Crowdsourcing, Citizen Science, and Data-sharing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sapien Labs: “The future of human neuroscience lies in crowdsourcing, citizen science and data sharing but it is not without its minefields.

A recent Scientific American article by Daniel Goodwin, “Why Neuroscience Needs Hackers,” makes the case that neuroscience, like many fields today, is drowning in data, begging for application of advances in computer science like machine learning. Neuroscientists are able to gather realms of neural data, but often without big data mechanisms and frameworks to synthesize them.

The SA article describes the work of Sebastian Seung, a Princeton neuroscientist, who recently mapped the neural connections of the human retina from an “overwhelming mass” of electron microscopy data using state of the art A.I. and massive crowd-sourcing. Seung incorporated the A.I. into a game called “Eyewire” where 1,000s of volunteers scored points while improving the neural map.   Although the article’s title emphasizes advanced A.I., Dr. Seung’s experiment points even more to crowdsourcing and open science, avenues for improving research that have suddenly become easy and powerful with today’s internet. Eyewire perhaps epitomizes successful crowdsourcing — using an application that gathers, represents, and analyzes data uniformly according to researchers’ needs.

Crowdsourcing is seductive in its potential but risky for those who aren’t sure how to control it to get what they want. For researchers who don’t want to become hackers themselves, trying to turn the diversity of data produced by a crowd into conclusive results might seem too much of a headache to make it worthwhile. This is probably why the SA article title says we need hackers. The crowd is there but using it depends on innovative software engineering. A lot of researchers could really use software designed to flexibly support a diversity of crowdsourcing, some AI to enable things like crowd validation and big data tools.

The Potential

The SA article also points to Open BCI (brain-computer interface), mentioned here in other posts, as an example of how traditional divisions between institutional and amateur (or “citizen”) science are now crumbling; Open BCI is a community of professional and citizen scientists doing principled research with cheap, portable EEG-headsets producing professional research quality data. In communities of “neuro-hackers,” like NeurotechX, professional researchers, entrepreneurs, and citizen scientists are coming together to develop all kinds of applications, such as “telepathic” machine control, prostheses, and art. Other companies, like Neurosky sell EEG headsets and biosensors for bio-/neuro-feedback training and health-monitoring at consumer affordable pricing. (Read more in Citizen Science and EEG)

Tan Le, whose company Emotiv Lifesciences, also produces portable EEG head-sets, says, in an article in National Geographic, that neuroscience needs “as much data as possible on as many brains as possible” to advance diagnosis of conditions such as epilepsy and Alzheimer’s. Human neuroscience studies have typically consisted of 20 to 50 participants, an incredibly small sampling of a 7 billion strong humanity. For a single lab to collect larger datasets is difficult but with diverse populations across the planet real understanding may require data not even from thousands of brains but millions. With cheap mobile EEG-headsets, open-source software, and online collaboration, the potential for anyone can participate in such data collection is immense; the potential for crowdsourcing unprecedented. There are, however, significant hurdles to overcome….(More)”

Towards a sociology of institutional transparency: openness, deception, and the problem of public trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

S. Moore in Sociology: “Transparency has become the watchword of twenty-first century liberal democracies. It refers to a project of ‘opening up’ the state by providing online access to public sector data. This article puts forward a sociological critique of the transparency agenda and the purported relationship between institutional openness and public trust. Drawing upon Simmel’s (1906) work, the article argues that open government initiatives routinely prize visibility over intelligibility and ignore the communicative basis of trust. The result is a non-reciprocal form of openness that obscures more than it reveals. In making this point, the article suggests that transparency embodies the ethos of a now-discredited mode of ‘instrumental politics’, reliant on the idea that the state constitutes a ‘domain of plain public facts’ (Ezrahi, 2004: 106). The article examines how alternative mechanisms for achieving government openness might better respond to the distinctive needs of citizens living in late modern societies….(More)”.

From Servants to Stewards: Design-led Innovation in the Public Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Adam Hasler: “For years, and very acutely the last few months, citizens of the United States and in many other parts of the world have been pitched into an often uncomfortable morass of debate and discussion about the direction of their country. Problems exist, and persist, which government at all levels has tried to address or currently addresses, and government’s efficacy at addressing problems affects all of us in some way. At such an historical moment like the one in which we live, in which a competing visions of government excite or frighten so many, we remember how much government matters to us.

