Big data and the measurement of public organizations’ performance and efficiency: The state-of-the-art


, and  in Public Policy and Administration: “The increasing availability of statistical data raises opportunities for ‘big’ data and learning analytics. Here, we review the academic literature and research relating to the use of big data analytics in the public sector, and its contribution to public organizations’ performance and efficiency. We outline the advantages as well as the limitations of using big data in public sector organizations and identify research gaps in recent studies and interesting areas for future research….(More)”

 

Citizenship, Social Media, and Big Data


Homero Gil de Zúñiga and Trevor Diehl introducing Special Issue of the Social Science Computer Review: “This special issue of the Social Science Computer Review provides a sample of the latest strategies employing large data sets in social media and political communication research. The proliferation of information communication technologies, social media, and the Internet, alongside the ubiquity of high-performance computing and storage technologies, has ushered in the era of computational social science. However, in no way does the use of źbig dataź represent a standardized area of inquiry in any field. This article briefly summarizes pressing issues when employing big data for political communication research. Major challenges remain to ensure the validity and generalizability of findings. Strong theoretical arguments are still a central part of conducting meaningful research. In addition, ethical practices concerning how data are collected remain an area of open discussion. The article surveys studies that offer unique and creative ways to combine methods and introduce new tools while at the same time address some solutions to ethical questions. (See Table of Contents)”

Can artificial intelligence wipe out bias unconscious bias from your workplace?


Lydia Dishman at Fast Company: “Unconscious bias is exactly what it sounds like: The associations we make whenever we face a decision are buried so deep (literally—the gland responsible for this, the amygdala, is surrounded by the brain’s gray matter) that we’re as unaware of them as we are of having to breathe.

So it’s not much of a surprise that Ilit Raz, cofounder and CEO of Joonko, a new application that acts as diversity “coach” powered by artificial intelligence, wasn’t even aware at first of the unconscious bias she was facing as a woman in the course of a normal workday. Raz’s experience coming to grips with that informs the way she and her cofounders designed Joonko to work.

The tool joins a crowded field of AI-driven solutions for the workplace, but most of what’s on the market is meant to root out bias in recruiting and hiring. Joonko, by contrast, is setting its sights on illuminating unconscious bias in the types of workplace experiences where few people even think to look for it….

so far, a lot of these resources have been focused on addressing the hiring process. An integral part of the problem, after all, is getting enough diverse candidates in the recruiting pipeline so they can be considered for jobs. Apps like Blendoor hide a candidate’s name, age, employment history, criminal background, and even their photo so employers can focus on qualifications. Interviewing.io’s platform even masks applicants’ voices. Text.io uses AI to parse communications in order to make job postings more gender-neutral. Unitive’s technology also focuses on hiring, with software designed to detect unconscious bias in Applicant Tracking Systems that read resumes and decide which ones to keep or scrap based on certain keywords.

But as Intel recently discovered, hiring diverse talent doesn’t always mean they’ll stick around. And while one 2014 estimate by Margaret Regan, head of the global diversity consultancy FutureWork Institute, found that 20% of large U.S. employers with diversity programs now provide unconscious-bias training—a number that could reach 50% by next year—that training doesn’t always work as intended. The reasons why vary, from companies putting programs on autopilot and expecting them to run themselves, to the simple fact that many employees who are trained ultimately forget what they learned a few days later.

Joonko doesn’t solve these problems. “We didn’t even start with recruiting,” Raz admits. “We started with task management.” She explains that when a company finally hires a diverse candidate, it needs to understand that the best way to retain them is to make sure they feel included and are given the same opportunities as everyone else. That’s where Joonko sees an opening…(More)”.

Public services and the new age of data


 at Civil Service Quaterly: “Government holds massive amounts of data. The potential in that data for transforming the way government makes policy and delivers public services is equally huge. So, getting data right is the next phase of public service reform. And the UK Government has a strong foundation on which to build this future.

Public services have a long and proud relationship with data. In 1858, more than 50 years before the creation of the Cabinet Office, Florence Nightingale produced her famous ‘Diagram of the causes of mortality in the army in the east’ during the Crimean War. The modern era of statistics in government was born at the height of the Second World War with the creation of the Central Statistical Office in 1941.

How data can help

However, the huge advances we’ve seen in technology mean there are significant new opportunities to use data to improve public services. It can help us:

  • understand what works and what doesn’t, through data science techniques, so we can make better decisions: improving the way government works and saving money
  • change the way that citizens interact with government through new better digital services built on reliable data;.
  • boost the UK economy by opening and sharing better quality data, in a secure and sensitive way, to stimulate new data-based businesses
  • demonstrate a trustworthy approach to data, so citizens know more about the information held about them and how and why it’s being used

In 2011 the Government embarked upon a radical improvement in its digital capability with the creation of the Government Digital Service, and over the last few years we have seen a similar revolution begin on data. Although there is much more to do, in areas like open data, the UK is already seen as world-leading.

