New report by Beth Simone Noveck and Stefaan Verhulst: “…With rates of trust in government at an all-time low, technology and innovation will be essential to achieve the next administration’s goals and to deliver services more effectively and efficiently. The next administration must prioritize using technology to improve governing and must develop plans to do so in the transition… This paper provides analysis and a set of concrete recommendations, both for the period of transition before the inauguration, and for the start of the next presidency, to encourage and sustain innovation in government. Leveraging the insights from the experts... (More >)
How the Federal Government is thinking about Artificial Intelligence
Mohana Ravindranath at NextGov: “Since May, the White House has been exploring the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning for the public: that is, how the federal government should be investing in the technology to improve its own operations. The technologies, often modeled after the way humans take in, store and use new information, could help researchers find patterns in genetic data or help judges decide sentences for criminals based on their likelihood to end up there again, among other applications. … Here’s a look at how some federal groups are thinking about the technology: Police data: At... (More >)
How Tech Giants Are Devising Real Ethics for Artificial Intelligence
John Markoff in the New York Times: “For years, science-fiction moviemakers have been making us fear the bad things that artificially intelligent machines might do to their human creators. But for the next decade or two, our biggest concern is more likely to be that robots will take away our jobs or bump into us on the highway. Now five of the world’s largest tech companies are trying to create a standard of ethics around the creation of artificial intelligence. While science fiction has focused on the existential threat of A.I. to humans,researchers at Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and... (More >)
Data and Democracy
(Free) book by Andrew Therriault: “The 2016 US elections will be remembered for many things, but for those who work in politics, 2016 may be best remembered as the year that the use of data in politics reached its maturity. Through a collection of essays from leading experts in the field, this report explores how political data science helps to drive everything from overall strategy and messaging to individual voter contacts and advertising. Curated by Andrew Therriault, former Director of Data Science for the Democratic National Committee, this illuminating report includes first-hand accounts from Democrats, Republicans, and members of... (More >)
Make Data Sharing Routine to Prepare for Public Health Emergencies
Jean-Paul Chretien, Caitlin M. Rivers, and Michael A. Johansson in PLOS Medicine: “In February 2016, Wellcome Trust organized a pledge among leading scientific organizations and health agencies encouraging researchers to release data relevant to the Zika outbreak as rapidly and widely as possible [1]. This initiative echoed a September 2015 World Health Organization (WHO) consultation that assessed data sharing during the recent West Africa Ebola outbreak and called on researchers to make data publicly available during public health emergencies [2]. These statements were necessary because the traditional way of communicating research results—publication in peer-reviewed journals, often months or years... (More >)
The ‘who’ and ‘what’ of #diabetes on Twitter
Mariano Beguerisse-Díaz, Amy K. McLennan, Guillermo Garduño-Hernández, Mauricio Barahona, and Stanley J. Ulijaszek at arXiv: “Social media are being increasingly used for health promotion. Yet the landscape of users and messages in such public fora is not well understood. So far, studies have typically focused either on people suffering from a disease, or on agencies that address it, but have not looked more broadly at all the participants in the debate and discussions. We study the conversation about diabetes on Twitter through the systematic analysis of a large collection of tweets containing the term ‘diabetes’, as well as the... (More >)
Effect of Government Data Openness on a Knowledge-based Economy
Jae-Nam Lee, Juyeon Ham and Byounggu Choi at Procedia Computer Science: “Many governments have recently begun to adopt the concept of open innovation. However, studies on the openness of government data and its effect on the global competitiveness have not received much attention. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the effects of government data openness on a knowledge-based economy at the government level. The proposed model was analyzed using secondary data collected from three different reports. The findings indicate that government data openness positively affects the formation of knowledge bases in a country and that the level of knowledge... (More >)
Taking a More Sophisticated Look at Human Beings
Nathan Collins at Pacific Standard: “Are people fundamentally selfish, or are they cooperators? Actually, it’s kind of an odd question—after all, why are those the only options? The answer is that those options are derived in large part from philosophy and classical economic theory, rather than data. In a new paper, researchers have flipped the script, using observations of simple social situations to show that optimism, pessimism, envy, and trust, rather than selfishness and sacrifice, are the basic ingredients of our behavior. That conclusion advances wider “efforts toward the identification of basic behavioral phenotypes,” or categories of behavior, and... (More >)
Legal confusion threatens to slow data science
Simon Oxenham in Nature: “Knowledge from millions of biological studies encoded into one network — that is Daniel Himmelstein’s alluring description of Hetionet, a free online resource that melds data from 28 public sources on links between drugs, genes and diseases. But for a product built on public information, obtaining legal permissions has been surprisingly tough. When Himmelstein, a data scientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, contacted researchers for permission to reproduce their work openly, several said they were surprised that he had to ask. “It never really crossed my mind that licensing is an issue here,”... (More >)
Expanding citizen science models to enhance open innovation
Kendra L. Smith in the Conversation: “Over the years, citizen scientists have provided vital data and contributed in invaluable ways to various scientific quests. But they’re typically relegated to helping traditional scientists complete tasks the pros don’t have the time or resources to deal with on their own. Citizens are asked to count wildlife, for instance, or classify photos that are of interest to the lead researchers. This type of top-down engagement has consigned citizen science to the fringes, where it fills a manpower gap but not much more. As a result, its full value has not been realized.... (More >)
