DATA – Page 314 – The Living Library

Universities must prepare for a technology-enabled future

Curated on January 9, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Subhash Kak in the Conversation: “Automation and artificial intelligence technologies are transforming manufacturing, corporate work and the retail business, providing new opportunities for companies to explore and posing major threats to those that don’t adapt to the times. Equally daunting challenges confront colleges and universities, but they’ve been slower to acknowledge them.

At present, colleges and universities are most worried about competition from schools or training systems using online learning technology. But that is just one aspect of the technological changes already under way. For example, some companies are moving toward requiring workers have specific skills trainings and certifications – as opposed to college degrees.

As a professor who researches artificial intelligence and offers distance learning courses, I can say that online education is a disruptive challenge for which colleges are ill-prepared. Lack of student demand is already closing 800 out of roughly 10,000 engineering colleges in India. And online learning has put as many as half the colleges and universities in the U.S. at risk of shutting down in the next couple decades as remote students get comparable educations over the internet – without living on campus or taking classes in person. Unless universities move quickly to transform themselves into educational institutions for a technology-assisted future, they risk becoming obsolete….(More)”

Can This App That Lets You Sell Your Health Data Cut Your Health Costs?

Curated on January 8, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Schiller at FastCompany: “Americans could do with new ways to save on healthcare….

CoverUS, a startup, has one idea: monetizing our health-related data. Through a new blockchain-based data marketplace, it hopes to generate revenue that could effectively make insurance cheaper and perhaps even encourage us to become healthier, thus cutting the cost of the system overall.

It works like this: When you sign up, you download a digital wallet to your phone. Then you populate that wallet with data from an electronic health record (EHR), for which, starting in January 2018, system operators are legally obliged to offer an open API. At the same time, you can also allow wearables and other health trackers to automatically add data to the platform, and answer questions about your health and consumption habits.

A prototype of the app. [Screenshots: CoverUS]

Why bother? To create a richer picture of your health than is currently held by the EHR systems, health providers, and data brokerages that buy and sell data from doctors, clinics, pharmacies, and other sources. By collecting all our data in one place, CoverUS wants to give us more autonomy over who uses our personal information and who makes money from it….

CoverUS, which plans to launch in the first quarter of 2018, will pay for the data we gather in the form of a fixed-price cryptocurrency called CoverCoin. Users generate coins by signing up and then sharing their data. The startup then hopes users will be able to spend the coins on services that improve their health (like gym memberships) or deposit them in a health savings account where the coins can be exchanged for insurance plan savings. Sealey says it’s in discussions with several providers…(More)”.

Social Theory After the Internet: Media, Technology and Globalization

Curated on January 8, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

(Open Access) Book by Ralph Schroeder: “The internet has fundamentally transformed society in the past 25 years, yet existing theories of mass or interpersonal communication do not work well in understanding a digital world. Nor has this understanding been helped by disciplinary specialization and a continual focus on the latest innovations. Ralph Schroeder takes a longer-term view, synthesizing perspectives and findings from various social science disciplines in four countries: the United States, Sweden, India and China. His comparison highlights, among other observations, that smartphones are in many respects more important than PC-based internet uses.

Social Theory after the Internet focuses on everyday uses and effects of the internet, including information seeking and big data, and explains how the internet has gone beyond traditional media in, for example, enabling Donald Trump and Narendra Modi to come to power. Schroeder puts forward a sophisticated theory of the role internet plays, and how both technological and social forces shape its significance. He provides a sweeping and penetrating study, theoretically ambitious and at the same time always empirically grounded….(More)”.

A.I. and Big Data Could Power a New War on Poverty

Curated on January 5, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Elisabeth A. Mason in The New York Times: “When it comes to artificial intelligence and jobs, the prognostications are grim. The conventional wisdom is that A.I. might soon put millions of people out of work — that it stands poised to do to clerical and white collar workers over the next two decades what mechanization did to factory workers over the past two. And that is to say nothing of the truckers and taxi drivers who will find themselves unemployed or underemployed as self-driving cars take over our roads.