…But if government is going to seize this opportunity, it needs to make some changes in:

  • infrastructure – data is too often hard to find, hard to access, and hard to work with; so government is introducing developer-friendly open registers of trusted core data, such as countries and local authorities, and better tools to find and access personal data where appropriate through APIs for transformative digital services;
  • approach – we need the right policies in place to enable us to get the most out of data for citizens and ensure we’re acting appropriately; and the introduction of new legislation on data access will ensure government is doing the right thing – for example, through the data science code of ethics;
  • data science skills – those working in government need the skills to be confident with data; that means recruiting more data scientists, developing data science skills across government, and using those skills on transformative projects….(More)”.

DataCollaboratives.org – A New Resource on Creating Public Value by Exchanging Data


Recent years have seen exponential growth in the amount of data being generated and stored around the world. There is increasing recognition that this data can play a key role in solving some of the most difficult public problems we face.

However, much of the potentially useful data is currently privately held and not available for public insights. Data in the form of web clicks, social “likes,” geo location and online purchases are typically tightly controlled, usually by entities in the private sector. Companies today generate an ever-growing stream of information from our proliferating sensors and devices. Increasingly, they—and various other actors—are asking if there is a way to make this data available for the public good. There is an ongoing search for new models of corporate responsibility in the digital era around data toward the creation of “data collaboratives”.

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Today, the GovLab is excited to launch a new resource for Data Collaboratives (datacollaboratives.org). Data Collaboratives are an emerging form of public-private partnership in which participants from different sectors — including private companies, research institutions, and government agencies — exchange data to help solve public problems.

The resource results from different partnerships with UNICEF (focused on creating data collaboratives to improve children’s lives) and Omidyar Network (studying new ways to match (open) data demand and supply to increase impact).

Natalia Adler, a data, research and policy planning specialist and the UNICEF Data Collaboratives Project Lead notes, “At UNICEF, we’re dealing with the world’s most complex problems affecting children. Data Collaboratives offer an exciting opportunity to tap on previously inaccessible datasets and mobilize a wide range of data expertise to advance child rights around the world. It’s all about connecting the dots.”

To better understand the potential of these Collaboratives, the GovLab collected information on dozens of examples from across the world. These many and diverse initiatives clearly suggest the potential of Data Collaboratives to improve people’s lives when done responsibly. As Stefaan Verhulst, co-founder of the GovLab, puts it: “In the coming months and years, Data Collaboratives will be essential vehicles for harnessing the vast stores of privately held data toward the public good.”

In particular, our research to date suggests that Data Collaboratives offer a number of potential benefits, including enhanced:

  • Situational Awareness and Response: For example, Orbital Insights and the World Bank are using satellite imagery to measure and track poverty. This technology can, in some instances, “be more accurate than U.S. census data.”
  • Public Service Design and Delivery: Global mapping company, Esri, and Waze’s Connected Citizen’s program are using crowdsourced traffic information to help governments design better transportation.
  • Impact Assessment and Evaluation: Nielsen and the World Food Program (WFP) have been using data collected via mobile phone surveys to better monitor food insecurity in order to advise the WFP’s resource allocations….(More)

Doctors take inspiration from online dating to build organ transplant AI


Ariel Bogle at Mashable :”When Bob Jones performed one of Victoria’s first liver transplants in 1988, he could not imagine that 29 years later he’d be talking about artificial intelligence and online dating. Jones is the director of Austin Health’s Victorian liver transplant unit in Melbourne, Australia, and along with his colleague Lawrence Lau, he has helped develop an algorithm that could potentially better match organ donors with organ recipients.

Comparing it to the metrics behind dating site eHarmony, Jone said they planned to use the specially-designed AI to improve the accuracy of matching liver donors and recipients, hopefully resulting in less graft failures and fewer patient deaths.

“It’s a specially designed machine learning algorithm using multiple donor and recipient features to predict the outcome,” he explained.

The team plugged around 25 characteristics of donors and recipients into their AI, using the data points to retrospectively predict what would happen to organ grafts.

“We used all the basic things like sex, age, underlying disease, blood type,” he said. “And then there are certain characteristics about the donor … and all the parameters that might indicate the liver might be upset.”

Using the AI to assess the retrospective results of 75 adult patients who’d had transplants, they found the method predicted graft failure 30 days post-transplant at an accuracy of 84 percent compared to 68 percent with current methods.

