Technology is a new kind of lifeline for refugees

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Marketplace: “Imagine you’re a refugee leaving home for good. You’ll need help. But what you ask for today is much different than it would have been just 10 years ago.

“What people are demanding, more and more, is not classic food, shelter, water, healthcare, but they demand wifi,” said Melita Šunjić, a spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Šunjić began her work with Syrian refugees in camps in Amman, Jordan. Many were from rural areas with basic cell phones.

“The refugees we’re looking at now, who are coming to Europe – this is a completely different story,” Šunjić said. “They are middle class, urban people. Practically each family has at least one smart phone. We calculated that in each group of 20, they would have three smart phones.”

Refugees use their phones to call home and to map their routes. Even smugglers have their own Facebook pages.

“I don’t remember a crisis or refugee group where modern technology played such a role,” Šunjić said.

As refugees from Syria continue to flow into Europe, aid organizations are gearing up for what promises to be a difficult winter.

Emily Eros, ‎a GIS mapping officer with the American Red Cross, said her organization is working on the basics like providing food, water and shelter, but it’s also helping refugees stay connected. “It’s a little bit difficult because it’s not just a matter of getting a wifi station up, it’s also a matter of having someone there who’s able to fix it if something goes wrong,” she said. …(More)”

Robots Will Make Leeds the First Self-Repairing City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emiko Jozuka at Motherboard: “Researchers in Britain want to make the first “self-repairing” city by 2035. How will they do this? By creating autonomous repair robots that patrol the streets and drainage systems, making sure your car doesn’t dip into a pothole, and that you don’t experience any gas leaks.

“The idea is to create a city that behaves almost like a living organism,” said Raul Fuentes, a researcher at the School of Civil Engineering at Leeds University, who is working on the project. “The robots will act like white cells that are able to identify bacteria or viruses and attack them. It’s kind of like an immune system.”

The £4.2 million ($6.4 million) national infrastructure project is in collaboration with Leeds City Council and the UK Collaboration for Research in Infrastructures and Cities (UKCRIC). The aim is to create a fleet of robot repair workers who will live in Leeds city, spot problems, and sort them out before they become even bigger ones by 2035, said Fuentes. The project is set to launch officially in January 2016, he added.

For their five-year project—which has a vision that extends until 2050—the researchers will develop robot designs and technologies that focus on three main areas. The first is to create drones that can perch on high structures and repair things like street lamps; the second is to develop drones that can autonomously spot when a pothole is about to form and zone in and patch that up before it worsens; and the third is to develop robots that will live in utility pipes so they can inspect, repair, and report back to humans when they spot an issue.

“The robots will be living permanently in the city, and they’ll be able to identify issues before they become real problems,” explained Fuentes. The researchers are working on making the robots autonomous, and want them to be living in swarms or packs where they can communicate with one another on how best they could get the repair job done….(More)

New flu tracker uses Google search data better than Google

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at ArsTechnica: “With big data comes big noise. Google learned this lesson the hard way with its now kaput Google Flu Trends. The online tracker, which used Internet search data to predict real-life flu outbreaks, emerged amid fanfare in 2008. Then it met a quiet death this August after repeatedly coughing up bad estimates.

But big Internet data isn’t out of the disease tracking scene yet.

With hubris firmly in check, a team of Harvard researchers have come up with a way to tame the unruly data, combine it with other data sets, and continually calibrate it to track flu outbreaks with less error. Their new model, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, out-performs Google Flu Trends and other models with at least double the accuracy. If the model holds up in coming flu seasons, it could reinstate some optimism in using big data to monitor disease and herald a wave of more accurate second-generation models.

Big data has a lot of potential, Samuel Kou, a statistics professor at Harvard University and coauthor on the new study, told Ars. It’s just a question of using the right analytics, he said.

Kou and his colleagues built on Google’s flu tracking model for their new version, called ARGO (AutoRegression with GOogle search data). Google Flu Trends basically relied on trends in Internet search terms, such as headache and chills, to estimate the number of flu cases. Those search terms were correlated with flu outbreak data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s data relies on clinical reports from around the country. But compiling and analyzing that data can be slow, leading to a lag time of one to three weeks. The Google data, on the other hand, offered near real-time tracking for health experts to manage and prepare for outbreaks.

