DATA – Page 429 – The Living Library

21st Century Enlightenment Revisited

Curated on December 13, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Taylor at the RSA: “The French historian Tzvetan Todorov describes the three essential ideas of the Enlightenment as ‘autonomy’, ‘universalism’ and ‘humanism’. The ideal of autonomy speaks to every individual’s right to self-determination. Universalism asserts that all human beings equally deserve basic rights and dignity (although, of course, in the 18^th and 19^th century most thinkers restricted this ambition to educated white men). The idea of humanism is that it is up to the people – not Gods or monarchs – through the use of rational inquiry to determine the path to greater human fulfilment….

21^st Century Enlightenment

Take autonomy; too often today we think of freedom either as a shrill demand to be able to turn our backs on wider society or in the narrow possessive terms of consumerism. Yet, brain and behavioural science have confirmed the intuition of philosophers through the ages genuine autonomy is something we only attain when we become aware of our human frailties and understand our truly social nature. Of course, freedom from oppression is the base line, but true autonomy is not a right to be granted but a goal to be pursued through self-awareness and engagement in society.

What of universalism, or social justice as we now tend to think of it? In most parts of the world and certainly in the West there have been incredible advances in equal rights. Discrimination and injustice still exist, but through struggle and reform huge strides have been made in widening the Enlightenment brotherhood of rich white men to women, people of different ethnicity, homosexuals and people with disabilities. Indeed the progress in legal equality over recent decades stands in contrast to the stubborn persistence, and even worsening, of social inequality, particularly based on class.

But the rationalist universalism of human rights needs an emotional corollary. People may be careful not to use the wrong words, but they still harbour resentment and suspicion towards other groups. …

Finally, humanism or the call of progress. The utilitarian philosophy that arose from the Enlightenment spoke to the idea that, free from the religious or autocratic dogma, the best routes to human fulfilment could be identified and should be pursued. The great motors of human progress – markets, science and technology, the modern state – shifted into gear and started to accelerate. Aspects of all these phenomena, indeed of Enlightenment ideas themselves, could be found at earlier stages of human history – what was different was the way they fed off each other and became dominant. Yet, in the process, the idea that these forces could deliver progress often became elided with the assumption that their development was the same as human progress.

Today this danger of letting the engines of progress determine the direction of the human journey feels particularly acute in relation to markets and technology. There is, for example, more discussion of how humans should best adapt to AI and robots than about how technological inquiry might be aligned with human fulfilment. The hollowing out of democratic institutions has diminished the space for public debate about what progress should comprise at just the time when the pace and scale of change makes those debates particularly vital.

A twenty first century enlightenment reinstates true autonomy over narrow ideas of freedom, it asserts a universalism based not just on legal status but on empathy and social connection and reminds us that humanism should lie at the heart of progress.

Think like a system act like an entrepreneur

There is one new strand I want to add to the 2010 account. In the face of many defeats, we must care as much about how we achieve change as about the goals we pursue. At the RSA we talk about ‘thinking like a system and acting like an entrepreneur’, a method which seeks to avoid the narrowness and path dependency of so many unsuccessful models of change. To alter the course our society is now on we need more fully to understand the high barriers to change but then to act more creatively and adaptively when we spot opportunities to take a different path….(More)”

The Government Isn’t Doing Enough to Solve Big Problems with AI

Curated on December 12, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mike Orcutt at MIT Technology Review: “The government should play a bigger role in developing new tools based on artificial intelligence, or we could miss out on revolutionary applications because they don’t have obvious commercial upside.

That was the message from prominent AI technologists and researchers at a Senate committee hearing last week. They agreed that AI is in a crucial developmental moment, and that government has a unique opportunity to shape its future. They also said that the government is in a better position than technology companies to invest in AI applications aimed at broad societal problems.

