Survive and Thrive: How Big Data Is Transforming Health Care

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at Pacific Standard: “When you step on a scale, take your temperature, or check your blood pressure, you’re using data from your body to measure your health. Advances in fitness trackers have made health quantification more accessible to casual users. But for researchers, health care providers, and people with chronic conditions, advances in tracking technology, data analysis, and automation offer significant improvements in medical treatment and quality of life.

This three-part series explores health quantification through the eyes of Rutgers University Ph.D student Maria Qadri, who has both professional and personal experience in the matter. Qadri’s research aims to help people with traumatic brain injury and Parkinson’s Disease better manage their illness, and, as a Type 1 diabetic, glucose monitoring is a major part of her own life. Below, we take a look at how number crunching and personal data factors into Qadri’s research and life….(More).”

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Open Data Is Finally Making A Dent In Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Brooks Rainwater at Co-Exist: “As with a range of leading issues, cities are at the vanguard of this shifting environment. Through increased measurement, analysis, and engagement, open data will further solidify the centrality of cities.
In the Chicago, the voice of the mayor counts for a lot. And Mayor Emmanuel has been at the forefront in supporting and encouraging open data in the city, resulting in a strong open government community. The city has more than 600 datasets online, and has seen millions of page views on its data portal. The public benefits have accrued widely with civic initiatives like Chicagolobbyists.org, as well as with a myriad of other open data led endeavors.
Transparency is one of the great promises of open data. Petitioning the government is a fundamental tenet of democracy and many government relations’ professionals perform this task brilliantly. At the same time that transparency is good for the city, it’s good for citizens and democracy. Through the advent of Chicagolobbyists.org, anyone can now see how many lobbyists are in the city, how much they are spending, who they are talking to, and when it is happening.
Throughout the country, we are seeing data driven sites and apps like this that engage citizens, enhance services, and provide a rich understanding of government operations In Austin, a grassroots movement has formed with advocacy organization Open Austin. Through hackathons and other opportunities, citizens are getting involved, services are improving, and businesses are being built.
Data can even find your dog, reducing the number of stray animals being sheltered, with StrayMapper.com. The site has a simple map-based web portal where you can type in whether you are missing a dog or cat, when you lost them, and where. That information is then plugged into the data being collected by the city on stray animals. This project, developed by a Code for America brigade team, helps the city improve its rate of returning pets to owners.
It’s not only animals that get lost or at least can’t find the best way home. I’ve found myself in that situation too. Thanks to Ridescout, incubated in Washington, D.C., at 1776, I have been able to easily find the best way home. Through the use of open data available from both cities and the Department of Transportation, Ridescout created an app that is an intuitive mobility tool. By showing me all of the available options from transit to ridesharing to my own two feet, it frequently helps me get from place to place in the city. It looks like it wasn’t just me that found this app to be handy; Daimler recently acquired Ridescout as the auto giant continues its own expansion into the data driven mobility space.”

Doing Social Network Research: Network-based Research Design for Social Scientists

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
New book by Garry Robins: “Are you struggling to design your social network research? Are you looking for a book that covers more than social network analysis? If so, this is the book for you! With straight-forward guidance on research design and data collection, as well as social network analysis, this book takes you start to finish through the whole process of doing network research. Open the book and you’ll find practical, ‘how to’ advice and worked examples relevant to PhD students and researchers from across the social and behavioural sciences. The book covers:

  • Fundamental network concepts and theories
  • Research questions and study design
  • Social systems and data structures
  • Network observation and measurement
  • Methods for data collection
  • Ethical issues for social network research
  • Network visualization
  • Methods for social network analysis
  • Drawing conclusions from social network results

This is a perfect guide for all students and researchers looking to do empirical social network research…(More)”