A very powerful anecdote told to a crowd of listeners at Harvard recently recounted how, during a United States Digital Service project, the prototype for a project delivered to a decision maker and her team didn’t include a feature that was very clearly dictated to them in the requirements. The head of the United States Digital Service team that facilitated the project received an angry call summoning her to the director’s office. There, the policy maker who had added the requirement asked for an explanation why the prototype didn’t meet requirements. “We described to her that we actually took this prototype to a school, and had people use it. It wasn’t a feature they wanted or used, so it didn’t make sense to build it.” The simple common sense of the logic of design-thinking immediately resonated with the policy maker. “Yeah, we shouldn’t build it if they don’t need it.” She stopped for a moment, and continued, “Oh my gosh, this is great, we should do everything like this, we should make policy like this!”

“Yeah, we shouldn’t build it if they don’t need it.” She stopped for a moment, and continued, “Oh my gosh, this is great! We should do everything like this! We should make policy like this!”

This story demonstrates how a growing movement within governments around the world has begun improve the public sector through design-led innovation. This article, presented in four parts, explores various aspects of that movement. To get right to it, the “design” in design-led innovation refers in this work specifically to design thinking, or the idea that design is a process, rather than a domain of outputs. You’ll see that I advocate strongly for a particular design process known as human-centered design, commonly referred to as HCD. HCD is a process made up of alternating divergence and convergence by which an individual or team starts by empathetically understanding a problem through close interaction with the people that experience it. The team then extends that co-creation to the solution phase, and experiments with ideas originating from both the team the humans who have the problem. It relies heavily on prototyping and small-scale releases of potential solutions to facilitate multiple iterations and get as close as possible to a solution whose effectiveness the team measures relative to its ability to solve the original problem. This may represent a bit of a switch to some: rather than become enamored of and advocate for a favored genius idea, many of today’s best designers fall in love with the problem, and don’t rest until a solution, originating from anywhere, gets it closer to solved.

I define innovation here as the process of developing and cultivating new ideas, often from individuals throughout an organization and even outside of it, thereby maximizing the potential of all of the resources at an organization’s disposal and often breaking down organizational silos. The marriage of innovation and design thinking suggests a strategy in which innovation encourages new ideas and helps an organization adapt to ever-changing conditions, and a transparent process that helps to develop a deep understanding of a problem, decreases cost and mitigates the risk of releasing something that doesn’t solve the problem, and provides a mechanism for questioning the system itself.

This work culminates an introductory research project for me. At the heart of the work is the question, “How can design thinking and innovation improve public sector effectiveness, provide more opportunities for rewarding political participation, and facilitate the pursuit of ambitious, shared goals that move us into the future?…(More)”

Notable Privacy and Security Books from 2016

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel J. Solove at Technology, Academics, Policy: “Here are some notable books on privacy and security from 2016….

Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy

From my blurb: “Chris Hoofnagle has written the definitive book about the FTC’s involvement in privacy and security. This is a deep, thorough, erudite, clear, and insightful work – one of the very best books on privacy and security.”

My interview with Hoofnagle about his book: The 5 Things Every Privacy Lawyer Needs to Know about the FTC: An Interview with Chris Hoofnagle

My further thoughts on the book in my interview post above: “This is a book that all privacy and cybersecurity lawyers should have on their shelves. The book is the most comprehensive scholarly discussion of the FTC’s activities in these areas, and it also delves deep in the FTC’s history and activities in other areas to provide much-needed context to understand how it functions and reasons in privacy and security cases. There is simply no better resource on the FTC and privacy. This is a great book and a must-read. It is filled with countless fascinating things that will surprise you about the FTC, which has quite a rich and storied history. And it is an accessible and lively read too – Chris really makes the issues come alive.”

Gary T. Marx, Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology

From Peter Grabosky: “The first word that came to mind while reading this book was cornucopia. After decades of research on surveillance, Gary Marx has delivered an abundant harvest indeed. The book is much more than a straightforward treatise. It borders on the encyclopedic, and is literally overflowing with ideas, observations, and analyses. Windows into the Soul commands the attention of anyone interested in surveillance, past, present, and future. The book’s website contains a rich abundance of complementary material. An additional chapter consists of an intellectual autobiography discussing the author’s interest in, and personal experience with, surveillance over the course of his career. Because of its extraordinary breadth, the book should appeal to a wide readership…. it will be of interest to scholars of deviance and social control, cultural studies, criminal justice and criminology. But the book should be read well beyond the towers of academe. The security industry, broadly defined to include private security and intelligence companies as well as state law enforcement and intelligence agencies, would benefit from the book’s insights. So too should it be read by those in the information technology industries, including the manufacturers of the devices and applications which are central to contemporary surveillance, and which are shaping our future.”