But it’s time we start thinking about A.I.’s potential benefits for society as well as its drawbacks. The big-data and A.I. revolutions could also help fight poverty and promote economic stability.

Poverty, of course, is a multifaceted phenomenon. But the condition of poverty often entails one or more of these realities: a lack of income (joblessness); a lack of preparedness (education); and a dependency on government services (welfare). A.I. can address all three.

First, even as A.I. threatens to put people out of work, it can simultaneously be used to match them to good middle-class jobs that are going unfilled. Today there are millions of such jobs in the United States. This is precisely the kind of matching problem at which A.I. excels. Likewise, A.I. can predict where the job openings of tomorrow will lie, and which skills and training will be needed for them….

Second, we can bring what is known as differentiated education — based on the idea that students master skills in different ways and at different speeds — to every student in the country. A 2013 study by the National Institutes of Health found that nearly 40 percent of medical students held a strong preference for one mode of learning: Some were listeners; others were visual learners; still others learned best by doing….

Third, a concerted effort to drag education and job training and matching into the 21st century ought to remove the reliance of a substantial portion of the population on government programs designed to assist struggling Americans. With 21st-century technology, we could plausibly reduce the use of government assistance services to levels where they serve the function for which they were originally intended…(More)”.

Democratising the future: How do we build inclusive visions of the future?

Curated on January 4, 2018August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chun-Yin San at Nesta: “In 2011, Lord Martin Rees, the British Astronomer-Royal, launched a scathing critique on the UK Government’s long-term thinking capabilities. “It is depressing,” he argued, “that long-term global issues of energy, food, health and climate get trumped on the political agenda by the short term”. We are facing more and more complex, intergenerational issues like climate change, or the impact of AI, which require long-term, joined-up thinking to solve.

But even when governments do invest in foresight and strategic planning, there is a bigger question around whose vision of the future it is. These strategic plans tend to be written in opaque and complex ways by ‘experts’, with little room for scrutiny, let alone input, by members of the public….

There have been some great examples of more democratic futures exercises in the past. Key amongst them was the Hawai’i 2000 project in the 1970s, which bought together Hawaiians from different walks of life to debate the sort of place that Hawai’i should become over the next 30 years. It generated some incredibly inspiring and creative collective visions of the future of the tropical American state, and also helped embed long-term strategic thinking into policy-making instruments – at least for a time.

A more recent example took place over 2008 in the Dutch Caribbean nation of Aruba, which engaged some 50,000 people from all parts of Aruban society. The Nos Aruba 2025 project allowed the island nation to develop a more sustainable national strategic plan than ever before – one based on what Aruba and its people had to offer, responding to the potential and needs of a diverse community. Like Hawai’i 2000, what followed Nos Aruba 2025 was a fundamental change in the nature of participation in the country’s governance, with community engagement becoming a regular feature in the Aruban government’s work….

These examples demonstrate how futures work is at its best when it is participatory. …However, aside from some of the projects above, examples of genuine engagement in futures remain few and far between. Even when activities examining a community’s future take place in the public domain – such as the Museum of London’s ongoing City Now City Future series – the conversation can often seem one-sided. Expert-generated futures are presented to people with little room for them to challenge these ideas or contribute their own visions in a meaningful way. This has led some, like academics Denis Loveridge and Ozcan Saritas, to remark that futures and foresight can suffer from a serious case of ‘democratic deficit‘.

