled, productive Bahamian workforce.

“Currently, the certification process in the Bahamas lacks technological advances,” the IDB report said. “Today, student records management is a lengthy and cumbersome process. Students do not own their own records of achievement, depending on issuing institutions to verify their achievements throughout their lives. “This results not only in a verification process that can last weeks or months, and involves hours of human labour and (fallible) judgment, but also creates inefficiencies in placing new students and processing transfer equivalencies.“In extreme cases, when the issuing institution goes out of business, loses their records or is destroyed due to natural disasters, students have no way of verifying their achievements and must often start from nothing. This results in an enormous waste of human capital.”

The IDB report said the Bahamas was now “in a singular position to highlight the value of blockchain-based digital records for both students and institutions”, with the technology seen as a mechanism for Bahamians to possess and share records of their educational achievements. Blockchain technology allows information to be recorded, shared and updated by a particular community, with each member maintaining their own copy of data that has to be verified collectively.

Anything that can be described in digital form, such as contracts, transactions and assets, could thus be suitable for blockchain solutions. And Blockcerts, the open-standard for creating, issuing and verifying blockchain-based certificates, ensures they are tamper-proof. “Not only does the Blockcerts standard (open standard for digital documents anchored to the blockchain) allow Bahamian institutions to prevent records fraud, safeguarding and building confidence in their brands, but it allows them to leapfrog the digitisation process, skipping many of the interoperability issues associated with legacy digital formats (i.e. PDF, XML),” the IDB report said.

“Blockcerts provides students with autonomy, privacy, security and greater access all over the world, while allowing the Bahamian government to consolidate and streamline its credentialing operations in a way that produces real return on investment over a period. Primary use cases include: Student diplomas, professional certifications, awards, transcripts, enrollment verification, employment verification, verifications of qualifications, credit equivalencies and more.”…(More)”.

Data in the EU: Commission steps up efforts to increase availability and boost healthcare data sharing

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PressRelease: “Today, the European Commission is putting forward a set of measures to increase the availability of data in the EU, building on previous initiatives to boost the free flow of non-personal data in the Digital Single Market.

Data-driven innovation is a key enabler of market growth, job creation, particularly for SMEs and startups, and the development of new technologies. It allows citizens to easily access and manage their health data, and allows public authorities to use data better in research, prevention and health system reforms….

Today’s proposals build on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will enter into application as of 25 May 2018. They will ensure:

  • Better access to and reusability of public sector data: A revised law on Public Sector Information covers data held by public undertakings in transport and utilities sectors. The new rules limit the exceptions that allow public bodies to charge more than the marginal costs of data dissemination for the reuse of their data. They also facilitate the reusability of open research data resulting from public funding, and oblige Member States to develop open access policies. Finally, the new rules require – where applicable – technical solutions like Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to provide real-time access to data.
  • Scientific data sharing in 2018: A new set of recommendations address the policy and technological changes since the last Commission proposal on access to and preservation of scientific information. They offer guidance on implementing open access policies in line with open science objectives, research data and data management, the creation of a European Open Science Cloud, and text and data-mining. They also highlight the importance of incentives, rewards, skills and metrics appropriate for the new era of networked research.
  • Private sector data sharing in business-to-business and business-to-governments contexts: A new Communication entitled “Towards a common European data space” provides guidance for businesses operating in the EU on the legal and technical principles that should govern data sharing collaboration in the private sector.
  • Securing citizens’ healthcare data while fostering European cooperation: The Commission is today setting out a plan of action that puts citizens first when it comes to data on citizens’ health: by securing citizens’ access to their health data and introducing the possibility to share their data across borders; by using larger data sets to enable more personalised diagnoses and medical treatment, and better anticipate epidemics; and by promoting appropriate digital tools, allowing public authorities to better use health data for research and for health system reforms. Today’s proposal also covers the interoperability of electronic health records as well as a mechanism for voluntary coordination in sharing data – including genomic data – for disease prevention and research….(More)”.

