A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

R2D3 introduction: “In machine learning, computers apply statistical learning techniques to automatically identify patterns in data. These techniques can be used to make highly accurate predictions.

Keep scrolling. Using a data set about homes, we will create a machine learning model to distinguish homes in New York from homes in San Francisco…./

 

  1. Machine learning identifies patterns using statistical learning and computers by unearthing boundaries in data sets. You can use it to make predictions.
  2. One method for making predictions is called a decision trees, which uses a series of if-then statements to identify boundaries and define patterns in the data
  3. Overfitting happens when some boundaries are based on on distinctions that don’t make a difference. You can see if a model overfits by having test data flow through the model….(More)”

Urban Informatics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Special issue of Data Engineering: “Most data related to people and the built world originates in urban settings. There is increasing demand to capture and exploit this data to support efforts in areas such as Smart Cities, City Science and Intelligent Transportation Systems. Urban informatics deals with the collection, organization, dissemination and analysis of urban information used in such applications. However, the dramatic growth in the volume of this urban data creates challenges for existing data-management and analysis techniques. The collected data is also increasingly diverse, with a wide variety of sensor, GIS, imagery and graph data arising in cities. To address these challenges, urban informatics requires development of advanced data-management approaches, analysis methods, and visualization techniques. It also provides an opportunity to confront the “Variety” axis of Big Data head on. The contributions in this issue cross the spectrum of urban information, from its origin, to archiving and retrieval, to analysis and visualization. …

Collaborative Sensing for Urban Transportation (By Sergio Ilarri, et al)

Open Civic Data: Of the People, For the People, By the People (by Arnaud Sahuguet, et al, The GovLab)

Plenario: An Open Data Discovery and Exploration Platform for Urban Science (by Charlie Catlett et al)

Riding from Urban Data to Insight Using New York City Taxis (by Juliana Freire et al)…(More)”

 

Transparency in Social Media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book on “Tools, Methods and Algorithms for Mediating Online Interactions” edited by Matei, Sorin; Adam; Russell Martha G.: and Bertino, Elisa (Eds.): “The volume presents, in a synergistic manner, significant theoretical and practical contributions in the area of social media reputation and authorship measurement, visualization, and modeling. The book justifies and proposes contributions to a future agenda for understanding the requirements for making social media authorship more transparent. Building on work presented in a previous volume of this series, Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets, this book discusses new tools, applications, services, and algorithms that are needed for authoring content in a real-time publishing world. These insights may help people who interact and create content through social media better assess their potential for knowledge creation. They may also assist in analyzing audience attitudes, perceptions, and behavior in informal social media or in formal organizational structures. In addition, the volume includes several chapters that analyze the higher order ethical, critical thinking, and philosophical principles that may be used to ground social media authorship. Together, the perspectives presented in this volume help us understand how social media content is created and how its impact can be evaluated.

The chapters demonstrate thought leadership through new ways of constructing social media experiences and making traces of social interaction visible. Transparency in Social Media aims to help researchers and practitioners design services, tools, or methods of analysis that encourage a more transparent process of interaction and communication on social media. Knowing who has added what content and with what authority to a specific online social media project can help the user community better understand, evaluate and make decisions and, ultimately, act on the basis of such information …(More)”

Unpacking Civic Tech – Inside and Outside of Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Moore at Participatory Politics Foundation: “…I’ll argue it’s important to unpack the big-tent term “civic tech” to at least five major component areas, overlapping in practice & flexible of course – in order to more clearly understand what we have and what we need:

  • Responsive & efficient city services (e.g., SeeClickFix)
  • Open data portals & open government data publishing / visualization (Socrata, OpenGov.com)
  • Engagement platforms for government entities (Mindmixer aka Sidewalk)
  • Community-focused organizing services (Change, NextDoor, Brigade- these could validly be split, as NextDoor is of course place-based IRL)
  • Geo-based services & open mapping data (e.g.. Civic Insight)

More precisely, instead of “civic tech”, the term #GovTech can be productively applied to companies whose primary business model is vending to government entities – some #govtech is #opendata, some is civic #engagement, and that’s healthy & brilliant. But it doesn’t make sense to me to conflate as “civic tech” both government software vendors and the open-data work of good-government watchdogs. Another framework for understanding the inside / outside relationship to government, in company incorporation strategies & priorities, is broadly as follows:

  • tech entirely-outside government (such as OpenCongress or OpenStates);
  • tech mostly-outside government, where some elected officials volunteer to participate (such as AskThem, Councilmatic, DemocracyOS, or Change Decision Makers);
  • tech mostly-inside government, paid-for-by-government (such as Mindmixer or SpeakUp or OpenTownHall) where elected officials or gov’t staff sets the priorities, with the strong expectation of an official response;
  • deep legacy tech inside government, the enterprise vendors of closed-off CRM software to Congressional offices (including major defense contractors!).

