Could online democracy lead to governance by Trumps and trolls?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in The Guardian: “The first two user tutorials are pretty stock standard but, from there, things escalate dramatically. After mastering How to Sign Up and How to RecoverYour Password, users are apparently ready to advance to lesson number three: How to Create a Democracy.

As it turns out, on DemocracyOS, this is a relatively straightforward matter – not overthrowing the previous regime nor exterminating the last traces of the royal lineage in order to pave the way for a new world order. Instead Argentinian developers Democracia en Red have made it a simple matter of clicking a button to form a group and thrash out the policies voters wish to see enacted.

It is one of a range of digital platforms for direct democracy created by developers and activists to redefine the relationship between citizens and their governments,with the powers that be in Latin American city councils through to European anti-austerity parties making the upgrade to democracy 2.0.

Reshaping how government works is a difficult enough pitch by itself but,beyond that, there’s another challenge facing developers – the online trolls are ready and waiting.

Britain alone this year offered up two examples of what impact trolls could have on online direct democracy – there was the case of “BoatyMcBoatface” famously winning a Natural Environment ResearchCouncil poll to determine the name of a multimillion-pound arctic research vessel, and then there was the more serious case of trolls adding the signatures of thousands of residents of countries such as the Cayman Islands and Vatican City to a formal petition calling for a second Brexit referendum, in order to have the entire document disregarded as an online prank.

In the US presidential election even the politicians are getting in on it,with a pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC (political action committee) hiring an army of online commenters to defend the candidate in arguments on social media, while the Republican contender, Donald Trump, is himself engaging in textbook trolling behaviour – whether that’s urging the hacking of Clinton’s emails, revealing the phone number of a Republican rival during the primaries, or unleashing a constant stream of controversial statements as a means of derailing conversations, attracting attention and humiliating his targets.

So what does this mean for digital platforms for direct democracy? By merging the world of the internet with that of politics, will we all end up governed by some fusion of trolls and Trumps promising to build Wally McWallfaces on our borders? And will the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution also usher in a revolution in how democracy functions?…(More)”

Artificial Intelligence can streamline public comment for federal agencies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Davis at the Hill: “…What became immediately clear to me was that — although not impossible to overcome — the lack of consistency and shared best practices across all federal agencies in accepting and reviewing public comments was a serious impediment. The promise of Natural Language Processing and cognitive computing to make the public comment process light years faster and more transparent becomes that much more difficult without a consensus among federal agencies on what type of data is collected – and how.

“There is a whole bunch of work we have to do around getting government to be more customer friendly and making it at least as easy to file your taxes as it is to order a pizza or buy an airline ticket,” President Obama recently said in an interview with WIRED. “Whether it’s encouraging people to vote or dislodging Big Data so that people can use it more easily, or getting their forms processed online more simply — there’s a huge amount of work to drag the federal government and state governments and local governments into the 21st century.”

…expanding the discussion around Artificial Intelligence and regulatory processes to include how the technology should be leveraged to ensure fairness and responsiveness in the very basic processes of rulemaking – in particular public notices and comments. These technologies could also enable us to consider not just public comments formally submitted to an agency, but the entire universe of statements made through social media posts, blogs, chat boards — and conceivably every other electronic channel of public communication.

Obviously, an anonymous comment on the Internet should not carry the same credibility as a formally submitted, personally signed statement, just as sworn testimony in court holds far greater weight than a grapevine rumor. But so much public discussion today occurs on Facebook pages, in Tweets, on news website comment sections, etc. Anonymous speech enjoys explicit protection under the Constitution, based on a justified expectation that certain sincere statements of sentiment might result in unfair retribution from the government.

Should we simply ignore the valuable insights about actual public sentiment on specific issues made possible through the power of Artificial Intelligence, which can ascertain meaning from an otherwise unfathomable ocean of relevant public conversations? With certain qualifications, I believe Artificial Intelligence, or AI, should absolutely be employed in the critical effort to gain insights from public comments – signed or anonymous.

