social media

Why Zika, Malaria and Ebola should fear analytics

Curated on August 9, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Frédéric Pivetta at Real Impact Analytics: “Big data is a hot business topic. It turns out to be an equally hot topic for the non profit sector now that we know the vital role analytics can play in addressing public health issues and reaching sustainable development goals.

Big players like IBM just announced they will help fight Zika by analyzing social media, transportation and weather data, among other indicators. Telecom data takes it further by helping to predict the spread of disease, identifying isolated and fragile communities and prioritizing the actions of aid workers.

The power of telecom data

Human mobility contributes significantly to epidemic transmission into new regions. However, there are gaps in understanding human mobility due to the limited and often outdated data available from travel records. In some countries, these are collected by health officials in the hospitals or in occasional surveys.

Telecom data, constantly updated and covering a large portion of the population, is rich in terms of mobility insights. But there are other benefits:

it’s recorded automatically (in the Call Detail Records, or CDRs), so that we avoid data collection and response bias.
it contains localization and time information, which is great for understanding human mobility.
it contains info on connectivity between people, which helps understanding social networks.
it contains info on phone spending, which allows tracking of socio-economic indicators.

Aggregated and anonymized, mobile telecom data fills the public data gap without questioning privacy issues. Mixing it with other public data sources results in a very precise and reliable view on human mobility patterns, which is key for preventing epidemic spreads.

Using telecom data to map epidemic risk flows

So how does it work? As in any other big data application, the challenge is to build the right predictive model, allowing decision-makers to take the most appropriate actions. In the case of epidemic transmission, the methodology typically includes five steps :

Identify mobility patterns relevant for each particular disease. For example, short-term trips for fast-spreading diseases like Ebola. Or overnight trips for diseases like Malaria, as it spreads by mosquitoes that are active only at night. Such patterns can be deduced from the CDRs: we can actually find the home location of each user by looking at the most active night tower, and then tracking calls to identify short or long-term trips. Aggregating data per origin-destination pairs is useful as we look at intercity or interregional transmission flows. And it protects the privacy of individuals, as no one can be singled out from the aggregated data.
Get data on epidemic incidence, typically from local organisations like national healthcare systems or, in case of emergency, from NGOs or dedicated emergency teams. This data should be aggregated on the same level of granularity than CDRs.
Knowing how many travelers go from one place to another, for how long, and the disease incidence at origin and destination, build an epidemiological model that can account for the way and speed of transmission of the particular disease.
With an import/export scoring model, map epidemic risk flows and flag areas that are at risk of becoming the new hotspots because of human travel.
On that base, prioritize and monitor public health measures, focusing on restraining mobility to and from hotspots. Mapping risk also allows launching prevention campaigns at the right places and setting up the necessary infrastructure on time. Eventually, the tool reduces public health risks and helps stem the epidemic.

That kind of application works in a variety of epidemiological contexts, including Zika, Ebola, Malaria, Influenza or Tuberculosis. No doubt the global boom of mobile data will proof extraordinarily helpful in fighting these fierce enemies….(More)”

5 Crowdsourced News Platforms Shaping The Future of Journalism and Reporting

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

Maria Krisette Capati at Crowdsourcing Week: “We are exposed to a myriad of news and updates worldwide. As the crowd becomes moreinvolved in providing information, adopting that ‘upload mindset’ coined by Will Merritt ofZooppa, access to all kinds of data is a few taps and clicks away….

Google News Lab – Better reporting and insightful storytelling

Last week, Google announced its own crowdsourced news platform dubbed News Lab as part of their efforts “to empower innovation at the intersection of technology and media.”

Scouting for real-time stories, updates, and breaking news is much easier and systematize for journalists worldwide. They can use Google’s tools for better reporting, data for insightful storytelling and programs to focus on the future of media, tackling this initiative in three ways.

“There’s a revolution in data journalism happening in newsrooms today, as more data sets and more tools for analysis are allowing journalists to create insights that were never before possible,” Google said.

