New Institute Pushes the Boundaries of Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Each year thousands of genomes are sequenced, millions of neuronal activity traces are recorded, and light from hundreds of millions of galaxies is captured by our newest telescopes, all creating datasets of staggering size. These complex datasets are then stored for analysis.

Ongoing analysis of these information streams has illuminated a problem, however: Scientists’ standard methodologies are inadequate to the task of analyzing massive quantities of data. The development of new methods and software to learn from data and to model — at sufficient resolution — the complex processes they reflect is now a pressing concern in the scientific community.

To address these challenges, the Simons Foundation has launched a substantial new internal research group called the Flatiron Institute (FI). The FI is the first multidisciplinary institute focused entirely on computation. It is also the first center of its kind to be wholly supported by private philanthropy, providing a permanent home for up to 250 scientists and collaborating expert programmers all working together to create, deploy and support new state-of-the-art computational methods. Few existing institutions support the combination of scientists and programmers, instead leaving programming to relatively impermanent graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and none have done so at the scale of the Flatiron Institute or with such a broad scope, at a single location.

The institute will hold conferences and meetings and serve as a focal point for computational science around the world….(More)”.

The ethical impact of data science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Theme issue of Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A compiled and edited by Mariarosaria Taddeo and Luciano Floridi: “This theme issue has the founding ambition of landscaping data ethics as a new branch of ethics that studies and evaluates moral problems related to data (including generation, recording, curation, processing, dissemination, sharing and use), algorithms (including artificial intelligence, artificial agents, machine learning and robots) and corresponding practices (including responsible innovation, programming, hacking and professional codes), in order to formulate and support morally good solutions (e.g. right conducts or right values). Data ethics builds on the foundation provided by computer and information ethics but, at the same time, it refines the approach endorsed so far in this research field, by shifting the level of abstraction of ethical enquiries, from being information-centric to being data-centric. This shift brings into focus the different moral dimensions of all kinds of data, even data that never translate directly into information but can be used to support actions or generate behaviours, for example. It highlights the need for ethical analyses to concentrate on the content and nature of computational operations—the interactions among hardware, software and data—rather than on the variety of digital technologies that enable them. And it emphasizes the complexity of the ethical challenges posed by data science. Because of such complexity, data ethics should be developed from the start as a macroethics, that is, as an overall framework that avoids narrow, ad hoc approaches and addresses the ethical impact and implications of data science and its applications within a consistent, holistic and inclusive framework. Only as a macroethics will data ethics provide solutions that can maximize the value of data science for our societies, for all of us and for our environments….(More)”

Table of Contents:

  • The dynamics of big data and human rights: the case of scientific research; Effy Vayena, John Tasioulas
  • Facilitating the ethical use of health data for the benefit of society: electronic health records, consent and the duty of easy rescue; Sebastian Porsdam Mann, Julian Savulescu, Barbara J. Sahakian
  • Faultless responsibility: on the nature and allocation of moral responsibility for distributed moral actions; Luciano Floridi
  • Compelling truth: legal protection of the infosphere against big data spills; Burkhard Schafer
  • Locating ethics in data science: responsibility and accountability in global and distributed knowledge production systems; Sabina Leonelli
  • Privacy is an essentially contested concept: a multi-dimensional analytic for mapping privacy; Deirdre K. Mulligan, Colin Koopman, Nick Doty
  • Beyond privacy and exposure: ethical issues within citizen-facing analytics; Peter Grindrod
  • The ethics of smart cities and urban science; Rob Kitchin
  • The ethics of big data as a public good: which public? Whose good? Linnet Taylor
  • Data philanthropy and the design of the infraethics for information societies; Mariarosaria Taddeo
  • The opportunities and ethics of big data: practical priorities for a national Council of Data Ethics; Olivia Varley-Winter, Hetan Shah
  • Data science ethics in government; Cat Drew
  • The ethics of data and of data science: an economist’s perspective; Jonathan Cave
  • What’s the good of a science platform? John Gallacher

 

A Practical Guide for Harnessing the Power of Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rella Kaplowitz at the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “The nonprofit organization Repair the World has one goal: to make public service a defining element of American Jewish life. To achieve its mission, Repair works to involve thousands of young adults every year in meaningful service opportunities — and inspires them to go from being one-time participants to regular volunteers.

How does it do that? In a word: data.