These are the websites up and running today in the civic tech ecosystem – surveying them, I see there’s a lot of work still to do on developing advanced metrics towards thicker civic engagement. Towards evaluating whether the existing tools are having the impact we hope and expect them to at their level of capitalization, and to better contextualize the role of very-small non-profit alternatives….

One question to study is whether the highest-capitalized U.S. civic tech companies (Change, NextDoor, Mindmixer, Socrata, possibly Brigade) – which also generally have most users – are meeting ROI on continual engagement within communities.

  • If it’s a priority metric for users of a service to attend a community meeting, for example, are NextDoor or Mindmixer having expected impact?
  • How about metrics on return participation, joining an advocacy group, attending a district meeting with their U.S. reps, organizing peer-to-peer with neighbors?
  • How about writing or annotating their own legislation at the city level, introducing it for an official hearing, and moving it up the chain of government to state and even federal levels for consideration? What actual new popular public policies or systemic reforms are being carefully, collaboratively passed?
  • Do less-capitalized, community-based non-profits (AskThem, 596 Acres, OpenPlans’ much-missed Shareabouts, CKAN data portals, LittleSis, BeNeighbors, PBNYC tools) – with less scale, but with more open-source, open-data tools that can be remixed – improve on the tough metric of ROI on continual engagement or research-impact in the news?…(More)

Disruptive Technology that Could Transform Government-Citizen Relationships

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Raths at GovTech: “William Gibson, the science fiction writer who coined the term “cyberspace,” once said: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” That may be exactly the way to look at the selection of disruptive technologies we have chosen to highlight in eight critical areas of government, ranging from public safety to health to transportation. ….

PUBLIC SAFETY: WEARABLE TECH IS TRANSFORMING EMERGENCY RESPONSE

The wearable technology market is expected to grow from $20 billion in 2015 to almost $70 billion in 2025, according to research firm IDTechEx. As commercial applications bloom, more will find their way into the public sector and emergency response.

This year has seen an increase in the number of police departments using body cameras. And already under development are wireless devices that monitor a responder’s breathing, heart rate and blood pressure, as well as potentially harmful environmental conditions, and relay concerns back to incident command.

But rather than sitting back and waiting for the market to develop, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is determined to spur innovation in the field. DHS’ research and development arm is funding a startup accelerator program called Emerge managed by the Center for Innovative Technology (CIT), a Virginia-based nonprofit. Two accelerators, in Texas and Illinois, will work with 10 to 15 startups this year to develop wearable products and adopt them for first responder use….

HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES: ‘HOT-SPOTTING’ FOR POPULATION HEALTH MANAGEMENT

A hot health-care trend is population health management: using data to improve health at a community level as well as an individual level. The growth in sophistication of GIS tools has allowed public health researchers to more clearly identify and start addressing health resource disparities.

Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, a Camden, N.J.-based physician, uses data gathered in a health information exchange (HIE) to target high-cost individuals. The Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers uses the HIE data to identify high-cost “hot spots” — high-rise buildings where a large number of hospital emergency room “super users” live. By identifying and working with these individuals on patient-centered care coordination issues, the coalition has been able to reduce emergency room use and in-patient stays….

PARKS & RECREATION: TRACKING TREES FOR A BETTER FUTURE

A combination of advances in mobile data collection systems and geocoding lets natural resources and parks agencies be more proactive about collecting tree data, managing urban forests and quantifying their value, as forests become increasingly important resources in an era of climate change.

Philadelphia Parks and Recreation has added approximately 2 million trees to its database in the past few years. It plans to create a digital management system for all of them. Los Angeles City Parks uses the Davey Tree Expert Co.’s Web-based TreeKeeper management software to manage existing tree inventories and administer work orders. The department can also more easily look at species balance to manage against pests, disease and drought….

CORRECTIONS: VIDEO-BASED TOOLS TRANSFORM PRISONS AND JAILS

Videoconferencing is disrupting business as usual in U.S. jails and prisons in two ways: One is the rising use of telemedicine to reduce inmate health-care costs and to increase access to certain types of care for prisoners. The other is video visitation between inmates and families.

A March 2015 report by Southern California Public Radio noted that the federal court-appointed receiver overseeing inmate health care in California is reviewing telemedicine capabilities to reduce costly overtime billing by physicians and nurses at prisons. In one year, overtime has more than doubled for this branch of corrections, from more than $12 million to nearly $30 million….

