Algorithmic Government: Automating Public Services and Supporting Civil Servants in using Data Science Technologies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zeynep Engin and Philip Treleaven in the Computer Journal:  “The data science technologies of artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), big data and behavioral/predictive analytics, and blockchain are poised to revolutionize government and create a new generation of GovTech start-ups. The impact from the ‘smartification’ of public services and the national infrastructure will be much more significant in comparison to any other sector given government’s function and importance to every institution and individual.

Potential GovTech systems include Chatbots and intelligent assistants for public engagement, Robo-advisors to support civil servants, real-time management of the national infrastructure using IoT and blockchain, automated compliance/regulation, public records securely stored in blockchain distributed ledgers, online judicial and dispute resolution systems, and laws/statutes encoded as blockchain smart contracts. Government is potentially the major ‘client’ and also ‘public champion’ for these new data technologies. This review paper uses our simple taxonomy of government services to provide an overview of data science automation being deployed by governments world-wide. The goal of this review paper is to encourage the Computer Science community to engage with government to develop these new systems to transform public services and support the work of civil servants….(More)”.

Statistics Canada promises more detailed portrait of Canadians with fewer surveys

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bill Curry at The Globe and Mail: “Canadians are increasingly shunning phone surveys, but they could still be providing Statistics Canada with valuable data each time they flush the toilet or flash their debit card.

The national statistics agency laid out an ambitious plan Thursday to overhaul the way it collects and reports on issues ranging from cannabis and opioid use to market-moving information on unemployment and economic growth.

According to four senior Statscan officials, the agency is in the midst of a major transformation as it adapts to a world of big data collected by other government agencies as well as private sector actors such as banks, cellphone companies and digital-based companies like Uber.

At its core, the shift means the agency will become less reliant on traditional phone surveys or having businesses fill out forms to report their sales data. Instead, Statscan is reaching agreements with other government departments and private companies in order to gain access to their raw data, such as point-of-sale information. According to agency officials, such arrangements reduce the reporting paperwork faced by businesses while creating the potential for Statscan to produce faster and more reliable information.

Key releases such as labour statistics or reporting on economic growth could come out sooner, reducing the lag time between the end of a quarter and reporting on results. Officials said economic data that is released quarterly could shift to monthly reporting. The greater access to raw data sources will also allow for more localized reporting at the neighbourhood level….(More)”.

Rationality and politics of algorithms. Will the promise of big data survive the dynamics of public decision making?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by H.G. (Haiko)van der Voort et al: “Big data promises to transform public decision-making for the better by making it more responsive to actual needs and policy effects. However, much recent work on big data in public decision-making assumes a rational view of decision-making, which has been much criticized in the public administration debate.

In this paper, we apply this view, and a more political one, to the context of big data and offer a qualitative study. We question the impact of big data on decision-making, realizing that big data – including its new methods and functions – must inevitably encounter existing political and managerial institutions. By studying two illustrative cases of big data use processes, we explore how these two worlds meet. Specifically, we look at the interaction between data analysts and decision makers.

In this we distinguish between a rational view and a political view, and between an information logic and a decision logic. We find that big data provides ample opportunities for both analysts and decision makers to do a better job, but this doesn’t necessarily imply better decision-making, because big data also provides opportunities for actors to pursue their own interests. Big data enables both data analysts and decision makers to act as autonomous agents rather than as links in a functional chain. Therefore, big data’s impact cannot be interpreted only in terms of its functional promise; it must also be acknowledged as a phenomenon set to impact our policymaking institutions, including their legitimacy….(More)”.

When AI Misjudgment Is Not an Accident

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Douglas Yeung at Scientific American: “The conversation about unconscious bias in artificial intelligence often focuses on algorithms that unintentionally cause disproportionate harm to entire swaths of society—those that wrongly predict black defendants will commit future crimes, for example, or facial-recognition technologies developed mainly by using photos of white men that do a poor job of identifying women and people with darker skin.

But the problem could run much deeper than that. Society should be on guard for another twist: the possibility that nefarious actors could seek to attack artificial intelligence systems by deliberately introducing bias into them, smuggled inside the data that helps those systems learn. This could introduce a worrisome new dimension to cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns or the proliferation of fake news.