Grasswire – first-hand information in real-time

The design looks bleak and simple, but the site itself is rich with content—first-hand information crowdsourced from Twitter users in real-time and verified. Austen Allred, co-founder of Grasswire was inspired to develop the platform after his “minor slipup” as the American Journalism Review (AJR) puts it, when he missed his train out of Shanghai that actually saved his life.

“The bullet train Allred was supposed to be on collided with another train in the Wenzhou area ofChina’s Zhejiang province,” AJR wrote. “Of the 1,630 passengers, 40 died, and another 210 were injured.” The accident happened in 2011. Unfortunately, the Chinese government made some cover upon the incident, which frustrated Allred in finding first-hand information.

After almost four years, Grasswire was launched, a website that collects real-time information from users for breaking news infused with crowdsourcing model afterward. “It’s since grown into a more complex interface, allowing users to curate selected news tweets by voting and verifying information with a fact-checking system,” AJR wrote, which made the verification of data open and systematized.

Rappler – Project Agos: a technology for disaster risk reduction

The Philippines is a favorite hub for typhoons. The aftermath of typhoon Haiyan was exceedingly disastrous. But the crowds were steadfast in uploading and sharing information and crowdsourcing became mainstream during the relief operations. Maria Ressa said that they had to educate netizens to use the appropriate hashtags for years (#nameoftyphoonPH, e.g. #YolandaPH) for typhoons to collect data on social media channels easily.

Education and preparation can mitigate the risks and save lives if we utilize the right technology and act accordingly. In her blog, After Haiyan: Crisis management and beyond, Maria wrote, “We need to educate not just the first responders and local government officials, but more importantly, the people in the path of the storms.” …

China’s CCDI app – Crowdsourcing political reports to crack down corruption practices

In China, if you want to mitigate or possible, eradicate corrupt practices, then there’s an app for that.China launched its own anti-corruption app called, Central Commission for Discipline InspectionWebsite App, allowing the public to upload text messages, photos and videos of Chinese officials’ any corrupt practices.

The platform was released by the government agency, Central Committee for Discipline Inspection.Nervous in case you’ll be tracked as a whistleblower? Interestingly, anyone can report anonymously.China Daily said, “the anti-corruption authorities received more than 1,000 public reports, and nearly70 percent were communicated via snapshots, text messages or videos uploaded,” since its released.Kenya has its own version, too, called Ushahidi using crowdmapping, and India’s I Paid a Bribe.

Newzulu – share news, publish and get paid

While journalists can get fresh insights from Google News Labs, the crowd can get real-time verified news from Grasswire, and CCDI is open for public, Newzulu crowdsourced news platforms doesn’t just invite the crowd to share news, they can also publish and get paid.

It’s “a community of over 150,000 professional and citizen journalists who share and break news to the world as it happens,” originally based in Sydney. Anyone can submit stories, photos, videos, and even stream live….(More)”

How Medical Crowdsourcing Empowers Patients & Doctors

Curated on August 5, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Rob Stretch at Rendia: “Whether you’re a solo practitioner in a rural area, or a patient who’s bounced from doctor to doctor with adifficult–to-diagnose condition, there are many reasons why you might seek out expert medical advice from a larger group. Fortunately, in 2016, seeking feedback from other physicians or getting a second opinion is as easy as going online.

“Medical crowdsourcing” sites and apps are gathering steam, from provider-only forums likeSERMOsolves and Figure 1, to patient-focused sites like CrowdMed. They share the same mission of empowering doctors and patients, reducing misdiagnosis, and improving medicine. Is crowdsourcing the future of medicine? Read on to find out more.

Fixing misdiagnosis

An estimated 10 percent to 20 percent of medical cases are misdiagnosed, even more than drug errors and surgery on the wrong patient or body part, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis. And diagnostic errors are the leading cause of malpractice litigation. Doctors often report that with many of their patient cases, they would benefit from the support and advice of their peers.

The photo-sharing app for health professionals, Figure 1, is filling that need. Since we reported on it last year, the app has reached 1 million users and added a direct-messaging feature. The app is geared towards verified medical professionals, and goes to great lengths to protect patient privacy in keeping with HIPAAlaws. According to co-founder and CEO Gregory Levey, an average of 10,000 unique users check in toFigure 1 every hour, and medical professionals and students in 190 countries currently use the app.