Towards a new generation of public services: Designers Italia’s design kits

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matteo DeSanti: “Our lives are becoming more and more digital and we expect the public services we use every day to be digital as well: booking a medical examination, receiving a pension, paying the waste tax, obtaining an authorization or a document. Moreover, we would like for all digital public services to have standards of quality comparable to the best private services we use to inform ourselves, make purchases or reservations. When using a digital public service, we would like to have concrete advantages, in particular: higher quality and ease of use, better accessibility, more flexibility and speed.

As the Three-Year Plan for Digital Transformation explains, this is a unique opportunity to design a new generation of public services making citizens and businesses the starting point rather than simply complying with rules and ordinances. We need the right professionalism, the right skills and the right tools: this is why we created Designers Italia and it is also why today we are launching the new design system.

The Public Service Design Kits introduce a method of work based on user research, the rapid exploration of solutions and the development of effective and sustainable products. Also, the Public Service Design Kits also strongly push towards higher standards, providing interface components and codeso that the country’s thousands of administrations don’t have to waste time “inventing the wheel every time.”

The fourteen kits we provide cover all aspects of a service design process, from research to user interface, from prototyping to development and each kit offers different advantages….(More)”.

How artificial intelligence is transforming the world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Darrell West and John Allen at Brookings: “Most people are not very familiar with the concept of artificial intelligence (AI). As an illustration, when 1,500 senior business leaders in the United States in 2017 were asked about AI, only 17 percent said they were familiar with it. A number of them were not sure what it was or how it would affect their particular companies. They understood there was considerable potential for altering business processes, but were not clear how AI could be deployed within their own organizations.

Despite its widespread lack of familiarity, AI is a technology that is transforming every walk of life. It is a wide-ranging tool that enables people to rethink how we integrate information, analyze data, and use the resulting insights to improve decisionmaking. Our hope through this comprehensive overview is to explain AI to an audience of policymakers, opinion leaders, and interested observers, and demonstrate how AI already is altering the world and raising important questions for society, the economy, and governance.

In this paper, we discuss novel applications in finance, national security, health care, criminal justice, transportation, and smart cities, and address issues such as data access problems, algorithmic bias, AI ethics and transparency, and legal liability for AI decisions. We contrast the regulatory approaches of the U.S. and European Union, and close by making a number of recommendations for getting the most out of AI while still protecting important human values.

In order to maximize AI benefits, we recommend nine steps for going forward:

  • Encourage greater data access for researchers without compromising users’ personal privacy,
  • invest more government funding in unclassified AI research,
  • promote new models of digital education and AI workforce development so employees have the skills needed in the 21st-century economy,
  • create a federal AI advisory committee to make policy recommendations,
  • engage with state and local officials so they enact effective policies,
  • regulate broad AI principles rather than specific algorithms,
  • take bias complaints seriously so AI does not replicate historic injustice, unfairness, or discrimination in data or algorithms,
  • maintain mechanisms for human oversight and control, and
  • penalize malicious AI behavior and promote cybersecurity….(More)

Table of Contents
I. Qualities of artificial intelligence
II. Applications in diverse sectors
III. Policy, regulatory, and ethical issues
IV. Recommendations
V. Conclusion

A Race to the Top? The Aid Transparency Index and the Social Power of Global Performance Indicators

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Dan Honig and Catherine Weaver: “Recent studies on global performance indicators (GPIs) reveal the distinct power that non-state actors can accrue and exercise in world politics. How and when does this happen? Using a mixed-methods approach, we examine the impact of the Aid Transparency Index (ATI), an annual rating and rankings index produced by the small UK-based NGO Publish What You Fund.

The ATI seeks to shape development aid donors’ behavior with respect to their transparency – the quality and kind of information they publicly disclose. To investigate the ATI’s effect, we construct an original panel dataset of donor transparency performance before and after ATI inclusion (2006-2013) to test whether, and which, donors alter their behavior in response to inclusion in the ATI. To further probe the causal mechanisms that explain variations in donor behavior we use qualitative research, including over 150 key informant interviews conducted between 2010-2017.