According to a U.S. government study on big data and privacy, biased algorithms could make it easier to mask discriminatory lending, hiring or other unsavory business practices. Algorithms could be designed to take advantage of seemingly innocuous factors that can be discriminatory. Employing existing techniques, but with biased data or algorithms, could make it easier to hide nefarious intent. Commercial data brokers collect and hold onto all kinds of information, such as online browsing or shopping habits, that could be used in this way.

Biased data could also serve as bait. Corporations could release biased data with the hope competitors would use it to train artificial intelligence algorithms, causing competitors to diminish the quality of their own products and consumer confidence in them.

Algorithmic bias attacks could also be used to more easily advance ideological agendas. If hate groups or political advocacy organizations want to target or exclude people on the basis of race, gender, religion or other characteristics, biased algorithms could give them either the justification or more advanced means to directly do so. Biased data also could come into play in redistricting efforts that entrench racial segregation (“redlining”) or restrict voting rights.

Finally, national security threats from foreign actors could use deliberate bias attacks to destabilize societies by undermining government legitimacy or sharpening public polarization. This would fit naturally with tactics that reportedly seek to exploit ideological divides by creating social media posts and buying online ads designed to inflame racial tensions….(More)”.

Babbage among the insurers: big 19th-century data and the public interest.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Wilson, D. C. S.  at the History of the Human Sciences: “This article examines life assurance and the politics of ‘big data’ in mid-19th-century Britain. The datasets generated by life assurance companies were vast archives of information about human longevity. Actuaries distilled these archives into mortality tables – immensely valuable tools for predicting mortality and so pricing risk. The status of the mortality table was ambiguous, being both a public and a private object: often computed from company records they could also be extrapolated from quasi-public projects such as the Census or clerical records. Life assurance more generally straddled the line between private enterprise and collective endeavour, though its advocates stressed the public interest in its success. Reforming actuaries such as Thomas Rowe Edmonds wanted the data on which mortality tables were based to be made publicly available, but faced resistance. Such resistance undermined insurers’ claims to be scientific in spirit and hindered Edmonds’s personal quest for a law of mortality. Edmonds pushed instead for an open actuarial science alongside fellow-travellers at the Statistical Society of London, which was populated by statisticians such as William Farr (whose subsequent work, it is argued, was influenced by Edmonds) as well as by radical mathematicians such as Charles Babbage. The article explores Babbage’s little-known foray into the world of insurance, both as a budding actuary but also as a fierce critic of the industry. These debates over the construction, ownership, and accessibility of insurance datasets show that concern about the politics of big data did not begin in the 21st century….(More)”.

Privacy and Synthetic Datasets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Steven M. Bellovin, Preetam K. Dutta and Nathan Reitinger: “Sharing is a virtue, instilled in us from childhood. Unfortunately, when it comes to big data — i.e., databases possessing the potential to usher in a whole new world of scientific progress — the legal landscape prefers a hoggish motif. The historic approach to the resulting database–privacy problem has been anonymization, a subtractive technique incurring not only poor privacy results, but also lackluster utility. In anonymization’s stead, differential privacy arose; it provides better, near-perfect privacy, but is nonetheless subtractive in terms of utility.

Today, another solution is leaning into the fore, synthetic data. Using the magic of machine learning, synthetic data offers a generative, additive approach — the creation of almost-but-not-quite replica data. In fact, as we recommend, synthetic data may be combined with differential privacy to achieve a best-of-both-worlds scenario. After unpacking the technical nuances of synthetic data, we analyze its legal implications, finding both over and under inclusive applications. Privacy statutes either overweigh or downplay the potential for synthetic data to leak secrets, inviting ambiguity. We conclude by finding that synthetic data is a valid, privacy-conscious alternative to raw data, but is not a cure-all for every situation. In the end, computer science progress must be met with proper policy in order to move the area of useful data dissemination forward….(More)”.

Internet of Things for Smart Cities: Technologies, Big Data and Security

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Waleed Ejaz and Alagan Anpalagan: “This book introduces the concept of smart city as the potential solution to the challenges created by urbanization. The Internet of Things (IoT) offers novel features with minimum human intervention in smart cities. This book describes different components of Internet of Things (IoT) for smart cities including sensor technologies, communication technologies, big data analytics and security….(More)”.

