international development

Data for Development

Curated on October 18, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New Report by the OECD: “The 2017 volume of the Development Co-operation Report focuses on Data for Development. “Big Data” and “the Internet of Things” are more than buzzwords: the data revolution is transforming the way that economies and societies are functioning across the planet. The Sustainable Development Goals along with the data revolution are opportunities that should not be missed: more and better data can help boost inclusive growth, fight inequalities and combat climate change. These data are also essential to measure and monitor progress against the Sustainable Development Goals.

The value of data in enabling development is uncontested. Yet, there continue to be worrying gaps in basic data about people and the planet and weak capacity in developing countries to produce the data that policy makers need to deliver reforms and policies that achieve real, visible and long-lasting development results. At the same time, investing in building statistical capacity – which represented about 0.30% of ODA in 2015 – is not a priority for most providers of development assistance.

There is a need for stronger political leadership, greater investment and more collective action to bridge the data divide for development. With the unfolding data revolution, developing countries and donors have a unique chance to act now to boost data production and use for the benefit of citizens. This report sets out priority actions and good practices that will help policy makers and providers of development assistance to bridge the global data divide, notably by strengthening statistical systems in developing countries to produce better data for better policies and better lives….(More)”

Crowdsourced Morality Could Determine the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

Curated on October 17, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Dom Galeon in Futurism: “As artificial intelligence (AI) development progresses, experts have begun considering how best to give an AI system an ethical or moral backbone. A popular idea is to teach AI to behave ethically by learning from decisions made by the average person.

To test this assumption, researchers from MIT created the Moral Machine. Visitors to the website were asked to make choices regarding what an autonomous vehicle should do when faced with rather gruesome scenarios. For example, if a driverless car was being forced toward pedestrians, should it run over three adults to spare two children? Save a pregnant woman at the expense of an elderly man?

The Moral Machine was able to collect a huge swath of this data from random people, so Ariel Procaccia from Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department decided to put that data to work.

In a new study published online, he and Iyad Rahwan — one of the researchers behind the Moral Machine — taught an AI using the Moral Machine’s dataset. Then, they asked the system to predict how humans would want a self-driving car to react in similar but previously untested scenarios….

This idea of having to choose between two morally problematic outcomes isn’t new. Ethicists even have a name for it: the double-effect. However, having to apply the concept to an artificially intelligent system is something humankind has never had to do before, and numerous experts have shared their opinions on how best to go about it.

OpenAI co-chairman Elon Musk believes that creating an ethical AI is a matter of coming up with clear guidelines or policies to govern development, and governments and institutions are slowly heeding Musk’s call. Germany, for example, crafted the world’s first ethical guidelines for self-driving cars. Meanwhile, Google parent company Alphabet’s AI DeepMind now has an ethics and society unit.

Other experts, including a team of researchers from Duke University, think that the best way to move forward is to create a “general framework” that describes how AI will make ethical decisions….(More)”.

When Cartography Meets Disaster Relief

Curated on October 12, 2017August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mimi Kirk at CityLab: “Almost three weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, the island is in a grim state. Fewer than 15 percent of residents have power, and much of the island has no clean drinking water. Delivery of food and other necessities, especially to remote areas, has been hampered by a variety of ills, including a lack of cellular service, washed-out roads, additional rainfall, and what analysts and Puerto Ricans say is a slow and insufficient response from the U.S. government.

Another issue slowing recovery? Maps—or lack of them. While pre-Maria maps of Puerto Rico were fairly complete, their level of detail was nowhere near that of other parts of the United States. Platforms such as Google Maps are more comprehensive on the mainland than on the island, explains Juan Saldarriaga, a research scholar at the Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University. This is because companies like Google often create maps for financial reasons, selling them to advertisers or as navigation devices, so areas that have less economic activity are given less attention.

This lack of detail impedes recovery efforts: Without basic information on the location of buildings, for instance, rescue workers don’t know how many people were living in an area before the hurricane struck—and thus how much aid is needed.

Crowdsourced mapping can help. Saldarriaga recently organized a “mapathon” at Columbia, in which volunteers examined satellite imagery of Puerto Rico and added missing buildings, roads, bridges, and other landmarks in the open-source platform OpenStreetMap. While some universities and other groups are hosting similar events, anyone with an internet connection and computer can participate.

Saldarriaga and his co-organizers collaborated with Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), a nonprofit that works to create crowdsourced maps for aid and development work. Volunteers like Saldarriaga largely drive HOT’s “crisis mapping” projects, the first of which occurred in 2010 after Haiti’s earthquake…(More)”.

Open mapping from the ground up: learning from Map Kibera

Curated on October 10, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Erica Hagen for Making All Voices Count: “In Nairobi in 2009, 13 young residents of the informal settlement of Kibera mapped their community using OpenStreetMap, an online mapping platform. This was the start of Map Kibera, and eight years of ongoing work to date on digital mapping, citizen media and open data. In this paper, Erica Hagen – one of the initiators of Map Kibera – reflects on the trajectory of this work. Through research interviews with Map Kibera staff, participants and clients, and users of the data and maps the project has produced, she digs into what it means for citizens to map their communities, and examines the impact of open local information on members of the community. The paper begins by situating the research and Map Kibera in selected literature on transparency, accountability and mapping. It then presents three case studies of mapping in Kibera – in the education, security and water sectors – discussing evidence about the effects not only on project participants, but also on governmental and non-governmental actors in each of the three sectors. It concludes that open, community-based data collection can lead to greater trust, which is sorely lacking in marginalised places. In large-scale data gathering, it is often unclear to those involved why the data is needed or what will be done with it. But the experience of Map Kibera shows that by starting from the ground up and sharing open data widely, it is possible to achieve strong sector-wide ramifications beyond the scope of the initial project, including increased resources and targeting by government and NGOs. While debates continue over the best way to truly engage citizens in the ‘data revolution’ and tracking the Sustainable Development Goals, the research here shows that engaging people fully in the information value chain can be the missing link between data as a measurement tool, and information having an impact on social development….(More)”.

what3words

Curated on October 9, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

what3words: “Street addresses worldwide are inaccurate, unreliable and don’t exist at all in many places. Poor addressing is expensive and frustrating, hampers economic growth and development, restricts social mobility and affects lives.