At first Google’s tracker appeared to be pretty good, matching CDC data’s late-breaking data somewhat closely. But, two notable stumbles led to its ultimate downfall: an underestimate of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu outbreak and an alarming overestimate (almost double real numbers) of the 2012-2013 flu season’s cases…..For ARGO, he and colleagues took the trend data and then designed a model that could self-correct for changes in how people search. The model has a two-year sliding window in which it re-calibrates current search term trends with the CDC’s historical flu data (the gold standard for flu data). They also made sure to exclude winter search terms, such as March Madness and the Oscars, so they didn’t get accidentally correlated with seasonal flu trends. Last, they incorporated data on the historical seasonality of flu.

The result was a model that significantly out-competed the Google Flu Trends estimates for the period between March 29, 2009 to July 11, 2015. ARGO also beat out other models, including one based on current and historical CDC data….(More)”

See also Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1515373112

How Satellite Data and Artificial Intelligence could help us understand poverty better

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Maya Craig at Fast Company: “Governments and development organizations currently measure poverty levels by conducting door-to-door surveys. The new partnership will test the use of AI to supplement these surveys and increase the accuracy of poverty data. Orbital said its AI software will analyze satellite images to see if characteristics such as building height and rooftop material can effectively indicate wealth.

The pilot study will be conducted in Sri Lanka. If successful, the World Bank hopes to scale it worldwide. A recent study conducted by the organization found that more than 50 countries lack legitimate poverty estimates, which limits the ability of the development community to support the world’s poorest populations.

“Data depravation is a serious issue, especially in many of the countries where we need it most,” says David Newhouse, senior economist at the World Bank. “This technology has the potential to help us get that data more frequently and at a finer level of detail than is currently possible.”

The announcement is the latest in an emerging industry of AI analysis of satellite photos. A growing number of investors and entrepreneurs are betting that the convergence of these fields will have far-reaching impacts on business, policy, resource management and disaster response.

Wall Street’s biggest hedge-fund businesses have begun using the technology to improve investment strategies. The Pew Charitable Trust employs the method to monitor oceans for illegal fishing activities. And startups like San Francisco-based Mavrx use similar analytics to optimize crop harvest.

The commercial earth-imaging satellite market, valued at $2.7 billion in 2014, is predicted to grow by 14% each year through the decade, according to a recent report.

As recently as two years ago, there were just four commercial earth imaging satellites operated in the U.S., and government contracts accounted for about 70% of imagery sales. By 2020, there will be hundreds of private-sector “smallsats” in orbit capturing imagery that will be easily accessible online. Companies like Skybox Imaging and Planet Labs have the first of these smallsats already active, with plans for more.

The images generated by these companies will be among the world’s largest data sets. And recent breakthroughs in AI research have made it possible to analyze these images to inform decision-making…(More)”

Push, Pull, and Spill: A Transdisciplinary Case Study in Municipal Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jan Whittington et al: “Cities hold considerable information, including details about the daily lives of residents and employees, maps of critical infrastructure, and records of the officials’ internal deliberations. Cities are beginning to realize that this data has economic and other value: If done wisely, the responsible release of city information can also release greater efficiency and innovation in the public and private sector. New services are cropping up that leverage open city data to great effect.

Meanwhile, activist groups and individual residents are placing increasing pressure on state and local government to be more transparent and accountable, even as others sound an alarm over the privacy issues that inevitably attend greater data promiscuity. This takes the form of political pressure to release more information, as well as increased requests for information under the many public records acts across the country.

The result of these forces is that cities are beginning to open their data as never before. It turns out there is surprisingly little research to date into the important and growing area of municipal open data. This article is among the first sustained, cross-disciplinary assessments of an open municipal government system. We are a team of researchers in law, computer science, information science, and urban studies. We have worked hand-in-hand with the City of Seattle, Washington for the better part of a year to understand its current procedures from each disciplinary perspective. Based on this empirical work, we generate a set of recommendations to help the city manage risk latent in opening its data….(More)”

Open Data: Six Stories About Impact in the UK

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Laura Bacon at Omidyar Network: “In 2010, the year the United Kingdom launched its open data portal, a Transparency & Accountability Initiative report highlighted both the promise and potential of open data to improve services and create economic growth.