Using Figure 1 to crowdsource advice from the medical community has saved at least one life. EmilyNayar, a physician assistant in rural Oklahoma and a self-proclaimed “Figure 1 addict,” told Wired magazine that because of photos she’d seen on the app, she was able to correctly diagnose a patient with shingles meningitis. Another doctor had misdiagnosed him previously, and the wrong medication could have killed him.

Collective knowledge at zero cost

In addition to serving as “virtual colleagues” for isolated medical providers, crowdsourcing forums can pool knowledge from an unprecedented number of doctors in different specialties and even countries,and can do so very quickly.

When we first reported on SERMO, the company billed itself as a “virtual doctors’ lounge.” Now, the global social network with 600,000 verified, credentialed physician members has pivoted to medical crowdsourcing with SERMOsolves, one of its most popular features, according to CEO Peter Kirk.

“Crowdsourcing patient cases through SERMOsolves is an ideal way for physicians to gain valuable information from the collective knowledge of hundreds of physicians instantly,” he said in a press release.According to SERMO, 3,500 challenging patient cases were posted in 2014, viewed 700,000 times, and received 50,000 comments. Most posted cases received responses within 1.5 hours and were resolved within a day. “We have physicians from more than 96 specialties and subspecialties posting on the platform, working together to share their valuable insights at zero cost to the healthcare system.”

While one early user of SERMO wrote on KevinMD.com that he felt the site’s potential was overshadowed by the anonymous rants and complaining, other users have noted that the medical crowdsourcing site has,like Figure 1, directly benefitted patients.

In an article on PhysiciansPractice.com, Richard Armstrong, M.D., cites the example of a family physician in Canada who posted a case of a young girl with an E. coli infection. “Physicians from around the world immediately began to comment and the recommendations resulted in a positive outcome for the patient.This instance offered cross-border learning experiences for the participating doctors, not only regarding the specific medical issue but also about how things are managed in different health systems,” wrote Dr.Armstrong.

Patients get proactive

While patients have long turned to social media to (questionably) crowdsource their medical queries, there are now more reputable sources than Facebook.

Tech entrepreneur Jared Heyman launched the health startup CrowdMed in 2013 after his sister endured a “terrible, undiagnosed medical condition that could have killed her,” he told the Wall Street Journal. She saw about 20 doctors over three years, racking up six-figure medical bills. The NIH Undiagnosed DiseaseProgram finally gave her a diagnosis: fragile X-associated primary ovarian insufficiency, a rare disease that affects just 1 in 15,000 women. A hormone patch resolved her debilitating symptoms….(More)”

How Technology Can Restore Our Trust in Democracy

Curated on August 5, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Cenk Sidar in Foreign Policy: “The travails of the Arab Spring, the rise of the Islamic State, and the upsurge of right-wing populism throughout the countries of West all demonstrate a rising frustration with the liberal democratic order in the years since the 2008 financial crisis. There is a growing intellectual consensus that the world is sailing into uncharted territory: a realm marked by authoritarianism, shallow populism, and extremism.

One way to overcome this global resentment is to use the best tools we have to build a more inclusive and direct democracy. Could new technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), data analytics, crowdsourcing, and Blockchain help to restore meaningful dialogue and win back people’s hearts and minds?

Underpinning our unsettling current environment is an irony: Thanks to modern communication technology, the world is more connected than ever — but average people feel more disconnected. In the United States, polls show that trust in government is at a 50-year low. Frustrated Trump supporters and the Britons who voted for Brexit both have a sense of having “lost out” as the global elite consolidates its power and becomes less responsive to the rest of society. This is not an irrational belief: Branko Milanovic, a leading inequality scholar, has found that people in the lower and middle parts of rich countries’ income distributions have been the losers of the last 15 years of globalization.