Susan C. Lawrence, Privacy and the Past: Research, Law, Archives, Ethics

From the book blurb: “When the new HIPAA privacy rules regarding the release of health information took effect, medical historians suddenly faced a raft of new ethical and legal challenges—even in cases where their subjects had died years, or even a century, earlier. In Privacy and the Past, medical historian Susan C. Lawrence explores the impact of these new privacy rules, offering insight into what historians should do when they research, write about, and name real people in their work.”

Ronald J. Krotoszynski, Privacy Revisited: A Global Perspective on the Right to Be Left Alone

From Mark Tushnet: “Professor Krotoszynski provides a valuable overview of how several constitutional systems accommodate competing interests in privacy, speech, and democracy. He shows how scholarship in comparative law can help one think about one’s own legal system while remaining sensitive to the different cultural and institutional settings of each nation’s law. A very useful contribution.”

Laura K. Donohue, The Future of Foreign Intelligence: Privacy and Surveillance in a Digital Age…

Gordon Corera, Cyberspies: The Secret History of Surveillance, Hacking, and Digital Espionage…

J. Macgregor Wise, Surveillance and Film…(More; See also Nonfiction Privacy + Security Books).

Uber debuts Movement, a new website offering access to its traffic data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at TechCrunch: “Uber is opening up in an area where it might make sense competitively for it to stay more closed off: The ride-hailing company’s new Movement website will offer up access to its data around traffic flow in scores where it operates, intended for use by city planners and researchers looking into ways to improve urban mobility.

The basic idea is that Uber has a lot of insight into how traffic works within a city, and it can anonymize this data so that it isn’t tied to specific individuals in most cases. So where that’s possible, Uber is going to begin sharing said data, first to specific organizations who apply for early access, and then eventually to the general public.

Uber says it was looking at all the data it gathered and began to realize that it could be used for public benefit, and assembled a product team to make this happen. The result of this effort was Movement, which aims to address problems city officials and urban planners encounter when they’re forced to make key, transformational infrastructure decisions without access to all of, or the proper information about actual conditions and causes.

Essentially, according to Uber, it’s hoping to make it easier for those with influence over a city’s transportation picture to make the right decision, and to be able to explain why, where and when the changes are happening with accurate data backing them up. It also wants to do this in a way that makes it easy for organizations to work with, so it’s releasing the data organized around traffic analysis zones within cities, which are agreed-upon geographic demarcations that help with existing urban planning and traffic management.
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Users of the website can adjust things like time of day, day of week and zones to call up Uber’s data for that specific point or range, and can download the data, both with existing time series charts and in raw format for inputting into their own models. Uber says it’s looking at also releasing access to the data as an API, but is “trying to figure out how to do it in a performant way” at this stage….(More)”

Technology tools in human rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Engine Room: “Over the past few years, we have been witnessing a wave of new technology tools for human rights documentation. Along with the arrival of the new tools, human rights defenders are facing  new tools, new possibilities, new challenges, and new expectations of human rights documentation initiatives.

Produced with support from the Oak Foundation, this report is designed as a first attempt to detail available technologies that are designed for human rights documentation, understand the various perspectives on the challenges human rights documentation initiatives face when adopting new tools and practices, and analyse what is working and what is not for human rights documentation initiatives seeking to integrate new tools in their work….

Primary takeaways:

  • Traditional methods still apply: The environment in which HRDs are working has not dramatically inherently changed due to technology and data.
  • Unreliability and unknown risks provide huge barriers to engagement with technology: In high-pressured situations such as that of HRDs, methodologies used need to be concrete and reliable.
  • Priorities of HRDs centre around their particular issue: Digital technologies often come as an afterthought, rather than integrated into established strategies for communication or campaigning.
  • The lifespan of technology tools is a big barrier to longterm use: Sustainability of tools and maintenance is a big barrier to engaging with them and can cause fatigue among users having to change their practices often.
  • Past failed attempts at using tools makes future attempts more difficult: After having invested time and energy into changing a workflow or process only for it not to work, people are often reluctant to do the same again.
  • HRDs understand their context best: Tools recommendations coming from external parties sometimes do more harm than good.
  • There is a lack of technical capacity within HRD initiatives: As a result, when tools are introduced, groups become reliant on external parties for technical troubleshooting and support.

(Download the report)

 

Iran’s Civic Tech Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Leah Hunter at Forbes: “This is the story of Firuzeh Mahmoudi, founder of United4Iran and Irancubator, the first civic tech-focused startup incubator in Iran. She is also a creator of civil justice apps and a businessperson. Her business? Creating social good in a country she loves.

“Our mission is to improve civil liberties in Iran, and we do that in three ways,” says Mahmoudi, 45, who spent four years working for the United Nations in countries across the world as an international project coordinator before becoming a founder….

