DATA – Page 354 – The Living Library

Migration Data using Social Media

Curated on July 4, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission JRC Technical Report: “Migration is a top political priority for the European Union (EU). Data on international migrant stocks and flows are essential for effective migration management. In this report, we estimated the number of expatriates in 17 EU countries based on the number of Facebook Network users who are classified by Facebook as “expats”. To this end, we proposed a method for correcting the over- or under-representativeness of Facebook Network users compared to countries’ actual population.

This method uses Facebook penetration rates by age group and gender in the country of previous residence and country of destination of a Facebook expat. The purpose of Facebook Network expat estimations is not to reproduce migration statistics, but rather to generate separate estimates of expatriates, since migration statistics and Facebook Network expats estimates do not measure the same quantities of interest.

Estimates of social media application users who are classified as expats can be a timely, low-cost, and almost globally available source of information for estimating stocks of international migrants. Our methodology allowed for the timely capture of the increase of Venezuelan migrants in Spain. However, there are important methodological and data integrity issues with using social media data sources for studying migration-related phenomena. For example, our methodology led us to significantly overestimate the number of expats from Philippines in Spain and in Italy and there is no evidence that this overestimation may be valid. While research on the use of big data sources for migration is in its infancy, and the diffusion of internet technologies in less developed countries is still limited, the use of big data sources can unveil useful insights on quantitative and qualitative characteristics of migration….(More)”.

Google.gov

Curated on June 25, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Adam J. White at New Atlantis: “Google exists to answer our small questions. But how will we answer larger questions about Google itself? Is it a monopoly? Does it exert too much power over our lives? Should the government regulate it as a public utility — or even break it up?

In recent months, public concerns about Google have become more pronounced. This February, the New York Times Magazine published “The Case Against Google,” a blistering account of how “the search giant is squelching competition before it begins.” The Wall Street Journal published a similar article in January on the “antitrust case” against Google, along with Facebook and Amazon, whose market shares it compared to Standard Oil and AT&T at their peaks. Here and elsewhere, a wide array of reporters and commentators have reflected on Google’s immense power — not only over its competitors, but over each of us and the information we access — and suggested that the traditional antitrust remedies of regulation or breakup may be necessary to rein Google in.

Dreams of war between Google and government, however, obscure a much different relationship that may emerge between them — particularly between Google and progressive government. For eight years, Google and the Obama administration forged a uniquely close relationship. Their special bond is best ascribed not to the revolving door, although hundreds of meetings were held between the two; nor to crony capitalism, although hundreds of people have switched jobs from Google to the Obama administration or vice versa; nor to lobbying prowess, although Google is one of the top corporate lobbyists.

Rather, the ultimate source of the special bond between Google and the Obama White House — and modern progressive government more broadly — has been their common ethos. Both view society’s challenges today as social-engineering problems, whose resolutions depend mainly on facts and objective reasoning. Both view information as being at once ruthlessly value-free and yet, when properly grasped, a powerful force for ideological and social reform. And so both aspire to reshape Americans’ informational context, ensuring that we make choices based only upon what they consider the right kinds of facts — while denying that there would be any values or politics embedded in the effort.

Addressing an M.I.T. sports-analytics conference in February, former President Obama said that Google, Facebook, and prominent Internet services are “not just an invisible platform, but they are shaping our culture in powerful ways.” Focusing specifically on recent outcries over “fake news,” he warned that if Google and other platforms enable every American to personalize his or her own news sources, it is “very difficult to figure out how democracy works over the long term.” But instead of treating these tech companies as public threats to be regulated or broken up, Obama offered a much more conciliatory resolution, calling for them to be treated as public goods:

I do think that the large platforms — Google and Facebook being the most obvious, but Twitter and others as well that are part of that ecosystem — have to have a conversation about their business model that recognizes they are a public good as well as a commercial enterprise.

This approach, if Google were to accept it, could be immensely consequential….(More)”.

Ways to think about machine learning

Curated on June 24, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Benedict Evans: “We’re now four or five years into the current explosion of machine learning, and pretty much everyone has heard of it. It’s not just that startups are forming every day or that the big tech platform companies are rebuilding themselves around it – everyone outside tech has read the Economist or BusinessWeek cover story, and many big companies have some projects underway. We know this is a Next Big Thing.

Going a step further, we mostly understand what neural networks might be, in theory, and we get that this might be about patterns and data. Machine learning lets us find patterns or structures in data that are implicit and probabilistic (hence ‘inferred’) rather than explicit, that previously only people and not computers could find. They address a class of questions that were previously ‘hard for computers and easy for people’, or, perhaps more usefully, ‘hard for people to describe to computers’. And we’ve seen some cool (or worrying, depending on your perspective) speech and vision demos.