The downside of Open Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joshua Chambers at FutureGov: “…Inaccurate public datasets can cause big problems, because apps that feed off of them could be giving out false information. I was struck by this when we reported on an app in Australia that was issuing alerts for forest fires that didn’t exist. The data was coming from public emergency calls, but wasn’t verified before being displayed. This meant that app users would be alerted of all possible fires, but also could be caused unnecessarily panic. The government takes the view that more alerts are better than slower verified ones, but there is the potential for people to become less likely to trust all alerts on the app.
No-one wants to publish inaccurate data, but accuracy takes time and costs money. So we come to a central tension in discussions about open data: is it better to publish more data, with the risk of inaccuracy, or limit publication to datasets which are accurate?
The United Kingdom takes the view that more data is best. I interviewed the UK’s lead official on open data, Paul Maltby, a couple of years ago, and he told me that: “There’s a misnomer here that everything has to be perfect before you can put it out,” adding that “what we’re finding is that, actually, some of the datasets are a bit messy. We try to keep them as high-quality as we can; but other organisations then clean up the data and sell it on”.
Indeed, he noted that some officials use data accuracy as an excuse to not publish information that could hold their departments to account. “There’s sometimes a reluctance to get data out from the civil service; and whilst we see many examples of people understanding the reasons why data has been put to use, I’d say the general default is still not pro-release”.
Other countries take a different view, however. Singapore, for example, publishes much less data than Britain, but has more of a push on making its data accurate to assist startups and app builders….(More)”

Social Sensing and Crowdsourcing: the future of connected sensors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Conference Paper by C. Geijer, M. Larsson, M. Stigelid: “Social sensing is becoming an alternative to static sensors. It is a way to crowdsource data collection where sensors can be placed on frequently used objects, such as mobile phones or cars, to gather important information. Increasing availability in technology, such as cheap sensors being added in cell phones, creates an opportunity to build bigger sensor networks that are capable of collecting a larger quantity and more complex data. The purpose of this paper is to highlight problems in the field, as well as their solutions. The focus lies on the use of physical sensors and not on the use of social media to collect data. Research papers were reviewed based on implemented or suggested implementations of social sensing. The discovered problems are contrasted with possible solutions, and used to reflect upon the future of the field. We found issues such as privacy, noise and trustworthiness to be problems when using a distributed network of sensors. Furthermore, we discovered models for determining the accuracy as well as truthfulness of gathered data that can effectively combat these problems. The topic of privacy remains an open-ended problem, since it is based upon ethical considerations that may differ from person to person, but there exists methods for addressing this as well. The reviewed research suggests that social sensing will become more and more useful in the future….(More).”

Open Data Barometer (second edition)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
The second edition of the Open Data Barometer: “A global movement to make government “open by default” picked up steam in 2013 when the G8 leaders signed an Open Data Charter – promising to make public sector data openly available, without charge and in re-useable formats. In 2014 the G20 largest industrial economies followed up by pledging to advance open data as a tool against corruption, and the UN recognized the need for a “Data Revolution” to achieve global development goals.
However, this second edition of the Open Data Barometer shows that there is still a long way to go to put the power of data in the hands of citizens. Core data on how governments are spending our money and how public services are performing remains inaccessible or paywalled in most countries. Information critical to fight corruption and promote fair competition, such as company registers, public sector contracts, and land titles, is even harder to get. In most countries, proactive disclosure of government data is not mandated in law or policy as part of a wider right to information, and privacy protections are weak or uncertain.
Our research suggests some of the key steps needed to ensure the “Data Revolution” will lead to a genuine revolution in the transparency and performance of governments:

  • High-level political commitment to proactive disclosure of public sector data, particularly the data most critical to accountability
  • Sustained investment in supporting and training a broad cross-section of civil society and entrepreneurs to understand and use data effectively
  • Contextualizing open data tools and approaches to local needs, for example by making data visually accessible in countries with lower literacy levels.
  • Support for city-level open data initiatives as a complement to national-level programmes
  • Legal reform to ensure that guarantees of the right to information and the right to privacy underpin open data initiatives

Over the next six months, world leaders have several opportunities to agree these steps, starting with the United Nation’s high-level data revolution in Africa conference in March, Canada’s global International Open Data Conference in May and the G7 summit in Germany this June. It is crucial that these gatherings result in concrete actions to address the political and resource barriers that threaten to stall open data efforts….(More)”.