The same 15 years have also brought astounding advances in technology, from the rise of the Internet to the growing ubiquity of smartphones. And Western society has, to some extent, struggled to find its bearings amid this transition. Militant groups seduce young people through social media. The Internet enables consumers to choose only the news that matches their preconceived beliefs, offering a bottomless well of partisan fury and conspiracy theories. Cable news airing 24/7 keeps viewers in a state of agitation. In short, communication technologies that are meant to bring us together end up dividing us instead (and not least because our politicians have chosen to game these tools for their own advantage).

It is time to make technology part of the solution. More urgently than ever, leaders, innovators, and activists need to open up the political marketplace to allow technology to realize its potential for enabling direct citizen participation. This is an ideal way to restore trust in the democratic process.

As the London School of Economics’ Mary Kaldor put it recently: “The task of global governance has to be reconceptualized to make it possible for citizens to influence the decisions that affect their lives — to reclaim substantive democracy.” One notable exception to the technological disconnect has been fundraising, as candidates have tapped into the Internet to enable millions of average voters to donate small sums. With the right vision, however, technological innovation in politics could go well beyond asking people for money….(More)”

Through the looking glass: Harnessing big data to respond to violent extremism

Curated on August 5, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Michele Piercey, Carolyn Forbes, and Hasan Davulcu at Devex:”People think and say all sorts of things that they would never actually do. One of the biggest challenges in countering violent extremism is not only figuring out which people hold radical views, but who is most likely to join and act on behalf of violent extremist organizations. Determining who is likely to become violent is key to designing and evaluating more targeted interventions, but it has proven to be extremely difficult.

There are few recognized tools for assessing perceptions and beliefs, such as whether community sentiment about violent extremist organizations is more or less favorable, or which narratives and counternarratives resonate with vulnerable populations.

Program designers and monitoring and evaluation staff often rely on perception surveying to assess attitudinal changes that CVE programs try to achieve, but there are limitations to this method. Security and logistical challenges to collecting perception data in a conflict-affected community can make it difficult to get a representative sample, while ensuring the safety of enumerators and respondents. And given the sensitivity of the subject matter, respondents may be reluctant to express their actual beliefs to an outsider (that is, social desirability bias can affect data reliability).

The rise of smartphone technology and social media uptake among the burgeoning youth populations of many conflict-affected countries presents a new opportunity to understand what people believe from a safer distance, lessening the associated risks and data defects. Seeing an opportunity in the growing mass of online public data, the marketing industry has pioneered tools to “scrape” and aggregate the data to help companies paint a clearer picture of consumer behavior and perceptions of brands and products.

These developments present a critical question for CVE programs: Could similar tools be developed that would analyze online public data to identify who is being influenced by which extremist narratives and influences, learn which messages go viral, and distinguish groups and individuals who simply hold radical views from those who support or carry out violence?

Using data to track radicalization

Seeking to answer this question, researchers at Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, Cornell University’s Social Dynamics Laboratory, and Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational systems have been innovating a wide variety of data analytics tools. ASU’s LookingGlass tool, for example, maps networks of perception, belief, and influence online. ASU and Chemonics International are now piloting the tool on a CVE program in Libya.

Drawn from the humanities and social and computational sciences, LookingGlass retrieves, categorizes, and analyzes vast amounts of data from across the internet to map the spread of extremist and counter-extremist influence online. The tool displays what people think about their political situation, governments and extremist groups, and tracks changes in these perceptions over time and in response to events. It also lets users visualize how groups emerge, interact, coalesce, and fragment in relation to emerging issues and events and evaluates “information cascades” to assess what causes extremist messages to go viral on social media and what causes them to die out.

By assessing the relative influence and expressed beliefs of diverse groups over time and in critical locations, LookingGlass represents an advanced capability for providing real-time contextual information about the ideological drivers of violent and counter-violent extremist movements online. Click here to view a larger version.

For CVE planners, LookingGlass can map social movements in relation to specific countries and regions. Indonesia, for example, has been the site of numerous violent movements and events. A relatively young democracy, the country’s complex political environment encompasses numerous groups seeking radical change across a wide spectrum of social and political issues….(More)”

Gamification of physical activity: Beat the Street and Pokémon Go

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

Katherine Knight at NESTA: “Since launching in the US on 6 July, Pokémon Go has become a global phenomenon with millions of downloads and more active users than Twitter. The game has been attributed with improving mental health, establishing augmented reality as mainstream and boosting traffic to local businesses.