I don’t think, though, that we yet have a settled sense of quite what machine learning means – what it will mean for tech companies or for companies in the broader economy, how to think structurally about what new things it could enable, or what machine learning means for all the rest of us, and what important problems it might actually be able to solve.

This isn’t helped by the term ‘artificial intelligence’, which tends to end any conversation as soon as it’s begun. As soon as we say ‘AI’, it’s as though the black monolith from the beginning of 2001 has appeared, and we all become apes screaming at it and shaking our fists. You can’t analyze ‘AI’.

Indeed, I think one could propose a whole list of unhelpful ways of talking about current developments in machine learning. For example:

Data is the new oil
Google and China (or Facebook, or Amazon, or BAT) have all the data
AI will take all the jobs
And, of course, saying AI itself.

More useful things to talk about, perhaps, might be:

Automation
Enabling technology layers
Relational databases. …(More).

Blockchain’s governance paradox

Curated on June 24, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Izabella Kaminska at the Financial Times: “Distributed ledger technologies “are starting to look an awful lot like some of the more conventional technical solutions that we have,” says Prof. Vili Lehdonvirta, an associate professor and senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, at a recent talk he gave at the Alan Turing Institute.

At the heart of the issue (as always) is who dictates and enforces the rules of the system if and when things go wrong, according to Lehdonvirta. He echoes a point we’ve long made, namely, that what really matters in these systems is how they deal with exceptions rather than norms.

The industry’s continuous shifting of nomenclature hints at the inherent challenges and revisionism at hand. As blockchains become DLTs, shared databases and permissioned consensus networks, what the techies working on these systems fail to publicly highlight is that much of the time, “advance” means returning to tried and tested paradigms, or reintroducing trusted or governance-focused nodes.

Albeit, the “back to square one” solution isn’t unique to blockchain. We see the same pattern playing out across the network/platform industry. For example, Airbnb was built on the notion that peers could organise accommodation for each other bilaterally without any dependence on a centralised manager. As time went on, however, trust issues across the platform — everything from fraud, misrepresentation, bad consumer experience, abuse, vandalism or damage — forced the once proudly employee-light company to load up on staff who could troubleshoot many of these problems. In so doing, Airbnb — much like Ebay before it — transformed itself from a tech company into an adjudicator, value custodian and rules-and-standards authority.

And by and large, that’s not been an unwelcome transformation, from the consumer’s perspective. Indeed, what libertarian tech anarchists often fail to understand is that the public is not opposed to the idea of putting their trust in institutions, especially when they’re operated by real people who can be held accountable for things going wrong.

What they seemingly understand and technologists don’t is this: Trusting other parties to protect, enforce and adjudicate the rules of operation enhances division of labour and thus efficiency. I no longer have to waste hours of time trying to figure out if the counterparty I’ve dealt with on Ebay is trustworthy or not. Ebay governs the platform in such a way that I can be confident failed trades will always be compensated, and that Ebay’s own judgement about compensation entitlement will always be fair. After all, its continuing reputation as an efficient exchange platform depends on it.

But back to blockchian.

As Lehdonvirta observes, the vision of blockchain is of a system which can enforce contracts, prevent double spending, and cap the money supply pool without ceding power to anyone:

No rent-seeking, no abuses of power, no politics — blockchain technologies can be used to create “math-based money” and “unstoppable” contracts that are enforced with the impartiality of a machine instead of the imperfect and capricious human bureaucracy of a state or a bank. This is why so many people are so excited about blockchain: its supposed ability change economic organization in a way that transforms dominant relationships of power.

The problem which blockchain claims to have solved, in other words, is a rule-enforcement one, not a technological one….(More)”.

Microsoft Research Open Data

Curated on June 24, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Microsoft Research Open Data: “… is a data repository that makes available datasets that researchers at Microsoft have created and published in conjunction with their research. You can browse available datasets and either download them or directly copy them to an Azure-based Virtual Machine or Data Science Virtual Machine. To the extent possible, we follow FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) data principles and will continue to push towards the highest standards for data sharing. We recognize that there are dozens of data repositories already in use by researchers and expect that the capabilities of this repository will augment existing efforts. Datasets are categorized by their primary research area. You can find links to research projects or publications with the dataset.

What is our goal?