Mahmoudi realized that there wasn’t anyone focused on apps made for civic engagement inside Iran, so she built a team to create Irancubator. She works with 30 consultants and partners in the Iranian-American community. She also has a staff of 10 in her San Francisco Bay Area office—most of whom are Iranian, and were still in the country until 2009. “I really worked hard in bringing in resilient people…people who are smart, creative, kind. It’s so important to be kind. How you do the work, and how you show up, is that critical. If you try to make the world a better place, you’d better be nice. If you want to make the government be nicer, you’d better be nice, too.”

She and her team, based in the San Francisco Bay Area are creating apps like the Iran Prison Atlas – a database of all the country’s political prisoners, the judges who sentenced them and the prisons where they’re held. “We believe how these people are treated is a litmus test for our country,” Mahmoudi explains.

They are building an app women can use to track their ovulation cycles and periods. It also acts as a Trojan horse; as you dig deeper, it includes all sorts of information on women’s rights, including how to have equal rights in a marriage. (In Iran, divorce rights for women—as well as the right to equal custody of their children afterward—require a document signed before the wedding ceremony.) “This one’s not specifically targeting the richer women who are living in Northern Tehran. It’s an app that aims to engage people who live in rural areas, or not be as well-off or educated or perhaps more conservative or religious,” Mahmoudi explains. “Once you get in the app, you realize there are other parts. They include information on one’s rights as a woman in a marriage. Or basic concepts that may be completely foreign to them. Like maybe say, “Hey, do you know there’s a concept called ‘marital rape’? Even if someone’s your husband, they can’t treat you this way.”…

Right now, Irancubator is building a dozen apps. The first is launching in late January. Named RadiTo, this app works similarly to YouTube, but for radio instead of TV, allowing people in Iran to broadcast channels about the topics they care about. Someone can create a channel about LGBT rights or about children and education in their language. “Whatever they want—they can have a secure, safe platform to broadcast their message,” Mahmoudi explains.

From an operational perspective, this isn’t easy. Mahmoudi and her staff aren’t just building a startup. They’re operating from the other side of the world, working for users with whom they cannot directly communicate.  “Any startup is challenging and has so many hurdles. For us, it’s another level, working with so many security challenges,” says Mahmoudi….

The biggest challenge of all: they cannot go back to Iran. “The Islamic Republic coined me as an anti-revolutionary fugitive in one of their articles,” Mahmoudi says. “Half of my staff are refugees who got out.”…(More).

Could Technology Remove the Politicians From Politics?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sue Brideshead at Motherboard: “The tech industry has talked long and hard about democratizing industries. Democratizing content, democratizing taxi-cabs, and democratizing bed and breakfasts. But what about democratizing democracy?

Disruption is the word of the moment in Washington, thanks to an incoming president who counts his inexperience in government as an asset. It remains to be seen what kind of disruption Trump will bestow upon the White House, but efforts at disruption from the technology world have refined and chipped at only the topmost layer of inefficiencies. Mark Zuckerberg has poured cash into a broken school district; programmers have toyed with ways to secure digital ballots; and analysts have sought (and failed) to hone the political poll. The team of engineers Barack Obama lured to Washington has been tasked with fixing podunk websites and backend systems. But what they have failed to identify as a problem is the very system that elected their boss. Because beyond the topmost layer of government gunk lies a broad and broken structure: the idea of representation itself. In the era of the internet, the very premise of sending a man to Washington or a woman to city council is badly in need of an upgrade.

The idea of a political representative evolved out of necessity. Townspeople couldn’t afford to take a day off and ride a horse to the capital. They needed to agree upon one guy who would more or less say what they were thinking, and they voted to pick the right guy for the job.

Horses became model T’s became jets flying politicians from their constituencies to the District of Columbia, ostensibly to have an ear to the ground in their home state and a hand to the buzzers on the Senate floor. But travel—and voter awareness—requires cash that drives up the price of running for office.

The Republican President-elect scored votes by calling Washington “corrupt” and “criminal,” “rigged” and “stagnant,” but “quaint” is the first adjective I think of. In the era of the iPhone, sending a man or woman to Washington to “represent” a district back home can feel about as forward-thinking as sending an intern to Amazon headquarters to pick up the new DeLillo. Why do congressional offices read bills in hard-copy, in private, while their constituents draft their work in Google Docs? Why does a senator have to stand on the Senate floor to hear arguments or to vote, when her constituents watch proceedings on C-Span and vote for which Game of Thrones heroine her hair most resembles on BuzzFeed?..