Our analysis uncovers the conditions under which the ATI influences powerful aid donors. Moreover, our mixed methods evidence reveals how this happens. Consistent with Kelley & Simmons’ central argument that GPIs exercise influence via social pressure, we find that the ATI shapes donor behavior primarily via direct effects on elites: the diffusion of professional norms, organizational learning, and peer pressure….(More)”.

Smart cities need thick data, not big data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Adrian Smith at The Guardian: “…The Smart City is an alluring prospect for many city leaders. Even if you haven’t heard of it, you may have already joined in by looking up bus movements on your phone, accessing Council services online or learning about air contamination levels. By inserting sensors across city infrastructures and creating new data sources – including citizens via their mobile devices – Smart City managers can apply Big Data analysis to monitor and anticipate urban phenomena in new ways, and, so the argument goes, efficiently manage urban activity for the benefit of ‘smart citizens’.

Barcelona has been a pioneering Smart City. The Council’s business partners have been installing sensors and opening data platforms for years. Not everyone is comfortable with this technocratic turn. After Ada Colau was elected Mayor on a mandate of democratising the city and putting citizens centre-stage, digital policy has sought to go ‘beyond the Smart City’. Chief Technology Officer Francesca Bria is opening digital platforms to greater citizen participation and oversight. Worried that the city’s knowledge was being ceded to tech vendors, the Council now promotes technological sovereignty.

On the surface, the noise project in Plaça del Sol is an example of such sovereignty. It even features in Council presentations. Look more deeply, however, and it becomes apparent that neighbourhood activists are really appropriating new technologies into the old-fashioned politics of community development….

What made Plaça del Sol stand out can be traced to a group of technology activists who got in touch with residents early in 2017. The activists were seeking participants in their project called Making Sense, which sought to resurrect a struggling ‘Smart Citizen Kit’ for environmental monitoring. The idea was to provide residents with the tools to measure noise levels, compare them with officially permissible levels, and reduce noise in the square. More than 40 neighbours signed up and installed 25 sensors on balconies and inside apartments.

The neighbours had what project coordinator Mara Balestrini from Ideas for Change calls ‘a matter of concern’. The earlier Smart Citizen Kit had begun as a technological solution looking for a problem: a crowd-funded gadget for measuring pollution, whose data users could upload to a web-platform for comparison with information from other users. Early adopters found the technology trickier to install than developers had presumed. Even successful users stopped monitoring because there was little community purpose. A new approach was needed. Noise in Plaça del Sol provided a problem for this technology fix….

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued many years ago that situations can only be made meaningful through ‘thick description’. Applied to the Smart City, this means data cannot really be explained and used without understanding the contexts in which it arises and gets used. Data can only mobilise people and change things when it becomes thick with social meaning….(More)”

Online gamers control trash collecting water robot

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Urban Rivers is a Chicago-based charity focused on cleaning up the city’s rivers and re-wilding bankside habitats. One of their most visible pieces of work is a floating habitat installed in the middle of the river that runs through the city. An immediate problem that arose after installation was the accumulation of trash. At first, the company sent someone out on a kayak every other day to clean the habitat. Yet in less than a day, huge amounts of garbage would again be choking the space. The company’s solution was to create a Trash Task Force. The outcome of the Task Force’s work is the TrashBot, a remote-controlled garbage-collecting robot. The TrashBot allows gamers all over the world to do their bit in cleaning up Chicago’s river.

Anyone interested in playing the cleaning game can sign up via the Urban River website. Future development of the bot will likely focus on wildlife monitoring. Similarly, the end goal of the game will be that no one wants to play because there is no more garbage for collection.

From crowdsourced ocean data gathered by the fins of surfers’ boards to a solar-powered autonomous drone that gathers waste from harbor waters, the health of the world’s waterways is being improved in a number of ways. The surfboard fins use sensors to monitor sea salinity, acidity levels and wave motion. Those are all important coastal ecosystem factors that could be affected by climate change. The water drones are intelligent and use on-board cameras and sensors to learn about their environment and avoid other craft as they collect garbage from rivers, canals and harbors….(More)”.