Our goal is to provide a simple platform to Microsoft’s researchers and collaborators to share datasets and related research technologies and tools. The site has been designed to simplify access to these data sets, facilitate collaboration between researchers using cloud-based resources, and enable the reproducibility of research. We will continue to evolve and grow this repository and add features to it based on feedback from the community.

How did this project come to be?

Over the past few years, our team, based at Microsoft Research, has worked extensively with the research community to create cloud-based research infrastructure. We started this project as a prototype about a year ago and are excited to finally share it with the research community to support data-intensive research in the cloud. Because almost all research projects have a data component, there is real need for curated and meaningful datasets in the research community, not only in computer science but in interdisciplinary and domain sciences. We have now made several such datasets available for download or use directly on cloud infrastructure….(More)”.

City-as-a-Service

Curated on June 24, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Circle Economy: Today during the WeMakeThe.City festival, Circle Economy launched the ‘City-as-a-Service’ publication, which offers a first glimpse into the ‘circular city of the future’. This publication is an initial and practical exploration of how service models will shape the way in which societal needs can be met in a future urban environment and how cities can take a leadership role in a transition towards a circular economy….

Housing, nutrition, mobility, and clothing are primary human needs and directly linked to material extraction. For each of these needs, Circle Economy has examined the potential impacts that service models can have.

By subscribing to a car-sharing service, for example, consumers are able to choose smaller, cheaper and more efficient cars when driving solo. In the Netherlands alone, this would save 2,200 kton of CO2 annually and will reduce annual spending on motoring by 10%. For textiles, a service model could potentially help us avoid “bad buys” that are never worn, which would result in a 15% cost saving for consumers and 23 kton of CO2 in the Netherlands. …

In an increasingly urban world, cities have to play a leading role to drive sustainable transitions and will lead the way on delivering the positive effects of a circular economy – and hence help to close the circularity gap. The circular economy offers a clear roadmap towards realizing the low-carbon, human-centered and prosperous circular city of the future. The ‘City-As-A-Service’ vision is a key next step into this promising future. Ultimately, service models could be a game changer for cities. In fact, city governments can influence this by providing the right boundary conditions and incentives in their policymaking…..(More)”.

Blockchain Ethical Design Framework

Curated on June 23, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Cara LaPointe and Lara Fishbane: “There are dramatic predictions about the potential of blockchain to “revolutionize” everything from worldwide financial markets and the distribution of humanitarian assistance to the very way that we outright recognize human identity for billions of people around the globe. Some dismiss these claims as excessive technology hype by citing flaws in the technology or robustness of incumbent solutions and infrastructure.

The reality will likely fall somewhere between these two extremes across multiple sectors. Where initial applications of blockchain were focused on the financial industry, current applications have rapidly expanded to address a wide array of sectors with major implications for social impact.

This paper aims to demonstrate the capacity of blockchain to create scalable social impact and to identify the elements that need to be addressed to mitigate challenges in its application. We are at a moment when technology is enabling society to experiment with new solutions and business models. Ubiquity and global reach, increased capabilities, and affordability have made technology a critical tool for solving problems, making this an exciting time to think about achieving greater social impact. We can address issues for underserved or marginalized people in ways that were previously unimaginable.

Blockchain is a technology that holds real promise for dealing with key inefficiencies and transforming operations in the social sector and for improving lives. Because of its immutability and decentralization, blockchain has the potential to create transparency, provide distributed verification, and build trust across multiple systems. For instance, blockchain applications could provide the means for establishing identities for individuals without identification papers, improving access to finance and banking services for underserved populations, and distributing aid to refugees in a more transparent and efficient manner. Similarly, national and subnational governments are putting land registry information onto blockchains to create greater transparency and avoid corruption and manipulation by third parties.

From increasing access to capital, to tracking health and education data across multiple generations, to improving voter records and voting systems, blockchain has countless potential applications for social impact. As developers take on building these types of solutions, the social effects of blockchain can be powerful and lasting. With the potential for such a powerful impact, the design, application, and approach to the development and implementation of blockchain technologies have long-term implications for society and individuals.

This paper outlines why intentionality of design, which is important with any technology, is particularly crucial with blockchain, and offers a framework to guide policymakers and social impact organizations. As social media, cryptocurrencies, and algorithms have shown, technology is not neutral. Values are embedded in the code. How the problem is defined and by whom, who is building the solution, how it gets programmed and implemented, who has access, and what rules are created have consequences, in intentional and unintentional ways. In the applications and implementation of blockchain, it is critical to understand that seemingly innocuous design choices have resounding ethical implications on people’s lives.