Using a series of surveys and evaluations, Repair learned that once people participate in two volunteer opportunities, they’re more likely to continue volunteering regularly. Repair has used that and other findings to inform its operations and strategy, and to accelerate its work to encourage individuals to make an enduring commitment to public service.

Many purpose-driven organizations like Repair the World are committing more brainpower, time, and money to gathering data, and nonprofit and foundation professionals alike are recognizing the importance of that effort.

And yet there is a difference between just having data and using it well. Recent surveys have found that 94 percent of nonprofit professionals felt they were not using data effectively, and that 75 percent of foundation professionals felt that evaluations conducted by and submitted to grant makers did not provide any meaningful insights.

To remedy this, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation (one of Repair the World’s donors) developed the Data Playbook, a new tool to help more organizations harness the power of data to make smarter decisions, gain insights, and accelerate progress….

In the purpose-driven sector, our work is critically important for shaping lives and strengthening communities. Now is the time for all of us to commit to using the data at our fingertips to advance the broad range of causes we work on — education, health care, leadership development, social-justice work, and much more…

We are in this together. Let’s get started. (More)”

Essays on collective intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Thesis by Yiftach Nagar: “This dissertation consists of three essays that advance our understanding of collective-intelligence: how it works, how it can be used, and how it can be augmented. I combine theoretical and empirical work, spanning qualitative inquiry, lab experiments, and design, exploring how novel ways of organizing, enabled by advancements in information technology, can help us work better, innovate, and solve complex problems.

The first essay offers a collective sensemaking model to explain structurational processes in online communities. I draw upon Weick’s model of sensemaking as committed-interpretation, which I ground in a qualitative inquiry into Wikipedia’s policy discussion pages, in attempt to explain how structuration emerges as interpretations are negotiated, and then committed through conversation. I argue that the wiki environment provides conditions that help commitments form, strengthen and diffuse, and that this, in turn, helps explain trends of stabilization observed in previous research.

In the second essay, we characterize a class of semi-structured prediction problems, where patterns are difficult to discern, data are difficult to quantify, and changes occur unexpectedly. Making correct predictions under these conditions can be extremely difficult, and is often associated with high stakes. We argue that in these settings, combining predictions from humans and models can outperform predictions made by groups of people, or computers. In laboratory experiments, we combined human and machine predictions, and find the combined predictions more accurate and more robust than predictions made by groups of only people or only machines.

The third essay addresses a critical bottleneck in open-innovation systems: reviewing and selecting the best submissions, in settings where submissions are complex intellectual artifacts whose evaluation require expertise. To aid expert reviewers, we offer a computational approach we developed and tested using data from the Climate CoLab – a large citizen science platform. Our models approximate expert decisions about the submissions with high accuracy, and their use can save review labor, and accelerate the review process….(More)”

How Companies Can Help Cities Close the Data Gap

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Shamina Singh in Governing: “Recent advances in data analytics have revolutionized the way many companies do business. Starbucks, for example, rolls out new beverages and chooses its store locations by analyzing customer, economic and other data. And as Amazon’s customers know so well, the company makes purchase recommendations to them in real time based on items they’ve viewed or bought. So why aren’t more of our cities leveraging data in the same way to improve services for their residents?

According to a recent report by Bloomberg Philanthropies’ What Works Cities initiative, city officials say they simply lack the capacity to do so. Nearly half pointed to a shortage of staff and financial resources dedicated to gathering and evaluating data.

This gap between companies’ and cities’ ability to use data is not surprising. Businesses have invested heavily in data and analytics in recent years, and they are spending an average of $7 million annually per company on data-related activities. These investments are made with the understanding that they will improve the companies’ bottom line, and they have started paying off.

City halls, on the other hand, find themselves hamstrung when it comes to investing in data and analytics. Despite recent growth, city revenues remain below pre-recession levels, with spending demands on the rise. Furthermore, many cities face the need to balance long-term opportunity with real short-term needs. Do you hire a data scientist — who may command a salary north of $200,000 — to research strategies to reduce crime in the long run, or do you hire more police officers to keep neighborhoods safe today?….

One way companies can help is through data philanthropy, leveraging their data analytics and capabilities to advance social progress. A step beyond conventional philanthropy and traditional corporate social-responsibility initiatives, data philanthropy is a new kind of response to social issues.

