Discovering the Language of Data: Personal Pattern Languages and the Social Construction of Meaning from Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Kim Erwin; Maggee Bond; Aashika Jain in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews: “This paper attempts to address two issues relevant to the sense-making of Big Data. First, it presents a case study for how a large dataset can be transformed into both a visual language and, in effect, a ‘text’ that can be read and interpreted by human beings. The case study comes from direct observation of graduate students at the IIT Institute of Design who investigated task-switching behaviours, as documented by productivity software on a single user’s laptop and a smart phone. Through a series of experiments with the resulting dataset, the team effects a transformation of that data into a catalogue of visual primitives — a kind of iconic alphabet — that allow others to ‘read’ the data as a corpus and, more provocatively, suggest the formation of a personal pattern language. Second, this paper offers a model for human-technical collaboration in the sense-making of data, as demonstrated by this and other teams in the class. Current sense-making models tend to be data- and technology-centric, and increasingly presume data visualization as a primary point of entry of humans into Big Data systems. This alternative model proposes that meaningful interpretation of data emerges from a more elaborate interplay between algorithms, data and human beings….(More)”

 

Eight ways to make government more experimental

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Jonathan Breckon et al at NESTA: “When the banners and bunting have been tidied away after the May election, and a new bunch of ministers sit at their Whitehall desks, could they embrace a more experimental approach to government?

Such an approach requires a degree of humility.  Facing up to the fact that we don’t have all the answers for the next five years.  We need to test things out, evaluate new ways of doing things with the best of social science, and grow what works.  And drop policies that fail.

But how best to go about it?  Here are our 8 ways to make it a reality:

  1. Make failure OK. A more benign attitude to risk is central to experimentation.  As a 2003 Cabinet Office review entitled Trying it Out said, a pilot that reveals a policy to be flawed should be ‘viewed as a success rather than a failure, having potentially helped to avert a potentially larger political and/or financial embarrassment’. Pilots are particularly important in fast moving areas such as technology to try promising fresh ideas in real-time. Our ‘Visible Classroom’ pilot tried an innovative approach to teacher CPD developed from technology for television subtitling.
  2. Avoid making policies that are set in stone.  Allowing policy to be more project–based, flexible and time-limited could encourage room for manoeuvre, according to a previous Nesta report State of Uncertainty; Innovation policy through experimentation.  The Department for Work and Pensions’ Employment Retention and Advancement pilot scheme to help people back to work was designed to influence the shape of legislation. It allowed for amendments and learning as it was rolled out.  We need more policy experiments like this.
  3. Work with the grain of current policy environment. Experimenters need to be opportunists. We need to be nimble and flexible. Ready to seize windows of opportunity to  experiment. Some services have to be rolled out in stages due to budget constraints. This offers opportunities to try things out before going national. For instance, The Mexican Oportunidades anti-poverty experiments which eventually reached 5.8 million households in all Mexican states, had to be trialled first in a handful of areas. Greater devolution is creating a patchwork of different policy priorities, funding and delivery models – so-called ‘natural experiments’. Let’s seize the opportunity to deliberately test and compare across different jurisdictions. What about a trial of basic income in Northern Ireland, for example, along the lines of recent Finnish proposals, or universal free childcare in Scotland?
  4. Experiments need the most robust and appropriate evaluation methods such as, if appropriate, Randomised Controlled Trials. Other methods, such as qualitative research may be needed to pry open the ‘black box’ of policies – to learn about why and how things are working. Civil servants should use the government trial advice panel as a source of expertise when setting up experiments.
  5. Grow the public debate about the importance of experimentation. Facebook had to apologise after a global backlash to psychological experiments on their 689,000 users web-users. Approval by ethics committees – normal practice for trials in hospitals and universities – is essential, but we can’t just rely on experts. We need a dedicated public understanding of experimentation programmes, perhaps run by Evidence Matters or Ask for Evidence campaigns at Sense about Science. Taking part in an experiment in itself can be a learning opportunity creating  an appetite amongt the public, something we have found from running an RCT with schools.
  6. Create ‘Skunkworks’ institutions. New or improved institutional structures within government can also help with experimentation.   The Behavioural Insights Team, located in Nesta,  operates a classic ‘skunkworks’ model, semi-detached from day-to-day bureaucracy. The nine UK What Works Centres help try things out semi-detached from central power, such as the The Education Endowment Foundation who source innovations widely from across the public and private sectors- including Nesta-  rather than generating ideas exclusively in house or in government.
  7. Find low-cost ways to experiment. People sometimes worry that trials are expensive and complicated.  This does not have to be the case. Experiments to encourage organ donation by the Government Digital Service and Behavioural Insights Team involved an estimated cost of £20,000.  This was because the digital experiments didn’t involve setting up expensive new interventions – just changing messages on  web pages for existing services. Some programmes do, however, need significant funding to evaluate and budgets need to be found for it. A memo from the White House Office for Management and Budget has asked for new Government schemes seeking funding to allocate a proportion of their budgets to ‘randomized controlled trials or carefully designed quasi-experimental techniques’.
  8. Be bold. A criticism of some experiments is that they only deal with the margins of policy and delivery. Government officials and researchers should set up more ambitious experiments on nationally important big-ticket issues, from counter-terrorism to innovation in jobs and housing….(More)