Today just a few companies, led by Google and Facebook, account for the lion’s share of AI R&D in the U.S. But Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft Research, told the committee members that there are important areas that are rich and ripe for AI innovation, such as homelessness and addiction, where the industry isn’t making big investments. The government could help support those pursuits, Horvitz said.

For a more specific example, take the plight of a veteran seeking information online about medical options, says Andrew Moore, dean of the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. If an application that could respond to freeform questions, search multiple government data sets at once, and provide helpful information about a veteran’s health care options were commercially attractive, it might be available already, he says.

There is a “real hunger for basic research” says Greg Brockman, cofounder and chief technology officer of the nonprofit research company OpenAI, because technologists understand that they haven’t made the most important advances yet. If we continue to leave the bulk of it to industry, not only could we miss out on useful applications, but also on the chance to adequately explore urgent scientific questions about ethics, safety, and security while the technology is still young, says Brockman. Since the field of AI is growing “exponentially,” it’s important to study these things now, he says, and the government could make that a “top line thing that they are trying to get done.”….(More)”.

The age of analytics: Competing in a data-driven world

Curated on December 11, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Updated report by the McKinsey Global Institute: “Back in 2011, the McKinsey Global Institute published a report highlighting the transformational potential of big data. Five years later, we remain convinced that this potential has not been overhyped. In fact, we now believe that our 2011 analyses gave only a partial view. The range of applications and opportunities has grown even larger today. The convergence of several technology trends is accelerating progress. The volume of data continues to double every three years as information pours in from digital platforms, wireless sensors, and billions of mobile phones. Data storage capacity has increased, while its cost has plummeted. Data scientists now have unprecedented computing power at their disposal, and they are devising ever more sophisticated algorithms….

There has been uneven progress in capturing value from data and analytics…

The EU public sector: Our 2011 report analyzed how the European Union’s public sector could use data and analytics to make government services more efficient, reduce fraud and errors in transfer payments, and improve tax collection, potentially achieving some €250 billion worth of annual savings. But only about 10 to 20 percent of this has materialized. Some agencies have moved more interactions online, and many (particularly tax agencies) have introduced pre-filled forms. But across Europe and other advanced economies, adoption and capabilities vary greatly. The complexity of existing systems and the difficulty of attracting scarce analytics talent with public-sector salaries have slowed progress. Despite this, we see even wider potential today for societies to use analytics to make more evidence-based decisions in many aspects of government.

US health care: To date, only 10 to 20 percent of the opportunities we outlined in 2011 have been realized by the US health-care sector. A range of barriers—including a lack of incentives, the difficulty of process and organizational changes, a shortage of technical talent, data-sharing challenges, and regulations—have combined to limit adoption. Within clinical operations, the biggest success has been the shift to electronic medical records, although the vast stores of data they contain have not yet been fully mined. While payers have been slow to capitalize on big data for accounting and pricing, a growing industry now aggregates and synthesizes clinical records, and analytics have taken on new importance in public health surveillance. Many pharmaceutical firms are using analytics in R&D, particularly in streamlining clinical trials. While the health-care sector continues to lag in adoption, there are enormous unrealized opportunities to transform clinical care and deliver personalized medicine… (More)”

Executive Summary (PDF–1MB)

Full Report (PDF–3MB)

Appendix (PDF–533KB)

What does Big Data mean to public affairs research?

Curated on December 10, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ines Mergel, R. Karl Rethemeyer, and Kimberley R. Isett at LSE’s The Impact Blog: “…Big Data promises access to vast amounts of real-time information from public and private sources that should allow insights into behavioral preferences, policy options, and methods for public service improvement. In the private sector, marketing preferences can be aligned with customer insights gleaned from Big Data. In the public sector however, government agencies are less responsive and agile in their real-time interactions by design – instead using time for deliberation to respond to broader public goods. The responsiveness Big Data promises is a virtue in the private sector but could be a vice in the public.

