Paper by Caio Libânio Melo Jerônimo, Claudio E. C. Campelo, Cláudio de Souza Baptista: “The need to use online technologies that favor the understanding of city dynamics has grown, mainly due to the ease in obtaining the necessary data, which, in most cases, are gathered with no cost from social networks services. With such facility, the acquisition of georeferenced data has become easier, favoring the interest and feasibility in studying human mobility patterns, bringing new challenges for knowledge discovery in GIScience. This favorable scenario also encourages governments to make their data available for public access, increasing the possibilities for data scientist to analyze such data. This article presents an approach to extracting mobility metrics from Twitter messages and to analyzing their correlation with social, economic and demographic open data. The proposed model was evaluated using a dataset of georeferenced Twitter messages and a set of social indicators, both related to Greater London. The results revealed that social indicators related to employment conditions present higher correlation with the mobility metrics than any other social indicators investigated, suggesting that these social variables may be more relevant for studying mobility behaviors….(More)”.
Let’s create a nation of social scientists
Geoff Mulgan in Times Higher Education: “How might social science become more influential, more relevant and more useful in the years to come?
Recent debates about impact have largely assumed a model of social science in which a cadre of specialists, based in universities, analyse and interpret the world and then feed conclusions into an essentially passive society. But a very different view sees specialists in the academy working much more in partnership with a society that is itself skilled in social science, able to generate hypotheses, gather data, experiment and draw conclusions that might help to answer the big questions of our time, from the sources of inequality to social trust, identity to violence.
There are some powerful trends to suggest that this second view is gaining traction. The first of these is the extraordinary explosion of new ways to observe social phenomena. Every day each of us leaves behind a data trail of who we talk to, what we eat and where we go. It’s easier than ever to survey people, to spot patterns, to scrape the web or to pick up data from sensors. It’s easier than ever to gather perceptions and emotions as well as material facts and easier than ever for organisations to practice social science – whether investment organisations analysing market patterns, human resources departments using behavioural science, or local authorities using ethnography.
That deluge of data is a big enough shift on its own. However, it is also now being used to feed interpretive and predictive tools using artificial intelligence to predict who is most likely to go to hospital, to end up in prison, which relationships are most likely to end in divorce.
Governments are developing their own predictive tools, and have also become much more interested in systematic experimentation, with Finland and Canada in the lead, moving us closer to Karl Popper’s vision of “methods of trial and error, of inventing hypotheses which can be practically tested…”…
The second revolution is less visible but could be no less profound. This is the hunger of many people to be creators of knowledge, not just users; to be part of a truly collective intelligence. At the moment this shift towards mass engagement in knowledge is most visible in neighbouring fields. Digital humanities mobilise many volunteers to input data and interpret texts – for example making ancient Arabic texts machine-readable. Even more striking is the growth of citizen science – eBird had 1.5 million reports last January; some 1.5 million people in the US monitor river streams and lakes, and SETI@home has 5 million volunteers. Thousands of patients also take part in funding and shaping research on their own conditions….
We’re all familiar with the old idea that it’s better to teach a man to fish than just to give him fish. In essence these trends ask us a simple question: why not apply the same logic to social science, and why not reorient social sciences to enhance the capacity of society itself to observe, analyse and interpret?…(More)”.
Mobility Score
“MobilityScore® helps you understand how easy it is to get around. It works at any location or address within the US and Canada and gives you a score ranging from 0 (no mobility choices) to 100 (excellent mobility choices).
What do we mean by mobility? Any transportation option that can help you move around your city. Transportation is changing massively as new choices emerge: ridesharing, bikesharing, carsharing. Private and on-demand mobility services have sprung up. However, tools for measuring transportation access have not kept up. That’s why we created MobilityScore as an easy-to-understand measure of transportation access.
Technical Details
MobilityScore includes all the transportation choices that can be found on TransitScreen displays, including the following services:
- Public transit (subways, trains, buses, ferries, cable cars…)
- Car sharing services (Zipcar, Enterprise, and one-way services like car2go)
- Bike sharing services
- Hailed ride sharing services (e.g. taxis, Uber, Lyft)
We have developed a common way of comparing how choices that might seem very different contribute to your mobility. For each mobility choice, we measure how long it will take you until you can start moving on it – for example, the time it takes you to leave your building, walk to a subway station, and wait for a train.
Because we’re measuring how easy it is for you to move around the city, we also consider what mobility choices look like at different times of the day and different days of the week. Mobility data is regularly collected for most services, while ridehailing (Uber/Lyft) data is based on a geographic model of arrival times.
MobilityScore’s framework is future-proof. Just like we do with TransitScreen, we will integrate future services into the calculation as they emerge (e.g. microtransit, autonomous vehicles, mobility-as-a-service)….(More)”
UN Opens New Office to Monitor AI Development and Predict Possible Threats
Interesting Engineering: “The United Nations has created a new office in the Netherlands dedicated to the monitoring and research of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. The new office will collect information about the way in which AI is impacting the world. Researchers will have a particular focus on the way AI relates to global security but will also monitor the effects of job loss from AI and automation.