There are a number of ways cities could employ data philanthropy. For starters, they could partner with relevant apps to help ameliorate deteriorating roads. In Oklahoma City, for example, potholes are a particularly serious problem. Data from Waze, the community-based mapping and navigation app, could be leveraged to build a system through which residents could report potholes, allowing city services to efficiently fill them in.

Some data-philanthropy projects are already underway. Uber, for example, recently partnered with the city of Boston in the hopes that its data could help the city improve traffic congestion and community planning. Uber donates anonymized trip data by Zip code, allowing city officials to see the date and time of a trip, its duration and distance traveled. Boston’s transportation, neighborhood development and redevelopment agencies will have access to the data, equipping them with a new tool for more-effective policymaking.

While there is demonstrated enthusiasm from cities for more effective use of data to improve their residents’ lives, cities won’t be able to close the data gap on their own. Private-sector companies must answer the call. Helped in part by the better use of data, cities can create improved, more inclusive and stronger business environments. Who would argue with that goal?…(More)”

Helping Smart Cities Harness Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Linda Poon in CityLab: “Harnessing the power of open data is key to developing the smart cities of the future. But not all governments have the capacity—be that funding or human capital—to collect all the necessary information and turn it into a tool. That’s where Mapbox comes in.

Mapbox offers open-source mapping platforms, and is no stranger to turning complex data into visualizations cities can use, whether it’s mapping traffic fatalities in the U.S. or the conditions of streets in Washington, D.C., during last year’s East Coast blizzard. As part of the White House Smart Cities Initiative, which announced this week that it would make more than $80 million in tech investments this year, the company is rolling out Mapbox Cities, a new “mentorship” program that, for now, will give three cities the tools and support they need to solve some of their most pressing urban challenges. It issued a call for applications earlier this week, and responses have poured in from across the globe says Christina Franken, who specializes in smart cities at Mapbox.

“It’s very much an experimental approach to working with cities,” she says. “A lot of cities have open-data platforms but they don’t really do something with the data. So we’re trying to bridge that gap.”

During Hurricane Sandy, Mapbox launched a tool to help New Yorkers figure out if they were in an evacuation zone. (Mapbox)

But the company isn’t approaching the project blindly. In a way, Mapbox has the necessary experience to help cities jumpstart their own projects. Its resume includes, for example, a map that visualizes the sheer quantity of traffic fatalities along any commuting route in the U.S., showcasing its ability to turn a whopping five years’ worth of data into a public-safety tool. During 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, they created a disaster-relief tool to help New Yorkers find shelter.

And that’s just in the United States. Mapbox recently also started a group focusing primarily on humanitarian issues and bringing their mapping and data-collecting tools to aid organizations all over the world in times of crisis. It provides free access to its vast collection of resources, and works closely with collaborators to help them customize maps based on specific needs….(More)”

Philanthropy in Democratic Societies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Screen Shot 2016-10-02 at 9.11.45 AMNew book edited by Rob Reich, Chiara Cordelli, and Lucy Bernholz: “Philanthropy is everywhere. In 2013, in the United States alone, some $330 billion was recorded in giving, from large donations by the wealthy all the way down to informal giving circles. We tend to think of philanthropy as unequivocally good, but as the contributors to this book show, philanthropy is also an exercise of power. And like all forms of power, especially in a democratic society, it deserves scrutiny. Yet it rarely has been given serious attention. This book fills that gap, bringing together expert philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and legal scholars to ask fundamental and pressing questions about philanthropy’s role in democratic societies.
The contributors balance empirical and normative approaches, exploring both the roles philanthropy has actually played in societies and the roles it should play. They ask a multitude of questions: When is philanthropy good or bad for democracy? How does, and should, philanthropic power interact with expectations of equal citizenship and democratic political voice? What makes the exercise of philanthropic power legitimate? What forms of private activity in the public interest should democracy promote, and what forms should it resist? Examining these and many other topics, the contributors offer a vital assessment of philanthropy at a time when its power to affect public outcomes has never been greater…(More)”

Twitter, UN Global Pulse announce data partnership

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PressRelease: “Twitter and UN Global Pulse today announced a partnership that will provide the United Nations with access to Twitter’s data tools to support efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted by world leaders last year.

Every day, people around the world send hundreds of millions of Tweets in dozens of languages. This public data contains real-time information on many issues including the cost of food, availability of jobs, access to health care, quality of education, and reports of natural disasters. This partnership will allow the development and humanitarian agencies of the UN to turn these social conversations into actionable information to aid communities around the globe.