New Desktop Application Has Potential to Increase Asteroid Detection, Now Available to Public

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

NASA Press Release: “A software application based on an algorithm created by a NASA challenge has the potential to increase the number of new asteroid discoveries by amateur astronomers.

Analysis of images taken of our solar system’s main belt asteroids between Mars and Jupiter using the algorithm showed a 15 percent increase in positive identification of new asteroids.

During a panel Sunday at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, NASA representatives discussed how citizen scientists have made a difference in asteroid hunting. They also announced the release of a desktop software application developed by NASA in partnership with Planetary Resources, Inc., of Redmond, Washington. The application is based on an Asteroid Data Hunter-derived algorithm that analyzes images for potential asteroids. It’s a tool that can be used by amateur astronomers and citizen scientists.

The Asteroid Data Hunter challenge was part of NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge. The data hunter contest series, which was conducted in partnership with Planetary Resources under a Space Act Agreement, was announced at the 2014 South by Southwest Festival and concluded in December. The series offered a total of $55,000 in awards for participants to develop significantly improved algorithms to identify asteroids in images captured by ground-based telescopes. The winning solutions of each piece of the contest combined to create an application using the best algorithm that increased the detection sensitivity, minimized the number of false positives, ignored imperfections in the data, and ran effectively on all computer systems.

“The Asteroid Grand Challenge is seeking non-traditional partnerships to bring the citizen science and space enthusiast community into NASA’s work,” said Jason Kessler, program executive for NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge. “The Asteroid Data Hunter challenge has been successful beyond our hopes, creating something that makes a tangible difference to asteroid hunting astronomers and highlights the possibility for more people to play a role in protecting our planet.”…

The new asteroid hunting application can be downloaded at:

http://topcoder.com/asteroids

For information about NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/asteroidinitiative

Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Shannon Mattern at Places: “We know what rocket science looks like in the movies: a windowless bunker filled with blinking consoles, swivel chairs, and shirt-sleeved men in headsets nonchalantly relaying updates from “Houston” to outer space. Lately, that vision of Mission Control has taken over City Hall. NASA meets Copacabana, proclaimed the New York Times, hailing Rio de Janeiro’s Operations Center as a “potentially lucrative experiment that could shape the future of cities around the world.” The Times photographed an IBM executive in front of a seemingly endless wall of screens integrating data from 30 city agencies, including transit video, rainfall patterns, crime statistics, car accidents, power failures, and more. 1

Futuristic control rooms have proliferated in dozens of global cities. Baltimore has its CitiStat Room, where department heads stand at a podium before a wall of screens and account for their units’ performance.  The Mayor’s office in London’s City Hall features a 4×3 array of iPads mounted in a wooden panel, which seems an almost parodic, Terry Gilliam-esque take on the Brazilian Ops Center. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned an iPad app – the “No. 10 Dashboard” (a reference to his residence at 10 Downing Street) – which gives him access to financial, housing, employment, and public opinion data. As The Guardian reported, “the prime minister said that he could run government remotely from his smartphone.”

This is the age of Dashboard Governance, heralded by gurus like Stephen Few, founder of the “visual business intelligence” and “sensemaking” consultancy Perceptual Edge, who defines the dashboard as a “visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.” A well-designed dashboard, he says — one that makes proper use of bullet graphs, sparklines, and other visualization techniques informed by the “brain science” of aesthetics and cognition — can afford its users not only a perceptual edge, but a performance edge, too. The ideal display offers a big-picture view of what is happening in real time, along with information on historical trends, so that users can divine the how and why and redirect future action. As David Nettleton emphasizes, the dashboard’s utility extends beyond monitoring “the current situation”; it also “allows a manager to … make provisions, and take appropriate actions.”….

