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

Curated on Posted on 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 Posted on 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)”.

Ethical Guidelines for Applying Predictive Tools Within Human Services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MetroLab Network: “Predictive analytical tools are already being put to work within human service agencies to help make vital decisions about when and how to intervene in the lives of families and communities. The sector may not be entirely comfortable with this trend, but it should not be surprised. Predictive models are in wide use within the justice and education sectors and, more to the point, they work: risk assessment is fundamental to what social services do, and these tools can help agencies respond more quickly to prevent harm, to create more personalized interventions, and allocate scarce public resources to where they can do the most good.

There is also a strong case that predictive risk models (PRM) can reduce bias in decision-making. Designing a predictive model forces more explicit conversations about how agencies think about different risk factors and how they propose to guard against disadvantaging certain demographic or socioeconomic groups. And the standard that agencies are trying to improve upon is not perfect equity—it is the status quo, which is neither transparent nor uniformly fair. Risk scores do not eliminate the possibility of personal or institutional prejudice but they can make it more apparent by providing a common reference point.

That the use of predictive analytics in social services can reduce bias is not to say that it will. Careless or unskilled development of these predictive tools could worsen disparities among clients receiving social services. Child and civil rights advocates rightly worry about the potential for “net widening”—drawing more people in for unnecessary scrutiny by the government. They worry that rather than improving services for vulnerable clients, these models will replicate the biases in existing public data sources and expose them to greater trauma. Bad models scale just as quickly as good ones, and even the best of them can be misused.

The stakes here are real: for children and families that interact with these social systems and for the reputation of the agencies that turn to these tools. What, then, should a public leader know about risk modeling, and what lessons does it offer about how to think about data science, data stewardship, and the public interest?…(More)”.

Gamification, Participatory Democracy and Engaged Public(s)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Gianluca Sgueo: “The use of game-design elements – a phenomenon known as ‘gamification’ – features prominently within on-going processes of innovation of governance. According to the research and advisory firm Gartner, 2,000 of the top public organizations worldwide have at least one gamified application and/or process in place. Examples of gamification in public governance include “Run that town” (ideated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to raise citizens’ awareness of the national census), the “Red Balloon Challenge” (initiated by the United States’ Defence Advanced Research Project Agency to test systems for improving cooperation among soldiers, experts and diplomatic officers overseas), and “Manor Labs” (a web platform that awarded “Innobucks”, a type of virtual commodity, to residents of the City of Manor, in Texas, for proposing ideas related with urban development).
The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, to determine who is actually participating in public policy processes via gamification; second, to weigh the impact that the public(s) engaged by gamification has on democratic governance; third, to assess the societal environment within which gamification might flourish or establish plausibly….(More)”.

Polish activists turn to digital democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zosia Wasik in the Financial Times: “Opponents of the Polish government have mounted a series of protests on issues ranging from reform of the judiciary to an attempt to ban abortion. In February, they staged yet another, less public but intensely emotive, battle — to save the country’s trees.

At the beginning of the year, a new law allowed property owners to cut trees on their land without official permission. As a result, hundreds of trees disappeared from the centres of Polish cities as more valuable treeless plots were sold off to developers. In parallel, the government authorised extensive logging of the ancient forest in Bialowieza, a Unesco world heritage site.

“People reacted very emotionally to these practices,” says Wojciech Sanko, a co-ordinator at Code for Poland, a programme run by ePanstwo (eState), the country’s biggest non-governmental organisation in this field.

The group aims to deploy new technology tools designed to explain local and national policies, and to make it easier for citizens to take part in public life. As no one controlled the tree-cutting, for example, Mr Sanko thought technology could at least help to monitor it. First, he wanted to set up a simple digital map of trees cut in Warsaw. But as the controversial liberalisation of tree-cutting was reversed, the NGO together with local activists decided to work on another project — to map trees still standing, along with data about species and their absorption of carbon dioxide associated with climate change.

The group has also started to create an app for activists in Bialowieza forest: an open-source map that will gather all documentation from civic patrols monitoring the site, and will indicate the exact places of logging.

A trend towards recruiting technology for civic projects has been slowly gathering pace in a country that is hard to describe as socially-engaged: only 59 per cent of Poles say they have done volunteer work for the community, according to a 2016 survey by the Centre of Public Opinion Research.

Election turnout barely surpasses 50 per cent. Yet since the election of the rightwing Law and Justice government in 2015, which has introduced rapid and controversial reforms across all domains of public life, citizens have started to take a closer look at politicians and their actions.

