Paper by Caio Libânio Melo Jerônimo, Claudio E. C. Campelo, Cláudio de Souza Baptista: “The need to use online technologies that favor the understanding of city dynamics has grown, mainly due to the ease in obtaining the necessary data, which, in most cases, are gathered with no cost from social networks services. With such facility, the acquisition of georeferenced data has become easier, favoring the interest and feasibility in studying human mobility patterns, bringing new challenges for knowledge discovery in GIScience. This favorable scenario also encourages governments to make their data available for public access, increasing the possibilities for data scientist to analyze such data. This article presents an approach to extracting mobility metrics from Twitter messages and to analyzing their correlation with social, economic and demographic open data. The proposed model was evaluated using a dataset of georeferenced Twitter messages and a set of social indicators, both related to Greater London. The results revealed that social indicators related to employment conditions present higher correlation with the mobility metrics than any other social indicators investigated, suggesting that these social variables may be more relevant for studying mobility behaviors….(More)”.
New program wants to improve cities with the power of tweets and Flickr uploads
Marissa Clifford at Curbed: “Want to watch street life unfold outside of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, long after it’s closed for the day? Or uncover the hidden ways both tourists and locals alike use Manhattan’s most famous landmarks? Now you can, all thanks to the power of data.
Urban Pulse, open-source software developed at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, uses data to create a map that visualizes how people move through cities. From Urban Pulse’s interface, you can observe, for example, how tourists navigate Central Park.
Sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, who worked in the early years of the 20th century, developed a theory of urban environments that used the human body as an organizing analogy: They likened the mundane processes of everyday urban life (things like phone calls and taxi rides) to the heartbeat. Urban Pulse brings that analogy into the 21st century, replacing statistics about phone calls with social media and other digital data.
Essentially, Urban Pulse is a dynamic, comparative heat map. And the hot spots on the map are made up of what the research team dubbed “pulses” and “beats,” terminology that was inspired by Park and Burgess’s original analogy.
But Urban Pulse’s findings don’t simply reinforce what we already know about cities. By pinpointing how, when, and by whom city spaces are most often used, the data has the power to upend our preconceptions about civic space. This has potentially far-reaching implications for urban planners, architects, and city planners.
But what is a “pulse?” And where is that social media data coming from? Simply put, a pulse is a graphic representation of the kinds of open source data that serve as proxies for human activity, like tweets and Flickr uploads. Though Urban Pulse currently only uses data from Flickr and Twitter, it is free to download on GitHub, and its creators are hoping to see a wider variety of data types input by the open source community….(More)”.
The Potential of Social Media Intelligence to Improve People’s Lives: Social Media Data for Good
New report by Stefaan G. Verhulst and Andrew Young: “The twenty-first century will be challenging on many fronts. From historically catastrophic natural disasters resulting from climate change to inequality to refugee and terrorism crises, it is clear that we need not only new solutions, but new insights and methods of arriving at solutions. Data, and the intelligence gained from it through advances in data science, is increasingly being seen as part of the answer. This report explores the premise that data—and in particular the vast stores of data and the unique analytical expertise held by social media companies—may indeed provide for a new type of intelligence that could help develop solutions to today’s challenges.
In this report, developed with support from Facebook, we focus on an approach to extract public value from social media data that we believe holds the greatest potential: data collaboratives. Data collaboratives are an emerging form of public-private partnership in which actors from different sectors exchange information to create new public value. Such collaborative arrangements, for example between social media companies and humanitarian organizations or civil society actors, can be seen as possible templates for leveraging privately held data towards the attainment of public goals….(More)”
Smart cities are great. Human-centric cities are (again) the future
Naveen Rajdev at Quartz:” …You don’t want your smart city’s proverbial slip to show, and you don’t want to overwhelm your citizens with too much tech. So what’s the plan?
1. Start making technology invisible
Being able to “see” technology creates interaction, and interaction creates distraction.
To illustrate: Assuming your car and smartphone are connected, your phone should be able to notify someone—someone texting you, for example—that you’re driving and can’t respond. You don’t want to take your hands off the wheel, so your phone should instead be able to send an automatic response to the text sender: “I’m driving right now, but I’ll get back to you later.” It keeps you and others safe on the road, and it doesn’t force you to respond….
Detroit, for instance, is already investigating the idea of “invisible” technology, particularly when it comes to residents’ safety. Last fall, Detroit’s city officials partnered with Comcast to expand the area’s Project Green Light program, which allows businesses to install cameras police can use to monitor crimes (and solve them) in real time.
The program’s expansion led to a 50% drop in violent crime at convenience stores and gas stations. Thanks to the technology—which was by no means a distraction to Detroit’s residents—the city is safer, and business is better.
While Detroit excels at making tech inconspicuous, most of the country is doing what it can to be more on-the-grid than ever before, completely ignoring (or altogether missing) the subtleties “invisible” tech offers. Last fall, New York City officials introduced LinkNYC, a free Wi-Fi service throughout Manhattan in the form of 500 touch-screen kiosks available for public use.