The dashboard market now extends far beyond the corporate world. In 1994, New York City police commissioner William Bratton adapted former officer Jack Maple’s analog crime maps to create the CompStat model of aggregating and mapping crime statistics. Around the same time, the administrators of Charlotte, North Carolina, borrowed a business idea — Robert Kaplan’s and David Norton’s “total quality management” strategy known as the “Balanced Scorecard” — and began tracking performance in five “focus areas” defined by the City Council: housing and neighborhood development, community safety, transportation, economic development, and the environment. Atlanta followed Charlotte’s example in creating its own city dashboard.

In 1999, Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley, confronting a crippling crime rate and high taxes, designed CitiStat, “an internal process of using metrics to create accountability within his government.” (This rhetoric of data-tested internal “accountability” is prevalent in early dashboard development efforts.) The project turned to face the public in 2003, when Baltimore launched a website of city operational statistics, which inspired DCStat (2005), Maryland’s StateStat (2007), and NYCStat (2008). Since then, myriad other states and metro areas — driven by a “new managerialist” approach to urban governance, committed to “benchmarking” their performance against other regions, and obligated to demonstrate compliance with sustainability agendas — have developed their own dashboards.

The Open Michigan Mi Dashboard is typical of these efforts. The state website presents data on education, health and wellness, infrastructure, “talent” (employment, innovation), public safety, energy and environment, financial health, and seniors. You (or “Mi”) can monitor the state’s performance through a side-by-side comparison of “prior” and “current” data, punctuated with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon indicating the state’s “progress” on each metric. Another click reveals a graph of annual trends and a citation for the data source, but little detail about how the data are actually derived. How the public is supposed to use this information is an open question….(More)”

Why governments need guinea pigs for policies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jonathan Breckon in the Guardian:”People are unlikely to react positively to the idea of using citizens as guinea pigs; many will be downright disgusted. But there are times when government must experiment on us in the search for knowledge and better policy….

Though history calls into question the ethics of experimentation, unless we try things out, we will never learn. The National Audit Office says that £66bn worth of government projects have no plans to evaluate their impact. It is unethical to roll out policies in this arbitrary way. We have to experiment on a small scale to have a better understanding of how things work before rolling out policies across the UK. This is just as relevant to social policy, as it is to science and medicine, as set out in a new report by the Alliance for Useful Evidence.

Whether it’s the best ways to teach our kids to read, designing programmes to get unemployed people back to work, or encouraging organ donation – if the old ways don’t work, we have to test new ones. And that testing can’t always be done by a committee in Whitehall or in a university lab.

Experimentation can’t happen in isolation. What works in Lewisham or Londonnery, might not work in Lincoln – or indeed across the UK. For instance, there is a huge amount debate around the current practice of teaching children to read and spell using phonics, which was based on a small-scale study in Clackmannanshire, as well as evidence from the US. A government-commissioned review on the evidence for phonics led professor Carole Torgerson, then at York University, to warn against making national policy off the back of just one small Scottish trial.

One way round this problem is to do larger experiments. The increasing use of the internet in public services allows for more and faster experimentation, on a larger scale for lower cost – the randomised controlled trial on voter mobilisation that went to 61 million users in the 2010 US midterm elections, for example. However, the use of the internet doesn’t get us off the ethical hook. Facebook had to apologise after a global backlash to secret psychological tests on their 689,000 users.

Contentious experiments should be approved by ethics committees – normal practice for trials in hospitals and universities.

We are also not interested in freewheeling trial-and-error; robust and appropriate research techniques to learn from experiments are vital. It’s best to see experimentation as a continuum, ranging from the messiness of attempts to try something new to experiments using the best available social science, such as randomised controlled trials.

Experimental government means avoiding an approach where everything is fixed from the outset. What we need is “a spirit of experimentation, unburdened by promises of success”, as recommended by the late professor Roger Jowell, author of the 2003 Cabinet Office report, Trying it out [pdf]….(More)”

Big Data for Social Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to a Special Issue of the Journal “Big Data” by Catlett Charlie and Ghani Rayid: “…organizations focused on social good are realizing the potential as well but face several challenges as they seek to become more data-driven. The biggest challenge they face is a paucity of examples and case studies on how data can be used for social good. This special issue of Big Data is targeted at tackling that challenge and focuses on highlighting some exciting and impactful examples of work that uses data for social good. The special issue is just one example of the recent surge in such efforts by the data science community. …

This special issue solicited case studies and problem statements that would either highlight (1) the use of data to solve a social problem or (2) social challenges that need data-driven solutions. From roughly 20 submissions, we selected 5 articles that exemplify this type of work. These cover five broad application areas: international development, healthcare, democracy and government, human rights, and crime prevention.