In addition to the tree map, Code for Poland has developed a website that aggregates public data, such as tax spending or air pollution.

Mr Sanko underlines, however, that Code for Poland is much more about local communities than national politics. Many of the group’s projects are small scale, ranging from a mobile app for an animal shelter in Gdansk and a tool that shows people where they can take their garbage.

Piotr Micula, board member of Miasto Jest Nasze (The City is Ours), an urban movement in Warsaw, says that increasing access to data is fuelling the development of civic tech. “Even as a small organisation, we try to use big data and visualise it,” he says….(More)”.

Art And Science Of The Nudge – Innovation In Indian Policymaking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Vinayak Dalmia at Swarajya: “In September last year, a news release stated that NITI Aayog, in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will help set up a “nudge unit”. The stated aim is to deepen the reach of certain flagship programmes including Swachh Bharat, Jan Dhan Yojana and Skill Development.

Mainstream publications have also begun to argue for the same. Since a lot of India’s social problems are behavioural in nature, subtle, inexpensive changes in the “environment” prove more effective than elaborate laws or policies. Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself hinted at the psychological nature of ills such as gender violence and sanitation. Pratap Bhanu Mehta states – “social failure is as serious a matter as market failure”. The Prime Minister has started with moral persuasion on issues of cleanliness or giving up LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) subsidies. A formal and rigorous approach to some of these problems should be the next logical step.

Government and/or policymakers are in many ways architects designing “choices” and social environments we live in. As designers, they must leverage the fundamental truth that all actors and agents are psychological beings having less-than-perfect rationality. So, while behavioural science operates on the premise that the brain is prone to making mistakes, psychology can address the flaws and design smarter policies.

For example, open defecation is a big problem in India. It stands tangential to the Prime Minister’s Swachh Bharat dream. In spite of building toilets, in some cases, the usage rates are no more than 50 per cent. World Bank economist Nidhi Khurana has proposed communicating the harms of this behaviour as opposed to the benefits of using a toilet. In effect, she is suggesting the use of the theory of “loss aversion” which states that people value potential losses more than potential gains (on average, twice as much). Studies have also found that subtle changes in the sense of ownership bring significant improvements.

Noteworthy is the immunisation rate in Rajasthan. It increased after free lentils were given to women who brought their children to dispensaries. Colour-coded footprints in the Delhi Metro is borrowed from Copenhagen in order to institute better civic sense. In Kenya, weekly text reminders help ensure HIV patients adhere to medication schedules….(More)”.

Smart cities are great. Human-centric cities are (again) the future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Naveen Rajdev at Quartz:” …You don’t want your smart city’s proverbial slip to show, and you don’t want to overwhelm your citizens with too much tech. So what’s the plan?

1. Start making technology invisible

Being able to “see” technology creates interaction, and interaction creates distraction.

To illustrate: Assuming your car and smartphone are connected, your phone should be able to notify someone—someone texting you, for example—that you’re driving and can’t respond. You don’t want to take your hands off the wheel, so your phone should instead be able to send an automatic response to the text sender: “I’m driving right now, but I’ll get back to you later.” It keeps you and others safe on the road, and it doesn’t force you to respond….

Detroit, for instance, is already investigating the idea of “invisible” technology, particularly when it comes to residents’ safety. Last fall, Detroit’s city officials partnered with Comcast to expand the area’s Project Green Light program, which allows businesses to install cameras police can use to monitor crimes (and solve them) in real time.

The program’s expansion led to a 50% drop in violent crime at convenience stores and gas stations. Thanks to the technology—which was by no means a distraction to Detroit’s residents—the city is safer, and business is better.

While Detroit excels at making tech inconspicuous, most of the country is doing what it can to be more on-the-grid than ever before, completely ignoring (or altogether missing) the subtleties “invisible” tech offers. Last fall, New York City officials introduced LinkNYC, a free Wi-Fi service throughout Manhattan in the form of 500 touch-screen kiosks available for public use.

As the adage suggests, sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. With the kiosks being essentially too visible in Manhattan’s streets, problems arose: The city’s homeless population began misusing them, and certain groups started insisting the kiosks help officials “spy” on its residents….

2. Your city must be conscious of digital overload

In a world where technology rules, it’s imperative we find time to think, breathe, and unplug, so city leaders must carefully marry tech and mindfulness. Otherwise, they face the consequences of information overload: weakened decision-making and the feeling of being overwhelmed, among others. A city’s occasional digital detox is crucial.