In the five years since, the UK’s progress in opening its data has been pioneering and swift, but not without challenges and questions about impact. It’s this qualified success that prompted us to commission this report in an effort to understand if the promise and potential of open data are being realized, and, specifically, to…

… explore and document open data’s social, cultural, political, and economic impact;

… shine a light on the range of sectors and ways in which open data can make a difference; and

… profile the open data value chain, including its supply, demand, use, and re-use.

The report’s author, Becky Hogge, finds that open data has had catalytic and significant impact and that time will likely reveal even further value. She also flags critical challenges and obstacles, including closed datasets, valuable data not currently being collected, and important privacy considerations….Download full report here.”

Role of Citizens in India’s Smart Cities Challenge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Florence Engasser and Tom Saunders at the World Policy Blog: “India faces a wide range of urban challenges — from serious air pollution and poor local governance, to badly planned cities and a lack of decent housing. India’s Smart Cities Challenge, which has now selected 98 of the 100 cities that will receive funding, could go a long way in addressing these issues.

According to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, there are five key instruments that make a “smart” city: the use of clean technologies, the use of information and communications technology (ICT), private sector involvement, citizen participation and smart governance. There are good examples of new practices for each of these pillars.

For example, New Delhi recently launched a program to replace streetlights with energy efficient LEDs. The Digital India program is designed to upgrade the country’s IT infrastructure and includes plans to build “broadband highways” across the country. As for private sector participation, the Indian government is trying to encourage it by listing sectors and opportunities for public-private partnerships.

Citizen participation is one of Modi’s five key instruments, but this is an area where smart city pilots around the world have tended to perform least well on. While people are the implied beneficiaries of programs that aim to improve efficiency and reduce waste, they are rarely given a chance to participate in the design or delivery of smart city projects, which are usually implemented and managed by experts who have only a vague idea of the challenges that local communities face.

Citizen Participation

Engaging citizens is especially important in an Indian context because there have already been several striking examples of failed urban redevelopments that have blatantly lacked any type of community consultation or participation….

In practice, how can Indian cities engage residents in their smart city projects?

There are many tools available to policymakers — from traditional community engagement activities such as community meetings, to websites like Mygov.in that ask for feedback on policies. Now, there are a number of reasons to think smartphones could be an important tool to help improve collaboration between residents and city governments in Indian cities.

First, while only around 10 percent of Indians currently own a smartphone, this is predicted to rise to around half by 2020, and will be much higher in urban areas. A key driver of this is local manufacturing giants like Micromax, which have revolutionized low-cost technology in India, with smartphones costing as little as $30 (compared to around $800 for the newest iPhone).

Second, smartphone apps give city governments the potential to interact directly with citizens to make the most of what they know and feel about their communities. This can happen passively, for example, the Waze Connected Citizens program, which shares user location data with city governments to help improve transport planning. It can also be more active, for example, FixMyStreet, which allows people to report maintenance issues like potholes to their city government.

Third, smartphones are one of the main ways for people to access social media, and researchers are now developing a range of new and innovative solutions to address urban challenges using these platforms. This includes Petajakarta, which creates crowd-sourced maps of flooding in Jakarta by aggregating tweets that mention the word ‘flood.’

Made in India

Considering some of the above trends, it is interesting to think about the role smartphones could play in the governance of Indian cities and in better engaging communities. India is far from being behind in the field, and there are already a few really good examples of innovative smartphone applications made in India.

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (translated as Clean India Initiative) is a campaign launched by Modi in October 2014, covering over 4,000 towns all over the country, with the aim to clean India’s streets. The Clean India mobile application, launched at the end of 2014 to coincide with Modi’s initiative, was developed by Mahek Shah and allows users to take pictures to report, geo-locate, and timestamp streets that need cleaning or problems to be fixed by the local authorities.

Similar to FixMyStreet, users are able to tag their reports with keywords to categorize problems. Today, Clean India has been downloaded over 12,000 times and has 5,000 active users. Although still at a very early stage, Clean India has great potential to facilitate the complaint and reporting process by empowering people to become the eyes and ears of municipalities on the ground, who are often completely unaware of issues that matter to residents.