“The Sustainable Development Goals are first and foremost about people, and Twitter’s unique data stream can help us truly take a real-time pulse on priorities and concerns — particularly in regions where social media use is common — to strengthen decision-making. Strong public-private partnerships like this show the vast potential of big data to serve the public good,” said Robert Kirkpatrick, Director of UN Global Pulse.

“We are incredibly proud to partner with the UN in support of the Sustainable Development Goals,” said Chris Moody, Twitter’s VP of Data Services. “Twitter data provides a live window into the public conversations that communities around the world are having, and we believe that the increased potential for research and innovation through this partnership will further the UN’s efforts to reach the Sustainable Development Goals.”

Organizations and business around the world currently use Twitter data in many meaningful ways, and this unique data source enables them to leverage public information at scale to better inform their policies and decisions. These partnerships enable innovative uses of Twitter data, while protecting the privacy and safety of Twitter users.

UN Global Pulse’s new collaboration with Twitter builds on existing R&D that has shown the power of social media for social impact, like measuring the impact of public health campaigns, tracking reports of rising food prices, or prioritizing needs after natural disasters….(More)”

What we see when we see transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Taylor at the RSA: “…social coordination theory…. is one of the most powerful ways to analyse complex social problems and to develop effective solutions. I spoke this morning to the Transparency Task Force and it gave me an opportunity to apply the theory to the issue of corporate openness.

First, a very brief recap of the theory:

My own approach focusses on the four modes as approaches to the challenge of social coordination. Human beings are complex social beings who have to work together to survive and flourish. The hierarchical perspective puts emphasis on leadership, strategy and expertise as the way to coordinate human activity. The solidaristic view emphasises the glue of belonging and shared values. The individualistic view sees coordination as emerging largely spontaneously and its goal being to provide a platform of individual ambition and competitive endeavour. The fatalistic view sees effective coordination, variously, as intractable, unlikely to deliver intended outcomes or irrelevant to the things that make it hardest to be human.

Each mode has a substrate in human evolution and psychology – these competing theories have emerged from who we are as a species. Each mode or combination of modes has been dominant at different times in our history. Also, each mode generates behavioural and ideological predispositions: Solidaristic views – which emphasise membership and values – are often associated with rigid ideologies (on both the left and right); individualism goes with liberal attitudes (again of both left and right varieties).

In a kind of fractal which stretches from individual preferences to global problem solving, each mode is available as a perspective on complex social problems. Crucially, for the kind of problems which the modern world increasingly generates, the best solutions will combine aspects of each method. But there is a problem: each mode is, in part, a critique of the others. Each has both benign and malign aspects; hierarchy can be strategic and overbearing, individualism can be enterprising and selfish, solidarity can be altruistic and tribal, fatalism can be stoical and defeatist. The theory explains why success can so quickly turn to failure. Even when the modes are successfully combined – what I call a ‘fully engaged’ solution – internal dynamics or external shocks will sooner or later upset the balance.

This is all rather theoretical so let me be more concrete. If we are trying to solve a problem like encouraging and enabling a corporation to be more transparent we need to understand the arguments both in favour and against such a move from each of the perspectives. If we don’t many people, many ideas and many approaches will be ignored. In short, we will be much more likely to fail.

Here is a simple guide to what might be seen as the pros and cons of greater transparency from the four standpoints:

perspectives on transparency Matthew Taylor

People in authority and those who see things from a hierarchical perspective (we all see things from different perspectives at different times and in different places) will worry that transparency will make decision making more difficult and that, by opening up things like the underlying business model to scrutiny by customers and competitors, it would threaten the interests of the organisation. Conversely, the hierarchical case for transparency is that it can increase trust and understanding towards leaders and the challenges they face and it can aid alignment, clarity and commitment by exposing practices that don’t fit with corporate strategy.

Those who approach things from a solidaristic perspective are often the most outspoken champions of transparency. They see it as increasing integrity as companies have to live up to their stated values and fairness as unfair practices are exposed.  However, there are also solidaristic concerns; what if transparency exposes vulnerable people or if transparency makes life harder for the team to which I belong (the company or my part of the company)?