Pokémon Go has also caused a massive spike in physical activity similar to that seen following New Year’s Resolutions. While the game’s main intention was not to transform the health of its players, it has clearly demonstrated the powerful potential of gamification as a means to get people active.

Gamified design has already been recognised by leading organisations in transport, nature, and the voluntary sector as a way to engage new audiences and change behaviour, but only recently have we come to understand how gamification can be used to dramatically increase physical activity and improve public health.

Changing habitual behaviours such as inactivity or driving to school and work has proven difficult via traditional health initiatives. Gamification provides new opportunities move people towards a more active lifestyle by providing positive incentives and rewards for players who get moving. In the case of Pokémon GO, the incentive to catch and collect as many Pokémon as possible is enough to nudge players to go outside and get active.

Gamification offers advantages over other types of physical activity campaigns due to its ability to bypass the perceived barriers to becoming active. Gamified design can deliver health through stealth by encouraging people to play a fun, free game rather than take part in a fitness scheme.

The impact of gamifying health can be clearly seen in Intelligent Health’s Beat the Street initiative which transforms communities into playable cities. At the heart of Beat the Street is a six-week game where residents are encouraged to explore their local area by tapping cards and fobs against special sensors – Beat Boxes – distributed across their town. Players are rewarded with points, can create teams and earn prizes depending on how far they run, walk or cycle….(More)”.

Hype Cycle for Digital Government Technology, 2016

Curated on July 28, 2016October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Gartner: “This Hype Cycle helps government agencies eager to embrace digital transformation by highlighting critical technologies that can be adopted quickly.

What You Need to Know

Austerity continues to impact governments, and the requirement to transform is substantial. Years of cuts have left IT departments struggling to operate bimodally, focused on maintaining operations, but not delivering innovation. Effective and efficient mission delivery necessitates more technology, not less, so senior organizational leaders look outside the IT department to source innovation and additional capacity. Digital government demands improvements in the value chain, using end-to-end frictionless transactions, as the outcome of technical and process improvement. CIOs’ focus must move from infrastructure and its costs toward quickly delivering true mission outcome improvements.

This Hype Cycle highlights technologies that government CIOs should be implementing or planning for to ensure the organization obtains the necessary, impactful capabilities to deliver the digital government agenda quickly. To maintain their own relevance, government CIOs must recognize their organizations’ need for innovation and be mindful of the top trends and technologies disrupting their organizations.

The Hype Cycle

This Hype Cycle addresses all geographies and tiers of government tackling the opportunities presented by digital disruptions. The technologies herein support digital government and the global trends identified in“The Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for Government in 2016.” These technologies align to one or more of the trends and offer a mix of benefits, from increased effectiveness and efficiency, to improved security and enhanced customer interaction. Our intention is to draw attention to those technologies that map directly to these trends, and their inclusion is explained in the section “Off the Hype Cycle.”

Slower economic growth, higher debt, rising citizen expectations and an aging population demand innovative delivery of citizen-facing services, so the ROI to support investment in these technologies must be measured in more-effective outcomes. Agencies crave new solutions and capabilities to help ease the pressure on them, and they think that, if not delivered by their incumbent IT provider, they will increasingly source directly.

The technologies selected provide practical and pragmatic choices for those CIOs who need to deliver strategic solutions to enhance organizational capabilities. Use Cloud Office and Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) to deliver a better digital workplace experience, or make better use of open data by using data quality tools, API marketplaces, and geospatial and location intelligence tools. We also offer a glimpse of the future to provide a better understanding of how smart machines, such as Smart Robots or Cognitive Expert Advisors, will impact your agency. In either case, using the technologies highlighted here and using Strategic Technology Maps to assess what priority and when you might be able to move will assist the business in knowing when functionality will become available. This knowledge may inspire the use of commercially available capabilities and forgo the desire for customers to self-source solutions.

Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Digital Government, 2016

Source: Gartner (July 2016)

The Priority Matrix

The Priority Matrix shows those technologies and the time frame by which they are expected to mature and deliver benefits. Transformational and high benefits accrue immediately and run forward, delivering across the next decade. It is no surprise seeing that immediate benefits accrue to tactical investment technologies, such as Social Media Engagement Applications. They allow government agencies to go beyond monitoring citizen satisfaction by giving them a level of analysis and allowing them to engage in an informed two-way debate. Thus, multichannel citizen engagement can become a measured reality, taking government out to where the citizens communicate. This is supported by customer engagement hubs that allow personalized, contextual engagement with customers across all interaction channels, regardless of medium.

Smart Machines and the Internet of Things (IoT) are also featured this year, with real examples of technologies to help smart cities progress, with the inclusion of smart transportation solutions and an IOT platform that can help government agencies deal with the plethora of data sources that will undoubtedly emerge. It must be noted, these technologies operate as digital platforms, per se. “Implementing once, serving many” must become a mantra for digital government if it is to succeed at being both effective and efficient.

Figure 2. Priority Matrix for Digital Government, 2016

Source: Gartner (July 2016)…(More).”

Technology Is Monitoring the Urban Landscape

Curated on July 26, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Quentin Hardy in the New York Times: “Big City is watching you.

It will do it with camera-equipped drones that inspect municipal powerlines and robotic cars that know where people go. Sensor-laden streetlights will change brightness based on danger levels. Technologists and urban planners are working on a major transformation of urban landscapes over the next few decades.

Much of it involves the close monitoring of things and people, thanks to digital technology. To the extent that this makes people’s lives easier, the planners say, they will probably like it. But troubling and knotty questions of privacy and control remain.

A White House report published in February identified advances in transportation, energy and manufacturing, among other developments, that will bring on what it termed “a new era of change.”

Much of the change will also come from the private sector, which is moving faster to reach city dwellers, and is more skilled in collecting and responding to data. That is leading cities everywhere to work more closely than ever with private companies, which may have different priorities than the government.

One of the biggest changes that will hit a digitally aware city, it is widely agreed, is the seemingly prosaic issue of parking. Space given to parking is expected to shrink by half or more, as self-driving cars and drone deliveries lead an overall shift in connected urban transport. That will change or eliminate acres of urban space occupied by raised and underground parking structures.

Shared vehicles are not parked as much, and with more automation, they will know where parking spaces are available, eliminating the need to drive in search of a space.

“Office complexes won’t need parking lots with twice the footprint of their buildings,” said Sebastian Thrun, who led Google’s self-driving car project in its early days and now runs Udacity, an online learning company. “Whenwe started on self-driving cars, we talked all the time about cutting the number of cars in a city by a factor of three,” or a two-thirds reduction.

In addition, police, fire, and even library services will seek greater responsiveness by tracking their own assets, and partly by looking at things like social media. Later, technologies like three-dimensional printing, new materials and robotic construction and demolition will be able to reshape skylines in a matter of weeks.

At least that is the plan. So much change afoot creates confusion….

The new techno-optimism is focused on big data and artificial intelligence.“Futurists used to think everyone would have their own plane,” said ErickGuerra, a professor of city and regional planning at the University ofPennsylvania. “We never have a good understanding of how things will actually turn out.”

He recently surveyed the 25 largest metropolitan planning organizations in the country and found that almost none have solid plans for modernizing their infrastructure. That may be the right way to approach the challenges of cities full of robots, but so far most clues are coming from companies that also sell the technology.

“There’s a great deal of uncertainty, and a competition to show they’re low on regulation,” Mr. Guerra said. “There is too much potential money for new technology to be regulated out.”

The big tech companies say they are not interested in imposing the sweeping “smart city” projects they used to push, in part because things are changing too quickly. But they still want to build big, and they view digital surveillance as an essential component…(More)”

79 countries

Streetlight Effect

(stritlaɪt ɪˈfɛkt)

Subscribe to curated findings and actionable knowledge
from The Living Library, delivered to your inbox every Friday

Blockchain and Identity