The Internet of Anything: A Social Network for the World’s Online Sensors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in Wired: “When her oldest daughter was diagnosed with asthma last March, Yodi Stanton installed air pollution sensors around her London home. She wanted to see if there were links between her daughter’s attacks and the number of dirty particles in the air.
Ultimately, she wasn’t able to find a correlation. But maybe some else will find gold in this data. Instead of keeping it to herself, Stanton streamed the data to a public online service she helped create called OpenSensors.io, and from there, it can be accessed and analyzed by public health researchers, journalists, and other concerned citizens—or even feed into online applications that can make use of it.
OpenSensors is a service where anyone can publish real-time sensor data. Think of it as Twitter for sensors. You can publish a stream of data from virtually any source to the company’s computer servers—or subscribe to streams of data coming from others, using it for your own research, gadget, or online app…..(More)”.

Donated Personal Data Could Aid Lifestyle Researchers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anya Skatova and James Goulding at Scientific American: “In the future it will be possible to donate our personal data to charitable causes. All sorts of data is recorded about us as we go about our daily lives—what we buy, where we go, who we call on the phone and our use of the internet. The time is approaching when we could liberate that data in support of good causes. Given many people already donate precious resources such as money or even blood for the benefit of society at large, this step might not be far away.
How could donated data help our society? Data is a rich source of people’s habits—shopping data from loyalty cards, for example, can reflect our diet. If people donate their personal data for research, analysis of it can provide scope to improve everything from understandings of the dietary pre-cursors to diabetes to the impact of lifestyle on heart disease.
But there are vital issues around the collection and use of personal data that must be addressed. Donation rests on trust: would people give their data away knowing that researchers will examine it, even if anonymously? Would they want others scrutinising their diet, or their shopping habits? Would people feel their privacy was being invaded, even if they had chosen to donate to help medical research?
Who would donate data to research?
Our recent research has found that around 60% of people are willing to donate their data for uses that will benefit the public. In some ways this is not surprising. As previous research demonstrated, people help others and take part in various pro-social activities. People voluntarily give to benefit society at large: they donate money to charities, or run marathons to raise money without knowing exactly who will benefit; they give blood, bone marrow, or even organs. They often do so out of concern for the welfare of others, or in other cases for more selfish reasons, such as enhancing their reputation, professional benefit, or just to feel good about themselves….
Donating data is certainly different from donating money or blood—there is very little obvious cost to us when donating our data. Unlike blood or money, data is something for which most of us have no use, nor has it any real monetary value to those of us that generate it, but it becomes valuable when combined with the data of others.
Currently companies leverage personal data to make money because it provides them with sophisticated understanding of consumer behaviour, from which they in turn can profit. But shouldn’t our data benefit us too?…(More)”

Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Wu Youyou, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell at PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences): “Judging others’ personalities is an essential skill in successful social living, as personality is a key driver behind people’s interactions, behaviors, and emotions. Although accurate personality judgments stem from social-cognitive skills, developments in machine learning show that computer models can also make valid judgments. This study compares the accuracy of human and computer-based personality judgments, using a sample of 86,220 volunteers who completed a 100-item personality questionnaire. We show that (i) computer predictions based on a generic digital footprint (Facebook Likes) are more accurate (r = 0.56) than those made by the participants’ Facebook friends using a personality questionnaire (r = 0.49); (ii) computer models show higher interjudge agreement; and (iii) computer personality judgments have higher external validity when predicting life outcomes such as substance use, political attitudes, and physical health; for some outcomes, they even outperform the self-rated personality scores. Computers outpacing humans in personality judgment presents significant opportunities and challenges in the areas of psychological assessment, marketing, and privacy…(More)”.