A Right to Reasonable Inferences: Re-Thinking Data Protection Law in the Age of Big Data and AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sandra Wachter and Brent Mittelstadt: “Big Data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) draw non-intuitive and unverifiable inferences and predictions about the behaviors, preferences, and private lives of individuals. These inferences draw on highly diverse and feature-rich data of unpredictable value, and create new opportunities for discriminatory, biased, and invasive decision-making. Concerns about algorithmic accountability are often actually concerns about the way in which these technologies draw privacy invasive and non-verifiable inferences about us that we cannot predict, understand, or refute.

Data protection law is meant to protect people’s privacy, identity, reputation, and autonomy, but is currently failing to protect data subjects from the novel risks of inferential analytics. The broad concept of personal datain Europe could be interpreted to include inferences, predictions, and assumptions that refer to or impact on an individual. If seen as personal data, individuals are granted numerous rights under data protection law. However, the legal status of inferences is heavily disputed in legal scholarship, and marked by inconsistencies and contradictions within and between the views of the Article 29 Working Party and the European Court of Justice.

As we show in this paper, individuals are granted little control and oversight over how their personal data is used to draw inferences about them. Compared to other types of personal data, inferences are effectively ‘economy class’ personal data in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Data subjects’ rights to know about (Art 13-15), rectify (Art 16), delete (Art 17), object to (Art 21), or port (Art 20) personal data are significantly curtailed when it comes to inferences, often requiring a greater balance with controller’s interests (e.g. trade secrets, intellectual property) than would otherwise be the case. Similarly, the GDPR provides insufficient protection against sensitive inferences (Art 9) or remedies to challenge inferences or important decisions based on them (Art 22(3))….

In this paper we argue that a new data protection right, the ‘right to reasonable inferences’, is needed to help close the accountability gap currently posed ‘high risk inferences’ , meaning inferences that are privacy invasive or reputation damaging and have low verifiability in the sense of being predictive or opinion-based. In cases where algorithms draw ‘high risk inferences’ about individuals, this right would require ex-ante justification to be given by the data controller to establish whether an inference is reasonable. This disclosure would address (1) why certain data is a relevant basis to draw inferences; (2) why these inferences are relevant for the chosen processing purpose or type of automated decision; and (3) whether the data and methods used to draw the inferences are accurate and statistically reliable. The ex-ante justification is bolstered by an additional ex-post mechanism enabling unreasonable inferences to be challenged. A right to reasonable inferences must, however, be reconciled with EU jurisprudence and counterbalanced with IP and trade secrets law as well as freedom of expression and Article 16 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights: the freedom to conduct a business….(More)”.

Human Rights in the Big Data World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Francis Kuriakose and Deepa Iyer: “Ethical approach to human rights conceives and evaluates law through the underlying value concerns. This paper examines human rights after the introduction of big data using an ethical approach to rights. First, the central value concerns such as equity, equality, sustainability and security are derived from the history of digital technological revolution. Then, the properties and characteristics of big data are analyzed to understand emerging value concerns such as accountability, transparency, tracability, explainability and disprovability.

Using these value points, this paper argues that big data calls for two types of evaluations regarding human rights. The first is the reassessment of existing human rights in the digital sphere predominantly through right to equality and right to work. The second is the conceptualization of new digital rights such as right to privacy and right against propensity-based discrimination. The paper concludes that as we increasingly share the world with intelligence systems, these new values expand and modify the existing human rights paradigm….(More)”.

The law and ethics of big data analytics: A new role for international human rights in the search for global standards

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Nersessian at Business Horizons: “The Economist recently declared that digital information has overtaken oil as the world’s most valuable commodity. Big data technology is inherently global and borderless, yet little international consensus exists over what standards should govern its use. One source of global standards benefitting from considerable international consensus might be used to fill the gap: international human rights law.

This article considers the extent to which international human rights law operates as a legal or ethical constraint on global commercial use of big data technologies. By providing clear baseline standards that apply worldwide, human rights can help shape cultural norms—implemented as ethical practices and global policies and procedures—about what businesses should do with their information technologies. In this way, human rights could play a broad and important role in shaping business thinking about the proper handling of this increasingly valuable commodity in the modern global society…(More)”.