As the adage suggests, sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. With the kiosks being essentially too visible in Manhattan’s streets, problems arose: The city’s homeless population began misusing them, and certain groups started insisting the kiosks help officials “spy” on its residents….
2. Your city must be conscious of digital overload
In a world where technology rules, it’s imperative we find time to think, breathe, and unplug, so city leaders must carefully marry tech and mindfulness. Otherwise, they face the consequences of information overload: weakened decision-making and the feeling of being overwhelmed, among others. A city’s occasional digital detox is crucial.
Why? Studies have shown that smartphones could be causing insomnia, social media may be spawning narcissism, and computer screens might be making our kids less empathetic. At some point, a line must be drawn.
Luckily, certain cities are starting to draw it. Late last year, Miami’s development authority department proposed turning lanes clogged with traffic on Biscayne Boulevard into a spacious greenway that welcomed both pedestrians and bicyclists. Beyond that, walking trails are growing along the river and bay, and another trail is in the works. City developers have also approved smaller residential projects in areas that public transit serves….
Even a simple art exhibit can be marred by too much tech. …Other gallery curators aren’t loving the marriage of art and tech. Connie Wolf, Stanford University’s director of the Cantor Arts Center, is particularly cautious. “In our busy lives, in our crazy lives, we’re always connected to technology,” she said. “People want to come into museums and put that technology aside for a moment.”
Bottom line: Being connected is great, but being conscious is better. City leaders would do well to remember this….(More)”.
‘Stop Fake Hate Profiles on Facebook’: Challenges for crowdsourced activism on social media
Johan Farkas and Christina Neumayer in First Monday: “This research examines how activists mobilise against fake hate profiles on Facebook. Based on six months of participant observation, this paper demonstrates how Danish Facebook users organised to combat fictitious Muslim profiles that spurred hatred against ethnic minorities. Crowdsourced action by Facebook users is insufficient as a form of sustainable resistance against fake hate profiles. A viable solution would require social media companies, such as Facebook, to take responsibility in the struggle against fake content used for political manipulation….(More)”.
All hands on deck to tweet #sandy: Networked governance of citizen coproduction in turbulent times
Akemi TakeokaChatfield and Christopher G.Reddick at Government Information Quarterly: “While citizens previously took a back seat to government, citizen coproduction of disaster risk communications through social media networks is emerging. We draw on information-processing, citizen coproduction, and networked governance theories to examine the governance and impact of networked interactions in the following question: When government’s capacity in information-processing and communication is overwhelmed by unfolding disasters, how do government and citizens coproduce disaster risk communications? During the Hurricane Sandy, we collected 132,922 #sandy tweets to analyze the structure and networked interactions using social network analysis. We then conducted case study of the government’s social media policy governance networks. Networked citizen interactions – their agility in voluntarily retweeting the government’s #sandy tweets and tweeting their own messages – magnified the agility and reach of the government’s #sandy disaster communications. Our case study indicates the criticality of social media policy governance networks in empowering the lead agencies and citizens to coproduce disaster communication public services….(More)”.
Using big data to predict suicide risk among Canadian youth
SAS Insights “Suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth in Canada, according to Statistics Canada, accounting for one-fifth of deaths of people under the age of 25 in 2011. The Canadian Mental Health Association states that among 15 – 24 year olds the number is an even more frightening at 24 percent – the third highest in the industrialized world. Yet despite these disturbing statistics, the signals that an individual plans on self-injury or suicide are hard to isolate….
Team members …collected 2.3 million tweets and used text mining software to identify 1.1 million of them as likely to have been authored by 13 to 17 year olds in Canada by building a machine learning model to predict age, based on the open source PAN author profiling dataset. Their analysis made use of natural language processing, predictive modelling, text mining, and data visualization….
However, there were challenges. Ages are not revealed on Twitter, so the team had to figure out how to tease out the data for 13 – 17 year olds in Canada. “We had a text data set, and we created a model to identify if people were in that age group based on how they talked in their tweets,” Soehl said. “From there, we picked some specific buzzwords and created topics around them, and our software mined those tweets to collect the people.”
Another issue was the restrictions Twitter places on pulling data, though Soehl believes that once this analysis becomes an established solution, Twitter may work with researchers to expedite the process. “Now that we’ve shown it’s possible, there are a lot of places we can go with it,” said Soehl. “Once you know your path and figure out what’s going to be valuable, things come together quickly.”
The team looked at the percentage of people in the group who were talking about depression or suicide, and what they were talking about. Horne said that when SAS’ work went in front of a Canadian audience working in health care, they said that it definitely filled a gap in their data — and that was the validation he’d been looking for. The team also won $10,000 for creating the best answer to this question (the team donated the award money to two mental health charities: Mind Your Mind and Rise Asset Development)
What’s next?