FINANCE & BUDGETING: DATA PORTALS OFFER TRANSPARENCY AT UNPRECEDENTED LEVELS

The transparency and open data movements have hit the government finance sector in a big way and promise to be an area of innovation in the years ahead.

A partnership between Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel and the finance visualization startup OpenGov will result in one of the most sweeping statewide transparency efforts to date.

The initiative offers 3,900-plus local governments — from townships, cities and counties to school districts and more — a chance to place revenues and expenditures online free of charge through the state’s budget transparency site OhioCheckbook.com. Citizens will be able to track local government revenues and expenditures via interactive graphs that illustrate not only a bird’s-eye view of a budget, but also the granular details of check-by-check spending….

DMV: DRIVERS’ LICENSES: THERE WILL SOON BE AN APP FOR THAT

The laminated driver’s license you keep in your wallet may eventually give way to an app on your smartphone, and that change may have wider significance for how citizens interact digitally with their government. Legislatures in at least three states have seen bills introduced authorizing their transportation departments to begin piloting digital drivers’ licenses…..

TRANSPORTATION & MASS TRANSIT: BIG BREAKTHROUGHS ARE JUST AROUND THE CORNER

Nothing is likely to be more disruptive to transportation, mass transit and urban planning than the double whammy of connected vehicle technology and autonomous vehicles.
The U.S. Department of Transportation expects great things from the connected vehicles of the future ­— and that future may be just around the corner. Vehicle-to-infrastructure communication capabilities and anonymous information from passengers’ wireless devices relayed through dedicated short-range connections could provide transportation agencies with improved traffic, transit and parking data, making it easier to manage transportation systems and improve traffic safety….. (More)”

Harnessing Mistrust for Civic Action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ethan Zuckerman: “…One predictable consequence of mistrust in institutions is a decrease in participation. Fewer than 37% of eligible US voters participated in the 2014 Congressional election. Participation in European parliamentary and national elections across Europe is higher than the US’s dismal rates, but has steadily declined since 1979, with turnout for the 2014 European parliamentary elections dropping below 43%. It’s a mistake to blame low turnout on distracted or disinterested voters, when a better explanation exists: why vote if you don’t believe the US congress or European Parliament is capable of making meaningful change in the world?

In his 2012 book, “Twilight of the Elites”, Christopher Hayes suggests that the political tension of our time is not between left and right, but between institutionalists and insurrectionists. Institutionalists believe we can fix the world’s problems by strengthening and revitalizing the institutions we have. Insurrectionists believe we need to abandon these broken institutions we have and replace them with new, less corrupted ones, or with nothing at all. The institutionalists show up to vote in elections, but they’re being crowded out by the insurrectionists, who take to the streets to protest, or more worryingly, disengage entirely from civic life.

Conventional wisdom suggests that insurrectionists will grow up, stop protesting and start voting. But we may have reached a tipping point where the cultural zeitgeist favors insurrection. My students at MIT don’t want to work for banks, for Google or for universities – they want to build startups that disrupt banks, Google and universities.

The future of democracy depends on finding effective ways for people who mistrust institutions to make change in their communities, their nations and the world as a whole. The real danger is not that our broken institutions are toppled by a wave of digital disruption, but that a generation disengages from politics and civics as a whole.

It’s time to stop criticizing youth for their failure to vote and time to start celebrating the ways insurrectionists are actually trying to change the world. Those who mistrust institutions aren’t just ignoring them. Some are building new systems designed to make existing institutions obsolete. Others are becoming the fiercest and most engaged critics of of our institutions, while the most radical are building new systems that resist centralization and concentration of power.

Those outraged by government and corporate complicity in surveillance of the internet have the option of lobbying their governments to forbid these violations of privacy, or building and spreading tools that make it vastly harder for US and European governments to read our mail and track our online behavior. We need both better laws and better tools. But we must recognize that the programmers who build systems like Tor, PGP and Textsecure are engaged in civics as surely as anyone crafting a party’s political platform. The same goes for entrepreneurs building better electric cars, rather than fighting to legislate carbon taxes. As people lose faith in institutions, they seek change less through passing and enforcing laws, and more through building new technologies and businesses whose adoption has the same benefits as wisely crafted and enforced laws….(More)”