This white paper addresses why intentionality of design matters, identifies the key questions that should be asked, and provides a framework to approach use of blockchain, especially as it relates to social impact. It examines the key attributes of blockchain, its broad applicability as well as its particular potential for social impact, and the challenges in fully realizing that potential. Social impact organizations and policymakers have an obligation to understand the ethical approaches used in designing blockchain technology, especially how they affect marginalized and vulnerable populations….(More)”

My City Forecast: Urban planning communication tool for citizen with national open data

Curated on June 23, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Y. Hasegawa, Y. Sekimoto, T. Seto, Y. Fukushima et al in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems: “In urban management, the importance of citizen participation is being emphasized more than ever before. This is especially true in countries where depopulation has become a major concern for urban managers and many local authorities are working on revising city master plans, often incorporating the concept of the “compact city.” In Japan, for example, the implementation of compact city plans means that each local government decides on how to designate residential areas and promotes citizens moving to these areas in order to improve budget effectiveness and the vitality of the city. However, implementing a compact city is possible in various ways. Given that there can be some designated withdrawal areas for budget savings, compact city policies can include disadvantages for citizens. At this turning point for urban structures, citizen–government mutual understanding and cooperation is necessary for every step of urban management, including planning.

Concurrently, along with the recent rapid growth of big data utilization and computer technologies, a new conception of cooperation between citizens and government has emerged. With emerging technologies based on civic knowledge, citizens have started to obtain the power to engage directly in urban management by obtaining information, thinking about their city’s problems, and taking action to help shape the future of their city themselves (Knight Foundation, 2013). This development is also supported by the open government data movement, which promotes the availability of government information online (Kingston, Carver, Evans, & Turton, 2000). CityDashboard is one well-known example of real-time visualization and distribution of urban information. CityDashboard, a web tool launched in 2012 by University College London, aggregates spatial data for cities around the UK and displays the data on a dashboard and a map. These new technologies are expected to enable both citizens and government to see their urban situation in an interface presenting an overhead view based on statistical information.

However, usage of statistics and governmental data is as yet limited in the actual process of urban planning…

To help improve this situation and increase citizen participation in urban management, we have developed a web-based urban planning communication tool using open government data for enhanced citizen–government cooperation. The main aim of the present research is to evaluate the effect of our system on users’ awareness of and attitude toward the urban situation. We have designed and developed an urban simulation system, My City Forecast (http://mycityforecast.net,) that enables citizens to understand how their environment and region are likely to change by urban management in the future (up to 2040)….(More)”.

Can Smart Cities Be Equitable?

Curated on June 23, 2018May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Homi Kharas and Jaana Remes at Project Syndicate: “Around the world, governments are making cities “smarter” by using data and digital technology to build more efficient and livable urban environments. This makes sense: with urban populations growing and infrastructure under strain, smart cities will be better positioned to manage rapid change.

But as digital systems become more pervasive, there is a danger that inequality will deepen unless local governments recognize that tech-driven solutions are as important to the poor as they are to the affluent.

While offline populations can benefit from applications running in the background of daily life – such as intelligent signals that help with traffic flows – they will not have access to the full range of smart-city programs. With smartphones serving as the primary interface in the modern city, closing the digital divide, and extending access to networks and devices, is a critical first step.

City planners can also deploy technology in ways that make cities more inclusive for the poor, the disabled, the elderly, and other vulnerable people. Examples are already abundant.

In New York City, the Mayor’s Public Engagement Unit uses interagency data platforms to coordinate door-to-door outreachto residents in need of assistance. In California’s Santa Clara County, predictive analytics help prioritize shelter space for the homeless. On the London Underground, an app called Wayfindr uses Bluetooth to help visually impaired travelers navigate the Tube’s twisting pathways and escalators.

And in Kolkata, India, a Dublin-based startup called Addressing the Unaddressedhas used GPS to provide postal addresses for more than 120,000 slum dwellers in 14 informal communities. The goal is to give residents a legal means of obtaining biometric identification cards, essential documentation needed to access government services and register to vote.

But while these innovations are certainly significant, they are only a fraction of what is possible.

Public health is one area where small investments in technology can bring big benefits to marginalized groups. In the developing world, preventable illnesses comprise a disproportionate share of the disease burden. When data are used to identify demographic groups with elevated risk profiles, low-cost mobile-messaging campaigns can transmit vital prevention information. So-called “m-health” interventions on issues like vaccinations, safe sex, and pre- and post-natal care have been shown to improve health outcomes and lower health-care costs.

Another area ripe for innovation is the development of technologies that directly aid the elderly….(More)”.