Irakli Beridze, a UN senior strategic adviser will head the office. They have described the new office saying, “A number of UN organisations operate projects involving robots and AI, such as the group of experts studying the role of autonomous military robots in the realm of conventional weapons. These are temporary measures. Ours is the first permanent UN office on this subject. We are looking at the risks as well as the advantages.”….He suggests that the speed of AI technology development is of primary concern. He explains, “This can make for instability if society does not adapt quickly enough. One of our most important tasks is to set up a network of experts from business, knowledge institutes, civil society organisations and governments. We certainly do not want to plead for a ban or a brake on technologies. We will also explore how new technology can contribute to the sustainable development goals of the UN. For this, we want to start concrete projects. We will not be a talking club.”…(More).
New program wants to improve cities with the power of tweets and Flickr uploads
Marissa Clifford at Curbed: “Want to watch street life unfold outside of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, long after it’s closed for the day? Or uncover the hidden ways both tourists and locals alike use Manhattan’s most famous landmarks? Now you can, all thanks to the power of data.
Urban Pulse, open-source software developed at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, uses data to create a map that visualizes how people move through cities. From Urban Pulse’s interface, you can observe, for example, how tourists navigate Central Park.
Sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, who worked in the early years of the 20th century, developed a theory of urban environments that used the human body as an organizing analogy: They likened the mundane processes of everyday urban life (things like phone calls and taxi rides) to the heartbeat. Urban Pulse brings that analogy into the 21st century, replacing statistics about phone calls with social media and other digital data.
Essentially, Urban Pulse is a dynamic, comparative heat map. And the hot spots on the map are made up of what the research team dubbed “pulses” and “beats,” terminology that was inspired by Park and Burgess’s original analogy.
But Urban Pulse’s findings don’t simply reinforce what we already know about cities. By pinpointing how, when, and by whom city spaces are most often used, the data has the power to upend our preconceptions about civic space. This has potentially far-reaching implications for urban planners, architects, and city planners.
But what is a “pulse?” And where is that social media data coming from? Simply put, a pulse is a graphic representation of the kinds of open source data that serve as proxies for human activity, like tweets and Flickr uploads. Though Urban Pulse currently only uses data from Flickr and Twitter, it is free to download on GitHub, and its creators are hoping to see a wider variety of data types input by the open source community….(More)”.
Are countries with a poor democratic record more likely to mandate an Aadhaar-like ID?
Rohan Venkataramakrishnan at the Centre for Communication Governance: “Can a country’s democratic record indicate whether it is likely to mandate a national biometric identity? Research by scholars at the National Law University, Delhi suggests there may be some correlation, at least to indicate that robust democracies have been more cautious about adopting biometric identity systems.
The Supreme Court’s decision last month upholding a fundamental Right to Privacy for all Indians has put a renewed focus on Aadhaar, India’s 12-digit biometric identity programme that has been criticised for not only violating privacy but also lacking sufficient data protection safeguards. Challenges to the Aadhaar project, in fact, prompted the Supreme Court to take up the question of a Right to Privacy, and the apex court will hear petitions against the unique identity initiative later this year.
Ahead of those hearings, researchers from the Centre for Communication Governance at the National Law University, Delhi sought to look at the adoption of biometric identity systems by countries across the world. While examining whether countries were instituting these Aadhaar-like systems, researchers from the Centre noticed a trend wherein nations with strong biometric identity systems were less likely to have robust democratic governments.
“As we gathered and analysed the data, we noticed an interesting trend where many countries that had strong biometric ID systems, also did not have strong democratic governments,” the researchers said.
So they sought to map out their research, based on data collected primarily from countries within the Commonwealth, measured against their positions on Freedom House’s Freedom in the World index and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy index. The results show a cluster of nations with less freedoms also instituting a biometric system, while others higher up the democracy index do not have similar identity programmes….(More)”.
The Potential of Social Media Intelligence to Improve People’s Lives: Social Media Data for Good
New report by Stefaan G. Verhulst and Andrew Young: “The twenty-first century will be challenging on many fronts. From historically catastrophic natural disasters resulting from climate change to inequality to refugee and terrorism crises, it is clear that we need not only new solutions, but new insights and methods of arriving at solutions. Data, and the intelligence gained from it through advances in data science, is increasingly being seen as part of the answer. This report explores the premise that data—and in particular the vast stores of data and the unique analytical expertise held by social media companies—may indeed provide for a new type of intelligence that could help develop solutions to today’s challenges.
In this report, developed with support from Facebook, we focus on an approach to extract public value from social media data that we believe holds the greatest potential: data collaboratives. Data collaboratives are an emerging form of public-private partnership in which actors from different sectors exchange information to create new public value. Such collaborative arrangements, for example between social media companies and humanitarian organizations or civil society actors, can be seen as possible templates for leveraging privately held data towards the attainment of public goals….(More)”
Polish activists turn to digital democracy
Zosia Wasik in the Financial Times: “Opponents of the Polish government have mounted a series of protests on issues ranging from reform of the judiciary to an attempt to ban abortion. In February, they staged yet another, less public but intensely emotive, battle — to save the country’s trees.