There are three main reasons for this:

Meaningful participation can be difficult to do, as it is expensive and time-consuming, especially when it comes to large-scale exercises meant to facilitate deep and meaningful dialogue about a community’s future.
Participation is not always valued in the way it should be, and can be met with false sincerity from government sponsors. This is despite the wide-reaching social and economic benefits to building collective future visions, which we are currently exploring further in our work.
Practitioners may not necessarily have the know-how or tools to do citizen engagement effectively. While there are plenty of guides to public engagement and a number of different futures toolkits, there are few openly available resources for participatory futures activities….(More)”

Bitcoin, blockchain and the fight against poverty

Curated on January 3, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Gillian Tett at the Financial Times: “…This month, Hernando de Soto, an acclaimed development economist from Peru, joined forces with Patrick Byrne, a controversial American luminary of the bitcoin and blockchain ecosystem, to launch an unusual project to fight poverty.

What they hope to do is to use decentralised digital ledgers — similar to those used for bitcoin — to record the formal and informal property holdings of dispossessed communities, with the idea of giving them more security. This innovation might seem a million miles away from the Shining Path saga, and from our normal concept of philanthropy.

After all, at this time of year, we tend to assume that “aid” is about donating money, sponsoring schools and so on. But De Soto is convinced that the key to tackling extreme poverty — and the desperate violence that can accompany it — is to focus on property rights. After all, he argues, when conflict explodes in poor communities, this is usually because people feel insecure and dispossessed. Even if poor people hold property, their ownership is often based on informal rights rather than any official government ledger — and their homes and land can be seized by big companies or government officials.

Giving better property rights to the poor would mean more prosperity and security for everyone, De Soto believes. And he argues that one crucial reason why Shining Path was defeated was that the Peruvian government eventually did precisely that, awarding peasants land rights (partly on his advice). So he wants to repeat the trick around the world, using decentralised digital ledgers that will let poor communities record their formal and informal property rights in a permanent manner — without government interference.

“When you have property rights, you can get credit, you can advance,” De Soto says. “It’s the key to economic growth — much better than aid.” He believes that blockchain technology, which was set up as a platform for digital currencies such as bitcoin, will let the poor help themselves, as he regards cyber rights as more important than charity….(More)”.

A Guide to Chicago’s Array of Things Initiative

Curated on January 3, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sean Thornton at Data-Smart City Solutions: “The 606, Chicago’s rails-to-trails project that stretches for 4.2 miles on the city’s northwest side, has been popular with residents and visitors ever since its launch last year. The trail recently added a new art inst a llation, Blue Sky, that will greet visitors over the next five years with an array of lights and colors. Less noticed, but no less important, will be another array on display near the trail: a sensor node from Chicago’s Array of Things initiative.

If you’re a frequent reader of all things civic tech, then you may have already come across the Array of Things (AoT). Launched in 2016, the project, which consists of a network of sensor boxes mounted on light posts, has now begun collecting a host of real-time data on Chicago’s environmental surroundings and urban activity. After installing a small number of sensors downtown and elsewhere in 2016, Chicago is now adding additional sensors across the city and the city’s data portal currently lists locations for all of AoT’s active and yet-to-be installed sensors. This year, data collected from AoT will be accessible online, providing valuable information for researchers, urban planners, and the general public.

AoT’s public engagement campaign has been picking up steam as well, with a recent community event held this fall. As a non-proprietary project, AoT is being implemented as a tool to improve not just urban planning and sustainability efforts, but quality of life for residents and communities. To engage with the public, project leaders have held meetings and workshops to build relationships with residents and identify community priorities. Those priorities, which vary from community to community, could range from monitoring traffic congestion around specific intersections to addressing air quality concerns at local parks and schoolyards.

The AoT project is a leading example of how new technology—and the Internet of Things (IoT) in particular—is transforming efforts for sustainable urban growth and “smart” city planning. AoT’s truly multi-dimensional character sets it apart from other smart city efforts: complementing environmental sensor data collection, the initiative includes educational programming, community outreach, and R&D opportunities for academics, startups, corporations, and other organizations that could stand to benefit.

Launching a project like AoT, of course, isn’t as simple as installing sensor nodes and flipping on a switch. AoT has been in the works for years, and its recent launch marks a milestone event for its developers, the City of Chicago, and smart city technologies. AoT has frequently appeared in the press – yet often, coverage loses sight of the many facets of this unique project. How did AoT get to where it is today? What is the project’s significance outside of Chicago? What are AoT’s implications for cities? Consider this article as your primer for all things AoT….(More)”.