“In the criminal justice system, some of the biggest concerns with Big Data are the lack of data and the lack of quality data,” the NSTC report authors state. “AI needs good data. If the data is incomplete or biased, AI can exacerbate problems of bias.” As a former federal criminal prosecutor and defense attorney, I am well familiar with the absolute necessity to weigh the relative value of various forms of evidence – or in this case, data…(More)“

The Future of Drone Use: Opportunities and Threats from Ethical and Legal Perspectives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Bart Custers: “Given the popularity of drones and the fact that they are easy and cheap to buy, it is generally expected that the ubiquity of drones will significantly increase within the next few years. This raises questions as to what is technologically feasible (now and in the future), what is acceptable from an ethical point of view and what is allowed from a legal point of view. Drone technology is to some extent already available and to some extent still in development. The aim and scope of this book is to map the opportunities and threats associated with the use of drones and to discuss the ethical and legal issues of the use of drones.
This book provides an overview of current drone technologies and applications and of what to expect in the next few years. The question of how to regulate the use of drones in the future is addressed, by considering conditions and contents of future drone legislation and by analyzing issues surrounding privacy and safeguards that can be taken. As such, this book is valuable to scholars in several disciplines, such as law, ethics, sociology, politics and public administration, as well as to practitioners and others who may be confronted with the use of drones in their work, such as professionals working in the military, law enforcement, disaster management and infrastructure management. Individuals and businesses with a specific interest in drone use may also find in the nineteen contributions contained in this volume unexpected perspectives on this new field of research and innovation….(More)”

Enriching Urban Spaces with Ambient Computing, the Internet of Things, and Smart City Design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Shin’ichi Konomi and George Roussos: “In recent years, the presence of ubiquitous computing has increasingly integrated into the lives of people in modern society. As these technologies become more pervasive, new opportunities open for making citizens’ environments more comfortable, convenient, and efficient.

Enriching Urban Spaces with Ambient Computing, the Internet of Things, and Smart City Design is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly material on the interaction between people and computing systems in contemporary society, showcasing how ubiquitous computing influences and shapes urban environments. Highlighting the impacts of these emerging technologies from an interdisciplinary perspective, this book is ideally designed for professionals, researchers, academicians, and practitioners interested in the influential state of pervasive computing within urban contexts….(Table of Contents and List of Contributors)”.

Making Open Data more evidence-based

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Stefaan G. Verhulst and Danny Lämmerhirt: “…To realize its potential there is a need for more evidence on the full life cycle of open data – within and across settings and sectors….

In particular, three substantive areas were identified that could benefit from interdisciplinary and comparative research:

Demand and use: First, many expressed a need to become smarter about the demand and use-side of open data. Much of the focus, given the nascent nature of many initiatives around the world, has been on the supply-side of open data. Yet to be more responsive and sustainable more insight needs to be gained to the demand and/or user needs.

Conversations repeatedly emphasized that we should differentiate between open data demand and use. Open data demand and use can be analyzed from multiple directions: 1) top-down, starting from a data provider, to intermediaries, to the end users and/or audiences; or 2) bottom-up, studying the data demands articulated by individuals (for instance, through FOIA requests), and how these demands can be taken up by intermediaries and open data providers to change what is being provided as open data.

Research should scrutinize each stage (provision, intermediation, use and demand) on its own, but also examine the interactions between stages (for instance, how may open data demand inform data supply, and how does data supply influence intermediation and use?)….

Informing data supply and infrastructure: Second, we heard on numerous occasions, a call upon researchers and domain experts to help in identifying “key data” and inform the government data infrastructure needed to provide them. Principle 1 of the International Open Data Charter states that governments should provide key data “open by default”, yet the questions remains in how to identify “key” data (e.g., would that mean data relevant to society at large?).

Which governments (and other public institutions) should be expected to provide key data and which information do we need to better understand government’s role in providing key data? How can we evaluate progress around publishing these data coherently if countries organize the capture, collection, and publication of this data differently?…

Impact: In addition to those two focus areas – covering the supply and demand side –  there was also a call to become more sophisticated about impact. Too often impact gets confused with outputs, or even activities. Given the embryonic and iterative nature of many open data efforts, signals of impact are limited and often preliminary. In addition, different types of impact (such as enhancing transparency versus generating innovation and economic growth) require different indicators and methods. At the same time, to allow for regular evaluations of what works and why there is a need for common assessment methods that can generate comparative and directional insights….