From an individualistic starting point transparency can be viewed suspiciously as promoting a focus on process rather than outcomes and also being adverse to risk and reward (you can justify the means by the ends only if you have been able to achieve the ends without someone looking over your shoulder). On the other hand, the individualistic case for transparency can cite its contribution to innovation (by looking under the bonnet and seeing all the working parts we have better insights into what can be improved) and the promotion of rewards based on fair competition instead of covert rent-seeking or organisational nepotism.

Finally, those in a fatalistic mind set will tend to see transparency as either irrelevant or – and this is a more forensic critique – illusory (the secret stuff will just get hidden better). However there is also an appeal to be made to fatalists that transparency can help reveal warning signs of future dangers and make it easier to mount a defence when things go wrong (‘even if we failed, we can show that we tried’).

To win the case for transparency and also to implement it effectively its advocates need to stress the positives from the different perspectives and also address the legitimate concerns; both of which should make it easier to confront objections that are not reasonable. …(More)”

Living in the World of Both/And

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Adene Sacks & Heather McLeod Grant  in SSIR: “In 2011, New York Times data scientist Jake Porway wrote a blog post lamenting the fact that most data scientists spend their days creating apps to help users find restaurants, TV shows, or parking spots, rather than addressing complicated social issues like helping identify which teens are at risk of suicide or creating a poverty index of Africa using satellite data.

That post hit a nerve. Data scientists around the world began clamoring for opportunities to “do good with data.” Porway—at the center of this storm—began to convene these scientists and connect them to nonprofits via hackathon-style events called DataDives, designed to solve big social and environmental problems. There was so much interest, he eventually quit his day job at the Times and created the organization DataKind to steward this growing global network of data science do-gooders.

At the same time, in the same city, another movement was taking shape—#GivingTuesday, an annual global giving event fueled by social media. In just five years, #GivingTuesday has reshaped how nonprofits think about fundraising and how donors give. And yet, many don’t know that 92nd Street Y (92Y)—a 140-year-old Jewish community and cultural center in Manhattan, better known for its star-studded speaker series, summer camps, and water aerobics classes—launched it.

What do these two examples have in common? One started as a loose global network that engaged data scientists in solving problems, and then became an organization to help support the larger movement. The other started with a legacy organization, based at a single site, and catalyzed a global movement that has reshaped how we think about philanthropy. In both cases, the founding groups have incorporated the best of both organizations and networks.

Much has been written about the virtues of thinking and acting collectively to solve seemingly intractable challenges. Nonprofit leaders are being implored to put mission above brand, build networks not just programs, and prioritize collaboration over individual interests. And yet, these strategies are often in direct contradiction to the conventional wisdom of organization-building: differentiating your brand, developing unique expertise, and growing a loyal donor base.

A similar tension is emerging among network and movement leaders. These leaders spend their days steering the messy process required to connect, align, and channel the collective efforts of diverse stakeholders. It’s not always easy: Those searching to sustain movements often cite the lost momentum of the Occupy movement as a cautionary note. Increasingly, network leaders are looking at how to adapt the process, structure, and operational expertise more traditionally associated with organizations to their needs—but without co-opting or diminishing the energy and momentum of their self-organizing networks…

Welcome to the World of “Both/And”

Today’s social change leaders—be they from business, government, or nonprofits—must learn to straddle the leadership mindsets and practices of both networks and organizations, and know when to use which approach. Leaders like Porway, and Henry Timms and Asha Curran of 92Y can help show us the way.

How do these leaders work with the “both/and” mindset?

First, they understand and leverage the strengths of both organizations and networks—and anticipate their limitations. As Timms describes it, leaders need to be “bilingual” and embrace what he has called “new power.” Networks can be powerful generators of new talent or innovation around complex multi-sector challenges. It’s useful to take a network approach when innovating new ideas, mobilizing and engaging others in the work, or wanting to expand reach and scale quickly. However, networks can dissipate easily without specific “handrails,” or some structure to guide and support their work. This is where they need some help from the organizational mindset and approach.

On the flip side, organizations are good at creating centralized structures to deliver products or services, manage risk, oversee quality control, and coordinate concrete functions like communications or fundraising. However, often that efficiency and effectiveness can calcify over time, becoming a barrier to new ideas and growth opportunities. When organizational boundaries are too rigid, it is difficult to engage the outside world in ideating or mobilizing on an issue. This is when organizations need an infusion of the “network mindset.”

 

…(More)