Moreover, we raise several important concerns with respect to relying on Big Data as a decision and policymaking tool. While in the abstract Big Data is comprehensive and complete, in practice today’sversion of Big Data has several features that should give public sector practitioners and scholars pause. First, most of what we think of as Big Data is really ‘digital exhaust’ – that is, data collected for purposes other than public sector operations or research. Data sets that might be publicly available from social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter were designed for purely technical reasons. The degree to which this data lines up conceptually and operationally with public sector questions is purely coincidental. Use of digital exhaust for purposes not previously envisioned can go awry. A good example is Google’s attempt to predict the flu based on search terms.

Second, we believe there are ethical issues that may arise when researchers use data that was created as a byproduct of citizens’ interactions with each other or with a government social media account. Citizens are not able to understand or control how their data is used and have not given consent for storage and re-use of their data. We believe that research institutions need to examine their institutional review board processes to help researchers and their subjects understand important privacy issues that may arise. Too often it is possible to infer individual-level insights about private citizens from a combination of data points and thus predict their behaviors or choices.

Lastly, Big Data can only represent those that spend some part of their life online. Yet we know that certain segments of society opt in to life online (by using social media or network-connected devices), opt out (either knowingly or passively), or lack the resources to participate at all. The demography of the internet matters. For instance, researchers tend to use Twitter data because its API allows data collection for research purposes, but many forget that Twitter users are not representative of the overall population. Instead, as a recent Pew Social Media 2016 update shows, only 24% of all online adults use Twitter. Internet participation generally is biased in terms of age, educational attainment, and income – all of which correlate with gender, race, and ethnicity. We believe therefore that predictive insights are potentially biased toward certain parts of the population, making generalisations highly problematic at this time….(More)”

Future of e-government: learning from the past

Curated on December 9, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Special issue of SOCRATES edited by Manoj Dixit: “We are living in an era of digitization thus moving towards a digital government. The use of ICT in public-administration is beneficial and it is not mere a coincidence that the top 10 countries in e-government implementation (according to UN E-Government Survey 2016) are flourishing democracies. There has been a sharp rise in the number of countries using e-government to provide public services online through one stop-platform. According to the 2016 survey, 90 countries now offer one or more single entry portal on public information or online services, or both and 148 countries provide at-least one form of online transaction services. More and more countries are making efforts through e-government to ensure and increase inclusiveness, effectiveness, accountability and transparency in their public institutions. Across the globe, data for public information and security is being opened up. The 2016 survey shows that 128 countries now provide data-sets on government spending in machine readable formats. E-government and innovation seems to have provided significant opportunities to transform public administration into an instrument of sustainable development. The governments around the globe are rapidly transforming. The use of information and communication technology in public administration – combined with organizational change and new skills- seems to be improving public services and democratic processes and strengthening support to public policies. There has been an increased effort to utilize advanced electronic and mobile services that benefits all. Fixed and wireless broadband subscriptions have increased unevenly across regions, with Europe leading, but Africa still lagging behind. We have to focus on these substantial region disparities and growing divide. All countries agreed, in SDG 9, that a major effort is required to ensure universal access to internet in the least developed countries. The rise of Social media and its easy access seems to have enabled an increasing number of countries moving towards participatory decision making, in which developed European countries are among the top 50 performers. But, the issues of diminishing collective thinking and rising Individual thinking are some rising issues that we will have to deal with in the future. There are more sensitive issues like the new classification of citizens into literate-illiterate, e-literate and e-illiterate, that the governments need to look upon. It is a good sign that many developing countries are making good progress. Enhanced e-participation can support the realization of the SDGs by enabling more participatory decision making, but the success of e-government will ultimately depend upon our ability and capability to solve the contrasting issues raised due to this transition with sensitivity.

In this issue of SOCRATES we have discussed, this new era of Digital Government. We have focused on what we have learned from the past and the future we want. From discussions on the role of e-governance within the local government settings in a modern democratic state to the experience of an academia with online examination, we have tried to include every possible aspect of e-government….(More)”

A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept

Curated on December 7, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “UNDP and UN Global Pulse today released a comprehensive guide on how to integrate new sources of data into development and humanitarian work.