….The price of running for office is now astronomical, literally; a New Hampshire senate race tops the cost of sending your satellite to low earth orbit with SpaceX’s rocket…But the most disturbing fact of our Republic is an upsurge of anti-intellectual rhetoric. An ongoing protest of California’s default direct democracy—its barrage of referendums—is fueled by the disturbing fact that voters are likely to base their decision on a television advertisement. Referendum protesters rightly note that a system reliant on advertising hardly cuts money out of politics or ensures an informed electorate. But the premise of this protest rests on the assumption that a Representative is more informed than a television advertisement; that a Representative makes decisions by speaking with experts, using paid time and expertise…

…Fixing an existing problem with new technology often fuels new and terrifying questions. Displacing power simply raises the same questions of control and ownership in new places. For example, even without the risk of politicians becoming susceptible to lobbyists, voters could still be influenced by special interest groups that can afford to bombard voters with their message. But by distributing the power for change among the electorate, a direct democracy model would effectively make lobbying efforts much more expensive and inefficient….

…What I do know: our system is broken. Voters crave transparency, an end to political photo-ops, an end to the influence of television, of Facebook, a way to flush the lobbyists out of Washington and drag the cash out of politicians’ pockets. As a citizenry, we hold relatively little power to destroy lobbying; to reform pay-to-play; to transform the media industries; re-engineer Facebook, or temper the bad behavior of the wealthy and powerful. But our new technologies also mean that there’s one central component we might have the power to remove from government completely: the politicians. (More)”

The melting down of government: A multidecade perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bert A. Rockman in the Special 30th Anniversary Issue of Governance: “The editors of Governance have asked me to assess the extent and nature of change in the governing process since the origins of the journal 30 years ago. This is an engaging task but a difficult one. It is difficult because trend lines rarely have a definitive beginning point—or at least if similar tendencies are seen across national boundaries, they rarely begin at the same time. It is also difficult because states and nations have different traditions and may be more or less willing to accept lessons from elsewhere. As well, national entities and even regional ones may react differently to similar problems. Old Europe, as Donald Rumsfeld the former U.S. Defense Secretary once disparagingly referred to the more democratically stable and prosperous countries of Western Europe, still seems more likely to adhere to globalization, freedom of movement across national borders, and at least some tolerance of immigration than has been the case in the Eastern and Central parts of the continent or, for that matter, in the United States.

Because it is so difficult to see uniformities across all states, I shall concentrate my attention on the case of the United States with which I am most familiar while recognizing that all developed states have been facing challenges to their industrial base and all have been facing complicated problems of labor displacement through technology and absorption of immigrant populations in the midst of diminished economic growth and modest recovery from the financial crisis of 2008. To put it simply, there have been greater challenges and fewer financial and political resources.

I see four very different tendencies at work in the process of governing and the limitations that they may impose on government. Thinking of these in terms of a series of concentric circles and moving in succession from those with the broadest radius (sociopolitical) to those with the narrowest (machinery and fiscal capabilities of government), I will characterize them accordingly as (a) the confidence in government problem; (b) the frozen political alignment problem—or as it is known in the United States, political polarization; (c) the cult of efficiency in government and also private enterprise, which has resulted in substantial outsourcing and privatization; and (d) public austerity that, among other things, has altered the balance of power between governmental authority and powerful business and nonprofit organizations. I cannot be certain that these elements interact with one another. How they do and if they do is a matter for some further endeavor….(More)”

The legal macroscope: Experimenting with visual legal analytics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicola Lettieri, Antonio Altamura and Delfina Malandrino at InfoVis: “This work presents Knowlex, a web application designed for visualization, exploration, and analysis of legal documents coming from different sources. Understanding the legal framework relating to a given issue often requires the analysis of complex legal corpora. When a legal professional or a citizen tries to understand how a given phenomenon is disciplined, his attention cannot be limited to a single source of law but has to be directed on the bigger picture resulting from all the legal sources related to the theme under investigation. Knowlex exploits data visualization to support this activity by means of interactive maps making sense out of heterogeneous documents (norms, case law, legal literature, etc.).

Starting from a legislative measure (what we define as Root) given as input by the user, the application implements two visual analytics functionalities aiming to offer new insights on the legal corpus under investigation. The first one is an interactive node graph depicting relations and properties of the documents. The second one is a zoomable treemap showing the topics, the evolution, and the dimension of the legal literature settled over the years around the norm of interest. The article gives an overview of the research so far conducted presenting the results of a preliminary evaluation study aiming at evaluating the effectiveness of visualization in supporting legal activities as well as the effectiveness of Knowlex, the usability of the proposed system, and the overall user satisfaction when interacting with its applications…(More)”.