“It really meant for the first time we could assess an organ’s suitability in a quantitive way,” he added, “as opposed to the current method, which really comes down to the position of the doctor eyeballing all the data and making a call based on their experience.”

Improving the accuracy of organ donor matches is vital, because as Jones put it, “it’s an extraordinary, precious gift from one Australian to another.”…(More)”

How Mobile Crowdsourcing Can Improve Occupational Safety


Batu Sayici & Beth Simone Noveck at The GovLab’s Medium: “With 150 workers dying each day from hazardous working conditions, work safety continues to be a serious problem in the U.S. Using mobile technology to collect information about workplace safety conditions from those on the ground could help prevent serious injuries and save lives by accelerating the ability to spot unsafe conditions. The convergence of wireless devices, low-cost sensors, big data, and crowdsourcing can transform the way we assess risk in our workplaces. Government agencies, labor unions, workers’ rights organizations, contractors and crowdsourcing technology providers should work together to create new tools and frameworks in a way that can improve safety and provide value to all stakeholders.

Crowdsourcing (the act of soliciting help from a distributed audience) can provide a real-time source of data to complement data collected by government agencies as part of the regulatory processes of monitoring workplace safety. Having access to this data could help government agencies to more effectively monitor safety-related legal compliance, help building owners, construction companies and procurement entities to more easily identify “responsible contractors and subcontractors,” and aid workers and unions in making more informed choices and becoming better advocates for their own protection. Just as the FitBit and Nike Wristband provide individuals with a real-time reflection of their habits designed to create the incentive for healthier living, crowdsourcing safety data has the potential to provide employers and employees alike with a more accurate picture of conditions and accelerate the time needed to take action….(More)”

Protecting One’s Own Privacy in a Big Data Economy


Anita L. Allen in the Harvard Law Review Forum: “Big Data is the vast quantities of information amenable to large-scale collection, storage, and analysis. Using such data, companies and researchers can deploy complex algorithms and artificial intelligence technologies to reveal otherwise unascertained patterns, links, behaviors, trends, identities, and practical knowledge. The information that comprises Big Data arises from government and business practices, consumer transactions, and the digital applications sometimes referred to as the “Internet of Things.” Individuals invisibly contribute to Big Data whenever they live digital lifestyles or otherwise participate in the digital economy, such as when they shop with a credit card, get treated at a hospital, apply for a job online, research a topic on Google, or post on Facebook.

Privacy advocates and civil libertarians say Big Data amounts to digital surveillance that potentially results in unwanted personal disclosures, identity theft, and discrimination in contexts such as employment, housing, and financial services. These advocates and activists say typical consumers and internet users do not understand the extent to which their activities generate data that is being collected, analyzed, and put to use for varied governmental and business purposes.

I have argued elsewhere that individuals have a moral obligation to respect not only other people’s privacy but also their own. Here, I wish to comment first on whether the notion that individuals have a moral obligation to protect their own information privacy is rendered utterly implausible by current and likely future Big Data practices; and on whether a conception of an ethical duty to self-help in the Big Data context may be more pragmatically framed as a duty to be part of collective actions encouraging business and government to adopt more robust privacy protections and data security measures….(More)”

International Open Data Roadmap


IODC16: We have entered the next phase in the evolution of the open data movement. Just making data publicly available can no longer be the beginning and end of every conversation about open data. The focus of the movement is now shifting to building open data communities, and an increasingly sophisticated network of communities have begun to make data truly useful in addressing a myriad of problems facing citizens and their governments around the world:

  • More than 40 national and local governments have already committed to implement the principles of the International Open Data Charter;
  • Open data is central to many commitments made this year by world leaders, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Climate Agreement, and the G20 Anti Corruption Data Principles; and
  • Open data is also an increasingly local issue, as hundreds of cities and sub-national governments implement open data policies to drive transparency, economic growth, and service delivery in close collaboration with citizens.

Screen Shot 2017-01-17 at 11.32.32 AMTo further accelerate collaboration and increase the impact of open data activities globally, the Government of Spain, the International Development Research Centre, the World Bank, and the Open Data for Development Network recently hosted the fourth International Open Data Conference (IODC) on October 6-7, 2106 in Madrid, Spain.

Under the theme of Global Goals, Local Impact, the fourth IODC reconvened an ever expanding open data community to showcase best practices, confront shared challenges, and deepen global and regional collaboration in an effort to maximize the impact of open data. Supported by a full online archive of the 80+ sessions and 20+ special events held in Madrid during the first week of October 2016, this report reflects on the discussions and debates that took place, as well as the information shared on a wide range of vibrant global initiatives, in order to map out the road ahead, strengthen cohesion among existing efforts, and explore new ways to use open data to drive social and economic inclusion around the world….(More)”