In Bangalore, an initiative by the MOD Institute, a local nongovernmental organization, enabled residents to come together, online and offline, to create a community vision for the redevelopment of Shanthinagar, a neighborhood of the city. The project, Next Bengaluru, used new technologies to engage local residents in urban planning and tap into their knowledge of the area to promote a vision matching their real needs.

The initiative was very successful. In just three months, between December 2014 and March 2015, over 1,200 neighbors and residents visited the on-site community space, and the team crowd-sourced more than 600 ideas for redevelopment and planning both on-site and through the Next Bangalore website.

The MOD Institute now intends to work with local urban planners to try get these ideas adopted by the city government. The project has also developed a pilot app that will enable people to map abandoned urban spaces via smartphone and messaging service in the future.

Finally, Safecity India is a nonprofit organization providing a platform for anyone to share, anonymously or not, personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. Men and women can report different types of abuses — from ogling, whistles and comments, to stalking, groping and sexual assault. The aggregated data is then mapped, allowing citizens and governments to better understand crime trends at hyper-local levels.

Since its launch in 2012, SafeCity has received more than 4,000 reports of sexual crime and harassment in over 50 cities across India and Nepal. SafeCity helps generate greater awareness, breaks the cultural stigma associated with reporting sexual abuse and gives voice to grassroots movements and campaigns such as Sayfty, Protsahan, or Stop Street Harassment, forcing authorities to take action….(More)

Using Crowdsourcing to Track the Next Viral Disease Outbreak

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The TakeAway: “Last year’s Ebola outbreak in West Africa killed more than 11,000 people. The pandemic may be diminished, but public health officials think that another major outbreak of infectious disease is fast-approaching, and they’re busy preparing for it.

Boston public radio station WGBH recently partnered with The GroundTruth Project and NOVA Next on a series called “Next Outbreak.” As part of the series, they reported on an innovative global online monitoring system called HealthMap, which uses the power of the internet and crowdsourcing to detect and track emerging infectious diseases, and also more common ailments like the flu.

Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital are the ones behind HealthMap (see below), and they use it to tap into tens of thousands of sources of online data, including social media, news reports, and blogs to curate information about outbreaks. Dr. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and co-founder of HealthMap, says that smarter data collection can help to quickly detect and track emerging infectious diseases, fatal or not.

“Traditional public health is really slowed down by the communication process: People get sick, they’re seen by healthcare providers, they get laboratory confirmed, information flows up the channels to state and local health [agencies], national governments, and then to places like the WHO,” says Dr. Brownstein. “Each one of those stages can take days, weeks, or even months, and that’s the problem if you’re thinking about a virus that can spread around the world in a matter of days.”

The HealthMap team looks at a variety of communication channels to undo the existing hierarchy of health information.

“We make everyone a stakeholder when it comes to data about outbreaks, including consumers,” says Dr. Brownstein. “There are a suite of different tools that public health officials have at their disposal. What we’re trying to do is think about how to communicate and empower individuals to really understand what the risks are, what the true information is about a disease event, and what they can do to protect themselves and their families. It’s all about trying to demystify outbreaks.”

In addition to the map itself, the HealthMap team has a number of interactive tools that individuals can both use and contribute to. Dr. Brownstein hopes these resources will enable the public to care more about disease outbreaks that may be happening around them—it’s a way to put the “public” back in “public health,” he says.

“We have a app called Outbreaks Near Me that allows people to know about what disease outbreaks are happening in their neighborhood,” Dr. Brownstein says. “Flu Near You is a an app that people use to self report on symptoms; Vaccine Finder is a tool that allows people to know what vaccines are available to them and their community.”

In addition to developing their own app, the HealthMap has partnered with existing tech firms like Uber to spread the word about public health.

“We worked closely with Uber last year and actually put nurses in Uber cars and delivered vaccines to people,” Dr. Brownstein says. “The closest vaccine location might still be only a block away for people, but people are still hesitant to get it done.”…(More)”

How smartphones are solving one of China’s biggest mysteries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ana Swanson at the Washington Post: “For decades, China has been engaged in a building boom of a scale that is hard to wrap your mind around. In the last three decades, 260 million people have moved from the countryside to Chinese cities — equivalent to around 80 percent of the population of the U.S. To make room for all of those people, the size of China’s built-up urban areas nearly quintupled between 1984 and 2010.