Why? Studies have shown that smartphones could be causing insomnia, social media may be spawning narcissism, and computer screens might be making our kids less empathetic. At some point, a line must be drawn.

Luckily, certain cities are starting to draw it. Late last year, Miami’s development authority department proposed turning lanes clogged with traffic on Biscayne Boulevard into a spacious greenway that welcomed both pedestrians and bicyclists. Beyond that, walking trails are growing along the river and bay, and another trail is in the works. City developers have also approved smaller residential projects in areas that public transit serves….

Even a simple art exhibit can be marred by too much tech. …Other gallery curators aren’t loving the marriage of art and tech. Connie Wolf, Stanford University’s director of the Cantor Arts Center, is particularly cautious. “In our busy lives, in our crazy lives, we’re always connected to technology,” she said. “People want to come into museums and put that technology aside for a moment.”

Bottom line: Being connected is great, but being conscious is better. City leaders would do well to remember this….(More)”.

Using big data to predict suicide risk among Canadian youth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

SAS Insights “Suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth in Canada, according to Statistics Canada, accounting for one-fifth of deaths of people under the age of 25 in 2011. The Canadian Mental Health Association states that among 15 – 24 year olds the number is an even more frightening at 24 percent – the third highest in the industrialized world. Yet despite these disturbing statistics, the signals that an individual plans on self-injury or suicide are hard to isolate….

Team members …collected 2.3 million tweets and used text mining software to identify 1.1 million of them as likely to have been authored by 13 to 17 year olds in Canada by building a machine learning model to predict age, based on the open source PAN author profiling dataset. Their analysis made use of natural language processing, predictive modelling, text mining, and data visualization….

However, there were challenges. Ages are not revealed on Twitter, so the team had to figure out how to tease out the data for 13 – 17 year olds in Canada. “We had a text data set, and we created a model to identify if people were in that age group based on how they talked in their tweets,” Soehl said. “From there, we picked some specific buzzwords and created topics around them, and our software mined those tweets to collect the people.”

Another issue was the restrictions Twitter places on pulling data, though Soehl believes that once this analysis becomes an established solution, Twitter may work with researchers to expedite the process. “Now that we’ve shown it’s possible, there are a lot of places we can go with it,” said Soehl. “Once you know your path and figure out what’s going to be valuable, things come together quickly.”

The team looked at the percentage of people in the group who were talking about depression or suicide, and what they were talking about. Horne said that when SAS’ work went in front of a Canadian audience working in health care, they said that it definitely filled a gap in their data — and that was the validation he’d been looking for. The team also won $10,000 for creating the best answer to this question (the team donated the award money to two mental health charities: Mind Your Mind and Rise Asset Development)

What’s next?

That doesn’t mean the work is done, said Jos Polfliet. “We’re just scraping the surface of what can be done with the information.” Another way to use the results is to look at patterns and trends….(More)”

Privacy and Outrage

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jordan M. Blanke: “Technology has dramatically altered virtually every aspect of our life in recent years. While technology has always driven change, it seems that these changes are occurring more rapidly and more extensively than ever before. Society and its laws will evolve; but it is not always an easy process. Privacy has changed dramatically in our data-driven world – and continues to change daily. It has always been difficult to define exactly what privacy is, and therefore, it is even more difficult to propose what it should become. As the meaning of privacy often varies from person to person, it is difficult to establish a one-size-fits-all concept. This paper explores some of the historical, legal and ethical development of privacy, discusses how some of the normative values of privacy may survive or change, and examines how outrage has been – and will continue to be – a driver of such change….(More)”.

Mapping service design and policy design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UK Policy Lab: “…Over the summer in the Policy Lab we have started mapping different policy options, showing the variety of ways policy-makers might use their power to influence people’s actions and behaviours. We have grouped these into seven categories from low level to large scale interventions.

Carrots or sticks

These styles of intervention include traditional law-making powers (sticks) or applying softer influencing powers (carrots)  such as system stewardship.   In reality policy-making is much more complex than most people imagine.  From this starting point we’ve created a grid of 28 different ways policy-makers operate at different stages of maturity. This is still work in progress so we would very much welcome your thoughts. We are currently building examples for each of the styles from across government.  The design choices for policy-makers early in policy development shape how a policy is delivered and the kind of results that can be achieved. We have played around a lot with the language, and will continue to test this in the Lab.  However, it should be clear from the array of possibilities that determining which course of action, which levers will deliver the outcomes needed, in any particular circumstance requires great skill and judgement…(More)”.