That doesn’t mean the work is done, said Jos Polfliet. “We’re just scraping the surface of what can be done with the information.” Another way to use the results is to look at patterns and trends….(More)”
Humanizing technology
Kaliya Young at Open Democracy: “Can we use the internet to enhance deep human connection and support the emergence of thriving communities in which everyone’s needs are met and people’s lives are filled with joy and meaning?….
Our work on ‘technical’ technologies won’t generate broad human gains unless we invest an equal amount of time, energy and resources in the development of social and emotional technologies that drive how our whole society is organized and how we work together. I think we are actually on the cusp of having the tools, understanding and infrastructure to make that happen, without all our ideas and organizing being intermediated by giant corporations. But what does that mean in practice?
I think two things are absolutely vital.
First of all, how do we connect all the people and all the groups that want to align their goals in pursuit of social justice, deep democracy, and the development of new economies that share wealth and protect the environment? How are people supported to protect their own autonomy while also working with multiple other groups in processes of joint work and collective action?
One key element of the answer to that question is to generate a digital identity that is not under the control of a corporation, an organization or a government.
I have been co-leading the community surrounding the Internet Identity Workshop for the last 12 years. After many explorations of the techno-possibility landscape we have finally made some breakthroughs that will lay the foundations of a real internet-scale infrastructure to support what are called ‘user-centric’ or ‘self-sovereign’ identities.
This infrastructure consists of a network with two different types of nodes—people and organizations—with each individual being able to join lots of different groups. But regardless of how many groups they join, people will need a digital identity that is not owned by Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Google or Facebook. That’s the only way they will be able to control their own autonomous interactions on the internet. If open standards are not created for this critical piece of infrastructure then we will end up in a future where giant corporations control all of our identities. In many ways we are in this future now.
This is where something called ‘Shared Ledger Technology’ or SLT comes in—more commonly known as ‘blockchain’ or ‘distributed ledger technology.’ SLT represents a huge innovation in terms of databases that can be read by anyone and which are highly resistant to tampering—meaning that data cannot be erased or changed once entered. At the moment there’s a lot of work going on to design the encryption key management that’s necessary to support the creation and operation of these unique private channels of connection and communication between individuals and organizations. The Sovrin Foundation has built an SLT specifically for digital identity key management, and has donated the code required to the HyperLeger Foundation under ‘project Indy.’…
To put it simply, technical technologies are easier to turn in the direction of democracy and social justice if they are developed and applied with social and emotional intelligence. Combining all three together is the key to using technology for liberating ends….(More)”.
Free Speech in the Algorithmic Society: Big Data, Private Governance, and New School Speech Regulation
Paper by Jack Balkin: “We have now moved from the early days of the Internet to the Algorithmic Society. The Algorithmic Society features the use of algorithms, artificial intelligence agents, and Big Data to govern populations. It also features digital infrastructure companies, large multi-national social media platforms, and search engines that sit between traditional nation states and ordinary individuals, and serve as special-purpose governors of speech.
The Algorithmic Society presents two central problems for freedom of expression. First, Big Data allows new forms of manipulation and control, which private companies will attempt to legitimate and insulate from regulation by invoking free speech principles. Here First Amendment arguments will likely be employed to forestall digital privacy guarantees and prevent consumer protection regulation. Second, privately owned digital infrastructure companies and online platforms govern speech much as nation states once did. Here the First Amendment, as normally construed, is simply inadequate to protect the practical ability to speak.
The first part of the essay describes how to regulate online businesses that employ Big Data and algorithmic decision making consistent with free speech principles. Some of these businesses are “information fiduciaries” toward their end-users; they must exercise duties of good faith and non-manipulation. Other businesses who are not information fiduciaries have a duty not to engage in “algorithmic nuisance”: they may not externalize the costs of their analysis and use of Big Data onto innocent third parties.
The second part of the essay turns to the emerging pluralist model of online speech regulation. This pluralist model contrasts with the traditional dyadic model in which nation states regulated the speech of their citizens.
In the pluralist model, territorial governments continue to regulate the speech directly. But they also attempt to coerce or co-opt owners of digital infrastructure to regulate the speech of others. This is “new school” speech regulation….(More)”.
Chatbot helps asylum seekers prepare for their interviews
Springwise: “MarHub is a new chatbot developed by students at the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Businessto help asylum seekers through the complicated process of applying to become an official refugee – which can take up to 18 months – and to avoid using smugglers.
Finding the right information for the asylum process isn’t easy, and although most asylum seekers are in possession of a smartphone, a lot of the information is either missing or out of date. MarHub is designed to help with that, as it will walk the user through what they can expect and also how to present their case. MarHub is also expandable, so that new information or regulations can be quickly added to make it a hub of useful information.
The concept of MarHub was born in late 2016, in response to the Hult Prize social enterprise challenge, which was focusing on refugees for 2017. The development team quickly realized that there was a gap in the market which they felt they could fill. MarHub will initially be made available through Facebook, and then later on WhatsApp and text messaging….(More)”.