“Understanding Democracy and Development Traps Using a Data-Driven Approach” (Ranganathan et al.) details a data-driven model between democracy, cultural values, and socioeconomic indicators to identify a model of two types of “traps” that hinder the development of democracy. They use historical data to detect causal factors and make predictions about the time expected for a given country to overcome these traps.

“Targeting Villages for Rural Development Using Satellite Image Analysis” (Varshney et al.) discusses two case studies that use data and machine learning techniques for international economic development—solar-powered microgrids in rural India and targeting financial aid to villages in sub-Saharan Africa. In the process, the authors stress the importance of understanding the characteristics and provenance of the data and the criticality of incorporating local “on the ground” expertise.

In “Human Rights Event Detection from Heterogeneous Social Media Graphs,” Chen and Neil describe efficient and scalable techniques to use social media in order to detect emerging patterns in human rights events. They test their approach on recent events in Mexico and show that they can accurately detect relevant human rights–related tweets prior to international news sources, and in some cases, prior to local news reports, which could potentially lead to more timely, targeted, and effective advocacy by relevant human rights groups.

“Finding Patterns with a Rotten Core: Data Mining for Crime Series with Core Sets” (Wang et al.) describes a case study with the Cambridge Police Department, using a subspace clustering method to analyze the department’s full housebreak database, which contains detailed information from thousands of crimes from over a decade. They find that the method allows human crime analysts to handle vast amounts of data and provides new insights into true patterns of crime committed in Cambridge…..(More)

Our New Three Rs: Rigor, Relevance, and Readability

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stephen J. Del Rosso in Governance: “…Because of the dizzying complexity of the contemporary world, the quest for a direct relationship between academic scholarship and its policy utility is both quixotic and unnecessary. The 2013 U.S. Senate’s vote to prohibit funding for political science projects through the National Science Foundation, except for those certified “as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States,” revealed a fundamental misreading of the nonlinear path between idea and policy. Rather than providing a clear blueprint for addressing emergent or long-standing challenges, a more feasible role for academic scholarship is what political scientist Roland Paris describes as helping to “order the world in which officials operate.” Scholarly works can “influence practitioners’ understandings of what is possible or desirable in a particular policy field or set of circumstances,” he believes, by “creating operational frameworks for … identifying options and implementing policies.”

It is sometimes claimed that think tanks should play the main role in conveying scholarly insights to policymakers. But, however they may have mastered the sound bite, the putative role of think tanks as effective transmission belts for policy-relevant ideas is limited by their lack of academic rigor and systematic peer review. There is also a tendency, particularly among some “Inside the Beltway” experts, to trim their sails to the prevailing political winds and engage in self-censorship to keep employment options open in current or future presidential administrations. Scholarship’s comparative advantage in the marketplace of ideas is also evident in terms of its anticipatory function—the ability to loosen the intellectual bolts for promising policies not quite ready for implementation. A classic example is Swedish Nobel laureate Gunner Myrdal’s 1944 study of race relations, The American Dilemma, which was largely ignored and even disavowed by its sponsors for over a decade until it proved essential to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Moreover, it should also be noted, rather than providing a detailed game plan for addressing the problem of race in the country, Myrdal’s work was a quintessential example of the power of scholarship to frame critically important issues.

To bridge the scholarship–policy gap, academics must balance rigor and relevance with a third “R”—readability. There is no shortage of important scholarly work that goes unnoticed or unread because of its presentation. Scholars interested in having influence beyond the ivory tower need to combine their pursuit of disciplinary requirements with efforts to make their work more intelligible and accessible to a broader audience. For example, new forms of dissemination, such as blogs and other social media innovations, provide policy-relevant scholars with ample opportunities to supplement more traditional academic outlets. The recent pushback from the editors of the International Studies Association’s journals to the announced prohibition on their blogging is one indication that the cracks in the old system are already appearing.