Inaccurate addressing limits businesses and frustrates customers

Street addresses can usually identify a building, but aren’t accurate enough to help a courier or taxi driver find the correct entrance. This results in delayed or failed deliveries, and numerous ‘where are you’ phone calls.

There’s no human-friendly way to give a location to a machine

As personal devices, autonomous vehicles and the IoT streamline the way we live, we have an increasing need to communicate very accurate location. Addresses are too broad to direct a drone or an autonomous car, whilst GPS coordinates are complicated and prone to input mistakes.

Billions of people worldwide have no reliable address at all

Without an address, people struggle to access health and education services, register land and vote. Many of these people live in rapidly expanding cities, or informal settlements….

what3words is the simplest way to talk about any precise location. Our system has divided the world into a grid of 3m x 3m squares and assigned each one a unique address made of just 3 words. Now everyone and everywhere has a reliable address….(More)”.

The Digital Social Innovation Manifesto

Curated on October 3, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

ChiC: “The unprecedented hyper connectivity enabled by digital technologies and the Internet are rapidly changing the opportunities we have to address some of the society’s biggest challenges: environmental preservation, reducing inequalities, fostering inclusion and putting in place sustainable economic models.
However, to make the most of these opportunities we need to move away from the current centralization of power by a small number of large tech companies and enable a much broader group of people and organisations to develop and share innovative digital solutions.

Across Europe, a growing movement of people is exploring opportunities for Digital Social Innovation (DSI), developing bottom-up solutions leveraging on participation, collaboration, decentralization, openness, and multi-disciplinarity. However, it is still at a relatively small scale, because of the little public and private investment in DSI, the limited experience in large-scale take-up of collective solutions, and the relative lack of skills of DSI actors (civil society) compared to commercial companies.

This Manifesto aims at fostering civic participation into democratic and social processes, increasing societal resilience and mutual trust as core element of the Digital Society. It provides recommendations for policy makers, to drive the development of the European Digital Single Market to fulfill first and foremost societal and sustainability challenges (rather than short-lived economic interests), with the help and engagement of all citizens.

This Manifesto reflects the views of a broad community of innovators, catalyzed by the coordination action ChiC, which is funded by the European Commission, within the context of the CAPS initiative. As such, it is open to incorporating incoming views and opinions from other stakeholders and it does not intend to promote the specific commercial interests of actors of any kind….(More)”

UN Opens New Office to Monitor AI Development and Predict Possible Threats

Curated on October 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Interesting Engineering: “The United Nations has created a new office in the Netherlands dedicated to the monitoring and research of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. The new office will collect information about the way in which AI is impacting the world. Researchers will have a particular focus on the way AI relates to global security but will also monitor the effects of job loss from AI and automation.

Irakli Beridze, a UN senior strategic adviser will head the office. They have described the new office saying, “A number of UN organisations operate projects involving robots and AI, such as the group of experts studying the role of autonomous military robots in the realm of conventional weapons. These are temporary measures. Ours is the first permanent UN office on this subject. We are looking at the risks as well as the advantages.”….He suggests that the speed of AI technology development is of primary concern. He explains, “This can make for instability if society does not adapt quickly enough. One of our most important tasks is to set up a network of experts from business, knowledge institutes, civil society organisations and governments. We certainly do not want to plead for a ban or a brake on technologies. We will also explore how new technology can contribute to the sustainable development goals of the UN. For this, we want to start concrete projects. We will not be a talking club.”…(More).

Co-creating an Open Government Data Driven Public Service: The Case of Chicago’s Food Inspection Forecasting Model

Curated on October 1, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Conference paper by Keegan Mcbride et al: “Large amounts of Open Government Data (OGD) have become available and co-created public services have started to emerge, but there is only limited empirical material available on co-created OGD-driven public services. The authors have built a conceptual model around an innovation process based on the ideas of co-production and agile development for co-created OGD-driven public service. An exploratory case study on Chicago’s use of OGD in a predictive analytics model that forecasts critical safety violations at food serving establishments was carried out to expose the intricate process of how co-creation occurs and what factors allow for it to take place. Six factors were identified as playing a key role in allowing the co-creation of an OGD-driven public service to take place: external funding, motivated stakeholders, innovative leaders, proper communication channels, an existing OGD portal, and agile development practices. The conceptual model was generally validated, but further propositions on co-created OGD-driven public services emerged. These propositions state that the availability of OGD and tools for data analytics have the potential to enable the co-creation of OGD-driven public services, governments releasing OGD are acting as a platform and from this platform the co-creation of new and innovative OGD-driven public services may take place, and that the idea of Government as a Platform (GaaP) does appear to be an idea that allows for the topics of co-creation and OGD to be merged together….(More)”.