At the beginning of the year, a new law allowed property owners to cut trees on their land without official permission. As a result, hundreds of trees disappeared from the centres of Polish cities as more valuable treeless plots were sold off to developers. In parallel, the government authorised extensive logging of the ancient forest in Bialowieza, a Unesco world heritage site.
“People reacted very emotionally to these practices,” says Wojciech Sanko, a co-ordinator at Code for Poland, a programme run by ePanstwo (eState), the country’s biggest non-governmental organisation in this field.
The group aims to deploy new technology tools designed to explain local and national policies, and to make it easier for citizens to take part in public life. As no one controlled the tree-cutting, for example, Mr Sanko thought technology could at least help to monitor it. First, he wanted to set up a simple digital map of trees cut in Warsaw. But as the controversial liberalisation of tree-cutting was reversed, the NGO together with local activists decided to work on another project — to map trees still standing, along with data about species and their absorption of carbon dioxide associated with climate change.
The group has also started to create an app for activists in Bialowieza forest: an open-source map that will gather all documentation from civic patrols monitoring the site, and will indicate the exact places of logging.
A trend towards recruiting technology for civic projects has been slowly gathering pace in a country that is hard to describe as socially-engaged: only 59 per cent of Poles say they have done volunteer work for the community, according to a 2016 survey by the Centre of Public Opinion Research.
Election turnout barely surpasses 50 per cent. Yet since the election of the rightwing Law and Justice government in 2015, which has introduced rapid and controversial reforms across all domains of public life, citizens have started to take a closer look at politicians and their actions.
In addition to the tree map, Code for Poland has developed a website that aggregates public data, such as tax spending or air pollution.
Mr Sanko underlines, however, that Code for Poland is much more about local communities than national politics. Many of the group’s projects are small scale, ranging from a mobile app for an animal shelter in Gdansk and a tool that shows people where they can take their garbage.
Piotr Micula, board member of Miasto Jest Nasze (The City is Ours), an urban movement in Warsaw, says that increasing access to data is fuelling the development of civic tech. “Even as a small organisation, we try to use big data and visualise it,” he says….(More)”.
Blockchain-like ID may mean end of paper birth certificates
Chris Baraniuk at New Scientist: “There’s a new way to prove you are who you say you are – inspired by the tech underpinning bitcoin. Usually, when you need to verify your identity, the process is archaic, insecure and time-consuming. You get a copy of your birth certificate in the post, put it in an envelope and hope it gets to whoever is asking for it. In the digital era, this should take seconds.
But putting something as sensitive as a birth certificate online risks identity theft in the era of hacks and leaks. Now, the US state of Illinois is experimenting with a secure way of putting control of that data into its citizens’ hands, with the help of distributed ledgers, similar to the blockchain used by bitcoin.
Just last month, Illinois announced a pilot project to create “secure ‘self-sovereign’ identity” for Illinois citizens wishing to access their birth certificate. The idea is to use a blockchain-like distributed ledger that allows online access only to the people owning the ID, and any third parties granted their permission.
Illinois is working with software firm Evernym of Herriman, Utah, to create a record of who should be able to access data from the state’s birth register. Once this is done, no central authority should be required, just your say-so.They’re not the only ones. According to a report by Garrick Hileman and Michael Rauchs at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, UK, governments are increasingly experimenting with it, including the UK and Brazil.
Activists have long called for people to have greater control of their data. Hacks and leaks are making it too risky for authorities to be the central repository of citizens’ most vital information.
With distributed ledgers, all participants within a network can have their own identical copy of data like access permissions – so no one can view cryptographically sealed birth certificate data unless they’re meant to. Blockchains are a type of distributed ledger that gets the whole network to observe and verify transactions – such as when someone sends a bitcoin to their friend….(More)”.
Cape Town as a Smart and Safe City: Implications for Governance and Data Privacy
Nora Ni Loideain at the Journal of International Data Privacy Law: “Promises abound that ‘smart city’ technologies could play a major role in developing safer, more sustainable, and equitable cities, creating paragons of democracy. However, there are concerns that governance led by ‘Big Data’ processes marks the beginning of a trend of encroachment on the individual’s liberty and privacy, even if such technologies are employed legitimately for the public’s safety and security. There are many ways in which personal data processing for law enforcement and public safety purposes may pose a threat to the privacy and data protection rights of individuals. Furthermore, the risk of such powers being misused is increased by the covert nature of the processing, and the ever-increasing capacity, and pervasiveness, of the retention, sharing, and monitoring of personal data by public authorities and business. The focus of this article concerns the use of these smart city technologies for the purposes of countering crime and ensuring public safety. Specifically, this research examines these policy-making developments, and the key initiatives to date, undertaken by the municipal authorities within the city of Cape Town. Subsequently, the examination then explores the implications of these policies and initiatives for governance, and compliance with the right to data privacy, as guaranteed under international human rights law, the Constitution of South Africa, and the national statutory framework governing data protection. In conclusion, the discussion provides reflections on the findings from this analysis, including some policy recommendations….(More)”.