Tracking Metrics in Social 3.0

Curated on January 3, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nancy Lim in AdWeek: “…Facebook is the world’s most popular social network, with incomparable reach and real value for marketers. However, as engagement on the channel increases, marketers are in a pickle. While they want to track and support valuable experiences on Facebook, they’re unsure if they can trust the channel’s metrics…..Marketers’ wavering trust in Facebook metrics warrants a look back at the evolution of social media itself.

At social’s advent (Social 1.0), metrics focused strictly on likes and comments. Content simply wasn’t as important as users learned to build social profiles and make the platform work for them.

Then, Social 2.0 invited brands to enter the fray. With them came the new role of content as a driver of top-line metrics.

Now, we’re in the midst of Social 3.0, where advancements in the technology have made it possible for social channels to result in real ad conversions.

When it comes to these conversions, it’s no longer all about the click. There’s been a marked shift away from social interactions of the past, which centered around intangible things like likes and engagement-based activities. Now, marketers are tasked with tracking more tangible metrics like conversions. Another way to look at this evolution is from social objectives (likes, shares, comments) to real business objectives (conversions, units sold, cost per sale)….

To thrive in Social 3.0, marketers must provide more direct channels for responses with lower barriers of entry, and do more of this work themselves.

They must also come to terms with the fact that while Facebook often feels like an owned channel, it’s first and foremost a platform designed for consumers. This means they cannot blindly put all their trust in Facebook’s metrics. Rather, marketers should be partnering with available third-party technologies to truly understand, trust and drive full value from Facebook insights.

Call tracking provides an avenue for this. Armed with call tracking software, marketers can determine which campaigns are causing Facebook users to pick up their phones. For instance, marketers can assign unique call numbers to separate Facebook campaigns to A/B test different copy and CTAs. Once they know what’s working best, they can incorporate that feedback into future campaigns.

Other analytics tools then provide a clearer picture. For example, marketers can leverage insights from Google Analytics, third-party data providers or other big analytics tools to learn more about the users that are engaging. Such a holistic perspective results in the creation of more personalized campaigns and, therefore, conversions….(More)”.

Can the Blockchain Tame Moscow’s Wild Politics?

Curated on January 3, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah Holder at CityLab: “…In 2014, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin launched Active Citizen, an e-voting platform designed to allow citizens to directly weigh in on non-political city decisions—things like setting speed limits, plotting bus routes, and naming subway stations. Since then, 2,800 polls have been administered via the app and almost 2 million users across this city of 11 million residents have participated.

Active Citizen bears a family resemblance to other app-based citizen portals that cities are attempting to deploy, like the popular SeeClickFix, which originated in New Haven and is now used by many cities nationwide, and MyLA311, in L.A. They’re all aimed at boosting citizen engagement and government accountability, marketed as tools to connect residents to municipal services and help deliver swift and tangible results. But in Russia, where widespread corruption and a tendency toward authoritarianism have long been features of governance, the stakes of building that trust are higher.

That’s why this month, Moscow officials announced they would be piloting a move of Active Citizen onto “the blockchain.” A blockchain is an online database of sorts: a digitized, decentralized, and typically completely public ledger of transactions and interactions. Often used to track secure financial transactions (it underpins the crypto-currency Bitcoin, for example), the system is hosted by multiple “nodes,” all of which have a copy of the database and the information contained therein.

Lately, blockchain has also become a buzzword meant to convey accountability and security: Its workings are complex enough that the general public generally can’t fully wrap their heads around it, but sexy enough to inspire confidence. Moscow officials are using Active Citizen, with its new blockchain-assured transparency, as proof that the city is indeed heeding the will of the majority. “The city entrusts you to decide,” reads Active Citizen’s motto….(More)”.