New and emerging data sources such as mobile phone data, social media, remote sensors and satellites have the potential to improve the work of governments and development organizations across the globe.

Entitled ‘A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept,’ this publication was developed by practitioners for practitioners. It provides step-by-step guidance for working with new sources of data to staff of UN agencies and international Non-Governmental Organizations.

The guide is a result of a collaboration of UNDP and UN Global Pulse with support from UN Volunteers. Led by UNDP innovation teams in Europe and Central Asia and Arab States, six UNDP offices in Armenia, Egypt, Kosovo[1], fYR Macedonia, Sudan and Tunisia each completed data innovation projects applicable to development challenges on the ground.

The publication builds on these successful case trials and on the expertise of data innovators from UNDP and UN Global Pulse who managed the design and development of those projects.

It provides practical guidance for jump-starting a data innovation project, from the design phase through the creation of a proof-of-concept.

The guide is structured into three sections – (I) Explore the Problem & System, (II) Assemble the Team and (III) Create the Workplan. Each of the sections comprises of a series of tools for completing the steps needed to initiate and design a data innovation project, to engage the right partners and to make sure that adequate privacy and protection mechanisms are applied.

…Download ‘A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept’ here.”

From policing to news, how algorithms are changing our lives

Curated on December 6, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Carl Miller at The National: “First, write out the numbers one to 100 in 10 rows. Cross out the one. Then circle the two, and cross out all of the multiples of two. Circle the three, and do likewise. Follow those instructions, and you’ve just completed the first three steps of an algorithm, and an incredibly ancient one. Twenty-three centuries ago, Eratosthenes was sat in the great library of Alexandria, using this process (it is called Eratosthenes’ Sieve) to find and separate prime numbers. Algorithms are nothing new, indeed even the word itself is old. Fifteen centuries after Eratosthenes, Algoritmi de numero Indorum appeared on the bookshelves of European monks, and with it, the word to describe something very simple in essence: follow a series of fixed steps, in order, to achieve a given answer to a given problem. That’s it, that’s an algorithm. Simple.

Apart from, of course, the story of algorithms is not so simple, nor so humble. In the shocked wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the United States presidential election, a culprit needed to be found to explain what had happened. What had, against the odds, and in the face of thousands of polls, caused this tectonic shift in US political opinion? Soon the finger was pointed. On social media, and especially on Facebook, it was alleged that pro-Trump stories, based on inaccurate information, had spread like wildfire, often eclipsing real news and honestly-checked facts.

But no human editor was thrust into the spotlight. What took centre stage was an algorithm; Facebook’s news algorithm. It was this, critics said, that was responsible for allowing the “fake news” to circulate. This algorithm wasn’t humbly finding prime numbers; it was responsible for the news that you saw (and of course didn’t see) on the largest source of news in the world. This algorithm had somehow risen to become more powerful than any newspaper editor in the world, powerful enough to possibly throw an election.

So why all the fuss? Something is now happening in society that is throwing algorithms into the spotlight. They have taken on a new significance, even an allure and mystique. Algorithms are simply tools but a web of new technologies are vastly increasing the power that these tools have over our lives. The startling leaps forward in artificial intelligence have meant that algorithms have learned how to learn, and to become capable of accomplishing tasks and tackling problems that they were never been able to achieve before. Their learning is fuelled with more data than ever before, collected, stored and connected with the constellations of sensors, data farms and services that have ushered in the age of big data.

Algorithms are also doing more things; whether welding, driving or cooking, thanks to robotics. Wherever there is some kind of exciting innovation happening, algorithms are rarely far away. They are being used in more fields, for more things, than ever before and are incomparably, incomprehensibly more capable than the algorithms recognisable to Eratosthenes….(More)”