At the risk of oversimplification, there are three basic tribes populating the political science field. One tribe comprises those who “get it” when it comes to the importance of policy relevance, a second eschews such engagement with the real world in favor of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and a third is made up of anxious untenured assistant professors who seek to follow the path that will best provide them with secure employment. If war, as was famously said, is too important to be left to the generals, then the future of the political science field is too important to be left to the intellectual ostriches who bury their heads in self-referential esoterica. However, the first tribe needs to be supported, and the third tribe needs to be shown that there is professional value in engaging with the world, both to enlighten and, perhaps more importantly, to provoke—a sentiment the policy-relevant scholar and inveterate provocateur, Huntington, would surely have endorsed…(More)”

Data democracy – increased supply of geospatial information and expanded participatory processes in the production of data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Max Craglia & Lea Shanley: “The global landscape in the supply, co-creation and use of geospatial data is changing very rapidly with new satellites, sensors and mobile devices reconfiguring the traditional lines of demand and supply and the number of actors involved. In this paper we chart some of these technology-led developments and then focus on the opportunities they have created for the increased participation of the public in generating and contributing information for a wide range of uses, scientific and non. Not all this information is open or geospatial, but sufficiently large portions of it are to make it one of the most significant phenomena of the last decade. In fact, we argue that while satellite and sensors have exponentially increased the volumes of geospatial information available, the participation of the public is transformative because it expands the range of participants and stakeholders in society using and producing geospatial information, with opportunities for more direct participation in science, politics and social action…(View full text)”

Data scientists rejoice! There’s an online marketplace selling algorithms from academics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

SiliconRepublic: “Algorithmia, an online marketplace that connects computer science researchers’ algorithms with developers who may have uses for them, has exited its private beta.

Algorithms are essential to our online experience. Google uses them to determine which search results are the most relevant. Facebook uses them to decide what should appear in your news feed. Netflix uses them to make movie recommendations.

Founded in 2013, Algorithmia could be described as an app store for algorithms, with over 800 of them available in its library. These algorithms provide the means of completing various tasks in the fields of machine learning, audio and visual processing, and computer vision.

Algorithmia found a way to monetise algorithms by creating a platform where academics can share their creations and charge a royalty fee per use, while developers and data scientists can request specific algorithms in return for a monetary reward. One such suggestion is for ‘punctuation prediction’, which would insert correct punctuation and capitalisation in speech-to-text translation.

While it’s not the first algorithm marketplace online, Algorithmia will accept and sell any type of algorithm and host them on its servers. What this means is that developers need only add a simple piece of code to their software in order to send a query to Algorithmia’s servers, so the algorithm itself doesn’t have to be integrated in its entirety….

Computer science researchers can spend years developing algorithms, only for them to be published in a scientific journal never to be read by software engineers.

Algorithmia intends to create a community space where academics and engineers can meet to discuss and refine these algorithms for practical use. A voting and commenting system on the site will allow users to engage and even share insights on how contributions can be improved.

To that end, Algorithmia’s ultimate goal is to advance the development of algorithms as well as their discovery and use….(More)”

Turning smartphones into personal, real-time pollution-location monitors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kurzweil Newsletter: “Scientists reporting in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology have used smartphone and sensing technology to better pinpoint times and locations of the worst air pollution, which is associated with respiratory and cardiovascular problems.

Most such studies create a picture of exposure based on air pollution levels outside people’s homes. This approach ignores big differences in air quality in school and work environments. It also ignores spikes in pollution that happen over the course of the day such as during rush hour.

To fill in these gaps, Mark J. Nieuwenhuijsen and colleagues in Spain, The Netherlands, and the U.S. equipped 54 school children from from 29 different schools around Barcelona with smartphones that could track their location and physical activity. The children also received sensors that continuously measured the ambient levels of black carbon, a component of soot. Although most children spent less than 4 percent of their day traveling to and from school, this exposure contributed 13 percent of their total potential black carbon exposure.

The study was associated with BREATHE, an epidemiological study of the relation between air pollution and brain development.

The researchers conclude that mobile technologies could contribute valuable new insights into air pollution exposure….

More: Mark J. Nieuwenhuijsen, David Donaire-Gonzalez, Ioar Rivas, Montserrat de Castro, Marta Cirach, Gerard Hoek, Edmund Seto, Michael Jerrett, Jordi Sunyer. Variability in and Agreement between Modeled and Personal Continuously Measured Black Carbon Levels Using Novel Smartphone and Sensor Technologies. Environmental Science & Technology, 2015; 150209104136008 DOI: 10.1021/es505362x