Datafication and empowerment: How the open data movement re-articulates notions of democracy, participation, and journalism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stefan Baack at Big Data and Society: “This article shows how activists in the open data movement re-articulate notions of democracy, participation, and journalism by applying practices and values from open source culture to the creation and use of data. Focusing on the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and drawing from a combination of interviews and content analysis, it argues that this process leads activists to develop new rationalities around datafication that can support the agency of datafied publics. Three modulations of open source are identified: First, by regarding data as a prerequisite for generating knowledge, activists transform the sharing of source code to include the sharing of raw data. Sharing raw data should break the interpretative monopoly of governments and would allow people to make their own interpretation of data about public issues. Second, activists connect this idea to an open and flexible form of representative democracy by applying the open source model of participation to political participation. Third, activists acknowledge that intermediaries are necessary to make raw data accessible to the public. This leads them to an interest in transforming journalism to become an intermediary in this sense. At the same time, they try to act as intermediaries themselves and develop civic technologies to put their ideas into practice. The article concludes with suggesting that the practices and ideas of open data activists are relevant because they illustrate the connection between datafication and open source culture and help to understand how datafication might support the agency of publics and actors outside big government and big business….(More)“

AI tool turns complicated legal contracts into simple visual charts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “We have seen a host of work related apps that aim to make tedious office tasks more approachable — there is a plugin that can find files without knowing the title, and a tracking tool which analyzes competitors online strategies. Joining this is Beagle, an intelligent contract analysis tool which provides users with a graphical summary of lengthy documents in seconds. It is a time-saving tool which translates complicated documents from elusive legal language into comprehensive visual summaries.

The Beagle system is powered by self-learning artificial intelligence which learns the client’s preferences and adapts accordingly. Users begin by dropping in a file into the app. The AI — trained by lawyers and NLP experts — then converts the information into a single page document. It processes the contract at a rate of one page per 0.05 seconds and highlights key information, displaying it in easy to read graphs and charts. The system also comes with built-in collaboration tools so multiple users can edit and export the files….(More)”

Setting High and Compatible Standards

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Laura Bacon at Omidyar Network:  “…Standards enable interoperability, replicability, and efficiency. Airplane travel would be chaotic at best and deadly at worst if flights and air traffic control did not use common codes for call signs, flight numbers, location, date, and time. Trains that cross national borders need tracks built to a standard gauge as evidenced by Spain’s experience in making its trains interoperable with the rest of the continent’s.

Standards matter in data collection and publication as well.  This is especially true for those datasets that matter most to people’s lives, such as health, education, agriculture, and water. Disparate standards for basic category definitions like geography and organizations mean that data sources cannot be easily or cost-effectively analyzed for cross-comparison and decision making.

Compatible data standards that enable data being ‘joined up,’ would enable more efficacious logging and use of immunization records, controlling the spread of infectious disease, helping educators prioritize spending based on the greatest needs, and identifying the beneficial owners of companies to help ensure transparent and legal business transactions.

Data: More Valuable When Joined Up

Lots of efforts, time, and money are poured into the generation and publication of open data. And where open data is important in itself, the biggest return on investment is potentially from the inter-linkages among datasets. However, it is very difficult to yield this return because of the now-missing standards and building blocks (e.g., geodata, organizational identifiers, project identifiers) that would enable joining up of data.

Omidyar Network currently supports open data standards for contracting, extractives, budgets, and others. If “joining up” work is not considered and executed at early stages, these standards 1) could evolve in silos and 2) may not reach their full capacity.

Interoperability will not happen automatically; specific investments and efforts must be made to develop the public good infrastructure for the joining up of key datasets….The two organizations leading this project have an impressive track record working in this area. Development Initiatives is a global organization working to empower people to make more effective use of information. In 2013, it commissioned Open Knowledge Foundation to publish a cross-initiative scoping study, Joined-Up Data: Building Blocks for Common Standards, which recommended focus areas, shared learning, and the adoption of joined-up data and common standards for all publishers. Partnering with Development Initiatives is Publish What You Fund,…(More)”

From Governmental Open Data Toward Governmental Open Innovation (GOI)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Daniele Archibugi et al in The Handbook of Global Science, Technology, and Innovation: “Today, governments release governmental data that were previously hidden to the public. This democratization of governmental open data (OD) aims to increase transparency but also fuels innovation. Indeed, the release of governmental OD is a global trend, which has evolved into governmental open innovation (GOI). In GOI, governmental actors purposively manage the knowledge flows that span organizational boundaries and reveal innovation-related knowledge to the public with the aim to spur innovation for a higher economic and social welfare at regional, national, or global scale. GOI subsumes different revealing strategies, namely governmental OD, problem, and solution revealing. This chapter introduces the concept of GOI that has evolved from global OD efforts. It present a historical analysis of the emergence of GOI in four different continents, namely, Europe (UK and Denmark), North America (United States and Mexico), Australia, and China to highlight the emergence of GOI at a global scale….(More)”