Research Networking: Several researchers identified a need for better exchange and collaboration among the research community. This would allow to tackle the research questions and challenges listed above, as well as to identify gaps in existing knowledge, to develop common research methods and frameworks and to learn from each other. Key questions posed involved: how to nurture and facilitate networking among researchers and (topical) experts from different disciplines, focusing on different issues or using different methods? How are different sub-networks related or disconnected with each other (for instance how connected are the data4development; freedom of information or civic tech research communities)? In addition, an interesting discussion emerged around how researchers can also network more with those part of the respective universe of analysis – potentially generating some kind of participatory research design….(More)”

Crowdsourcing Gun Violence Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Penn Engineering: “Gun violence is often described as an epidemic, but as visible and shocking as shooting incidents are, epidemiologists who study that particular source of mortality have a hard time tracking them. The Centers for Disease Control is prohibited by federal law from conducting gun violence research, so there is little in the way of centralized infrastructure to monitor where, how,when, why and to whom shootings occur.

Chris Callison-Burch, Aravind K.Joshi Term Assistant Professor in Computer and InformationScience, and graduate studentEllie Pavlick are working to solve this problem.

They have developed the GunViolence Database, which combines machine learning and crowdsourcing techniques to produce a national registry of shooting incidents. Callison-Burch and Pavlick’s algorithm scans thousands of articles from local newspaper and television stations,determines which are about gun violence, then asks everyday people to pullout vital statistics from those articles, compiling that information into a unified, open database.

For natural language processing experts like Callison-Burch and Pavlick, the most exciting prospect of this effort is that it is training computer systems to do this kind of analysis automatically. They recently presented their work on that front at Bloomberg’s Data for Good Exchange conference.

The Gun Violence Database project started in 2014, when it became the centerpiece of Callison-Burch’s “Crowdsourcing and Human Computation”class. There, Pavlick developed a series of homework assignments that challenged undergraduates to develop a classifier that could tell whether a given news article was about a shooting incident.

“It allowed us to teach the things we want students to learn about datascience and natural language processing, while giving them the motivation to do a project that could contribute to the greater good,” says Callison-Burch.

The articles students used to train their classifiers were sourced from “TheGun Report,” a daily blog from New York Times reporters that attempted to catalog shootings from around the country in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. Realizing that their algorithmic approach could be scaled up to automate what the Times’ reporters were attempting, the researchers began exploring how such a database could work. They consulted with DouglasWiebe, a Associate Professor of Epidemiology in Biostatistics andEpidemiology in the Perelman School of Medicine, to learn more about what kind of information public health researchers needed to better study gun violence on a societal scale.

From there, the researchers enlisted people to annotate the articles their classifier found, connecting with them through Mechanical Turk, Amazon’scrowdsourcing platform, and their own website, http://gun-violence.org/…(More)”

Reframing Data Transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Recently, the Centre for Information Policy Leadership (“CIPL”) at Hunton & Williams LLP, a privacy and information policy think tank based in Brussels, London and Washington, D.C., and Telefónica, one of the largest telecommunications company in the world, issued a joint white paper on Reframing Data Transparency (the “white paper”). The white paper was the outcome of a June 2016 roundtable held by the two organizations in London, in which senior business leaders, Data Privacy Officers, lawyers and academics discussed the importance of user-centric transparency to the data driven economy….The issues explored during the roundtable and in the white paper include the following:

  • The transparency deficit in the digital age. There is a growing gap between traditional, legal privacy notices and user-centric transparency that is capable of delivering understandable and actionable information concerning an organization’s data use policies and practices, including why it processes data, what the benefits are to individuals and society, how it protects the data and how users can manage and control the use of their data.
  • The impact of the transparency deficit. The transparency deficit undermines customer trust and customers’ ability to participate more effectively in the digital economy.
  • Challenges of delivering user-centric transparency. In a connected world where there may be no direct relationship between companies and their end users, both transparency and consent as a basis for processing are particularly challenging.
  • Transparency as a multistakeholder challenge. Transparency is not solely a legal issue, but a multistakeholder challenge, which requires engagement of regulators, companies, individuals, behavioral economists, social scientists, psychologists and user experience specialists.
  • The role of data protection authorities (“DPAs”). DPAs play a key role in promoting and incentivizing effective data transparency approaches and tools.
  • The role of companies. Data transparency is a critical business issue because transparency drives digital trust as well as business opportunities. Organizations must innovate on how to deliver user-centric transparency. Data driven companies must research and develop new approaches to transparency that explain the value exchange between customers and companies and the companies’ data practices, and create tools that enable their customers to exercise effective engagement and control.
  • The importance of empowering individuals. It is crucial to support and enhance individuals’ digital literacy, which includes an understanding of the uses of personal data and the benefits of data processing, as well as knowledge of relevant privacy rights and the data management tools that are available to them. Government bodies, regulators and industry should be involved in educating the public regarding digital literacy. Such education should take place in schools and universities, and through consumer education campaigns. Transparency is the foundation and sine qua non of individual empowerment.
  • The role of behavioral economists, social scientists, psychologists and user experience specialists. Experts from these disciplines will be crucial in developing user-centric transparency and controls….(More)”.

Empowering cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“The real story on how citizens and businesses are driving smart cities” by the Economist Intelligence Unit: “Digital technologies are the lifeblood of today’s cities. They are applied widely in industry and society, from information and communications technology (ICT) to the Internet of Things (IoT), in which objects are connected to the Internet. As sensors turn any object into part of an intelligent urban network, and as computing power facilitates analysis of the data these sensors collect, elected officials and city administrators can gain an unparalleled understanding of the infrastructure and services of their city. However, to make the most of this intelligence, another ingredient is essential: citizen engagement. Thanks to digital technologies, citizens can provide a steady flow of feedback and ideas to city officials.

This study by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), supported by Philips Lighting, investigates how citizens and businesses in 12 diverse cities around the world—Barcelona, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Singapore and Toronto—envision the benefits of smart cities. The choices of the respondents to the survey reflect the diverse nature of the challenges and opportunities facing different cities, from older cities in mature markets, where technology is at work with infrastructure that may be centuries old, to new cities in emerging markets, which have the opportunity to incorporate digital technologies as they grow.

Coupled with expert perspectives, these insights paint a fresh picture of how digital technologies can empower people to contribute-giving city officials a roadmap to smart city life in the 21st century….(More)”

The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: 70 Real-World Examples

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation: “Artificial intelligence (AI) is on a winning streak. In 2005, five teams successfully completed the DARPA Grand Challenge, a competition held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to spur development of autonomous vehicles. In 2011, IBM’s Watson system beat out two longtime human champions to win Jeopardy! In 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo system defeated the 18-time world-champion Go player. And thanks to Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa, consumers now have easy access to a variety of AI-powered virtual assistants to help manage their daily lives. The potential uses of AI to identify patterns, learn from experience, and find novel solutions to new challenges continue to grow as the technology advances.

Moreover, AI is already having a major positive impact in many different sectors of the global economy and society.  For example, humanitarian organizations are using intelligent chatbots to provide psychological support to Syrian refugees, and doctors are using AI to develop personalized treatments for cancer patients. Unfortunately, the benefits of AI, as well as its likely impact in the years ahead, are vastly underappreciated by policymakers and the public. Moreover, a contrary narrative—that AI raises grave concerns and warrants a precautionary regulatory approach to limit the damages it could cause—has gained prominence, even though it is both wrong and harmful to societal progress.

To showcase the overwhelmingly positive impact of AI, this report describes the major uses of AI and highlights 70 real-world examples of how AI is already generating social and economic benefits. Policymakers should consider these benefits as they evaluate the steps they can take to support the development and adoption of AI….(More)”

We’ve stopped trusting institutions and started trusting strangers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

TED: “Something profound is changing our concept of trust, says Rachel Botsman. While we used to place our trust in institutions like governments and banks, today we increasingly rely on others, often strangers, on platforms like Airbnb and Uber and through technologies like the blockchain. This new era of trust could bring with it a more transparent, inclusive and accountable society — if we get it right. Who do you trust?…(More)”