Much of that development has benefited people’s lives, but some has not. In a breathless rush to boost growth and development, some urban areas have built vast, unused real estate projects — China’s infamous “ghost cities.” These eerie, shining developments are complete except for one thing: people to live in them.

China’s ghost cities have sparked a lot of debate over the last few years. Some argue that the developments are evidence of the waste in top-down planning, or the result of too much cheap funding for businesses. Some blame the lack of other good places for average people to invest their money, or the desire of local officials to make a quick buck — land sales generate a lot of revenue for China’s local governments.

Others say the idea of ghost cities has been overblown. They espouse a “build it and they will come” philosophy, pointing out that, with time, some ghost cities fill up and turn into vibrant communities.

It’s been hard to evaluate these claims, since most of the research on ghost cities has been anecdotal. Even the most rigorous research methods leave a lot to be desired — for example, investment research firms sending poor junior employees out to remote locations to count how many lights are turned on in buildings at night.

Now new research from Baidu, one of China’s biggest technology companies, provides one of the first systematic looks at Chinese ghost cities. Researchers from Baidu’s Big Data Lab and Peking University in Beijing used the kind of location data gathered by mobile phones and GPS receivers to track how people moved in and out suspected ghost cities, in real time and on a national scale, over a period of six months. You can see the interactive project here.

Google has been blocked in China for years, and Baidu dominates the market in terms of search, mobile maps and other offerings. That gave the researchers a huge data base to work with —  770 million users, a hefty chunk of China’s 1.36 billion people.

To identify potential ghost cities, the researchers created an algorithm that identifies urban areas with a relatively spare population. They define a ghost city as an urban region with a population of fewer than 5,000 people per square kilometer – about half the density recommended by the Chinese Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development….(More)”

Mobile data: Made to measure

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Neil Savage in Nature: “For decades, doctors around the world have been using a simple test to measure the cardiovascular health of patients. They ask them to walk on a hard, flat surface and see how much distance they cover in six minutes. This test has been used to predict the survival rates of lung transplant candidates, to measure the progression of muscular dystrophy, and to assess overall cardiovascular fitness.

The walk test has been studied in many trials, but even the biggest rarely top a thousand participants. Yet when Euan Ashley launched a cardiovascular study in March 2015, he collected test results from 6,000 people in the first two weeks. “That’s a remarkable number,” says Ashley, a geneticist who heads Stanford University’s Center for Inherited Cardiovascular Disease. “We’re used to dealing with a few hundred patients, if we’re lucky.”

Numbers on that scale, he hopes, will tell him a lot more about the relationship between physical activity and heart health. The reason they can be achieved is that millions of people now have smartphones and fitness trackers with sensors that can record all sorts of physical activity. Health researchers are studying such devices to figure out what sort of data they can collect, how reliable those data are, and what they might learn when they analyse measurements of all sorts of day-to-day activities from many tens of thousands of people and apply big-data algorithms to the readings.

By July, more than 40,000 people in the United States had signed up to participate in Ashley’s study, which uses an iPhone application called MyHeart Counts. He expects the numbers to surge as the app becomes more widely available around the world. The study — designed by scientists, approved by institutional review boards, and requiring informed consent — asks participants to answer questions about their health and risk factors, and to use their phone’s motion sensors to collect data about their activities for seven days. They also do a six-minute walk test, and the phone measures the distance they cover. If their own doctors have ordered blood tests, users can enter information such as cholesterol or glucose measurements. Every three months, the app checks back to update their data.

Physicians know that physical activity is a strong predictor of long-term heart health, Ashley says. But it is less clear what kind of activity is best, or whether different groups of people do better with different types of exercise. MyHeart Counts may open a window on such questions. “We can start to look at subgroups and find differences,” he says.

“You can take pretty noisy data, but if you have enough of it, you can find a signal.”

It is the volume of the data that makes such studies possible. In traditional studies, there may not be enough data to find statistically significant results for such subgroups. And rare events may not occur in the smaller samples, or may produce a signal so weak that it is lost in statistical noise. Big data can overcome those problems, and if the data set is big enough, small errors can be smoothed out. “You can take pretty noisy data, but if you have enough of it, you can find a signal,” Ashley says….(More)”.