Can An Online Game Help Create A Better Test For TB?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Esther Landhuis at NPR: “Though it’s the world’s top infectious killer, tuberculosis is surprisingly tricky to diagnose. Scientists think that video gamers can help them create a better diagnostic test.

An online puzzle released Monday will see whether the researchers are right. Players of a Web-based game called EteRNA will try to design a sensor molecule that could potentially make diagnosing TB as easy as taking a home pregnancy test. The TB puzzle marks the launch of “EteRNA Medicine.”

The idea of rallying gamers to fight TB arose as two young Stanford University professors chatted over dinner at a conference last May. Rhiju Das, a biochemist who helped create EteRNA, told bioinformatician Purvesh Khatri about the game, which challenges nonexperts to design RNA molecules that fold into target shapes.

RNA molecules play key roles in biology and disease. Some brain disorders can be traced to problems with RNA folding. Viruses such as H1N1 flu and HIV depend on RNA elements to replicate and infect cells.

Das wants to “fight fire with fire” — that is, to disrupt the RNA involved in a disease or virus by crafting new tools that are themselves made of RNA molecules. EteRNA players learn RNA design principles with each puzzle they solve.

Khatri was intrigued by the notion of engaging the public to solve problems. His lab develops novel diagnostics using publicly available data sets. The team had just published a paper on a set of genes that could help diagnose sepsis and had other papers under review on influenza and TB.

In an “Aha!” moment during their dinner chat, Khatri says, he and Das realized “how awesome it would be to sequentially merge our two approaches — to use public data to find a diagnostic marker for a disease, and then use the public’s help to develop the test.”

TB seemed opportune as it has a simple diagnostic signature — a set of three human genes that turn up or down predictably after TB infection. When checked across gene data on thousands of blood samples from 14 groups of people around the globe, the behavior of the three-gene set readily identified people with active TB, distinguishing them from individuals who had latent TB or other diseases.

Those findings, published in February, have gotten serious attention — not only from curious patients and doctors but also from humanitarian groups eager to help bring a better TB test to market. It can currently take several tests to tell whether a person has active TB, including a chest X-ray and sputum test. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has started sending data to help the Stanford team validate a test based on the newly identified TB gene signature, says study leader Khatri, who works at the university’s Center for Biomedical Informatics Research….(More)”

The Evolution of Wikipedia’s Norm Network

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bradi Heaberlin and Simon DeDeo at Future Internet: “Social norms have traditionally been difficult to quantify. In any particular society, their sheer number and complex interdependencies often limit a system-level analysis. One exception is that of the network of norms that sustain the online Wikipedia community. We study the fifteen-year evolution of this network using the interconnected set of pages that establish, describe, and interpret the community’s norms. Despite Wikipedia’s reputation for ad hocgovernance, we find that its normative evolution is highly conservative. The earliest users create norms that both dominate the network and persist over time. These core norms govern both content and interpersonal interactions using abstract principles such as neutrality, verifiability, and assume good faith. As the network grows, norm neighborhoods decouple topologically from each other, while increasing in semantic coherence. Taken together, these results suggest that the evolution of Wikipedia’s norm network is akin to bureaucratic systems that predate the information age….(More)”

Juries as Problem Solving Institutions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Series of interviews on Collective Problem Solving by Henry Farrell: Over the last two years, a group of scholars from disciplines including political science, political theory, cognitive psychology, information science, statistics and computer science have met under the auspices of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance. The goal of these meetings has been to bring the insights of different disciplines to bear on fundamental problems of collective problem solving. How do we best solve collective problems? How should we study and think about collective intelligence? How can we apply insights to real world problems? A wide body of work leads us to believe that complex problems are most likely to be solved when people with different viewpoints and sets of skills come together. This means that we can expect that the science of collective problem solving too will be improved when people from diverse disciplinary perspectives work together to generate new insights on shared problems.

Political theorists are beginning to think in different ways about institutions such as juries. Here, the crucial insights will involve how these institutions can address the traditional concerns of political theory, such as justice and recognition, while also solving the complex problem of figuring out how best to resolve disputes, and establishing the guilt or innocence of parties in criminal cases.

Melissa Schwartzberg is an associate professor of political science at New York University, working on the political theory of democratic decision making. I asked her a series of questions about the jury as a problem-solving institution.
…

Henry: Are there any general ways for figuring out the kinds of issues that juries (based on random selection of citizens and some voting rule) are good at deciding on, and the issues that they might have problems with?

Melissa: This is a difficult question, in part because we don’t have unmediated access to the “true state of the world”: our evidence about jury competence essentially derives from the correlation of jury verdicts with what the judge would have rendered, but obviously that doesn’t mean that the judge was correct. One way around the question is to ask instead what, historically, have been the reasons why we would wish to assign judgment to laypersons: what the “jury of one’s peers” signifies. Placing a body of ordinary citizens between the state and the accused serves an important protective device, so the use of the jury is quite clearly not all about judgment. But there is a long history of thinking that juries have special access to local knowledge – the established norms, practices, and expectations of a community, but in early periods knowledge of the parties and the alleged crime – that helps to shed light on why we still think “vicinage” is important…..(More)”

The era of development mutants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Guilo Quaggiotto at Nesta: “If you were looking for the cutting edge of the development sector, where would you go these days? You would probably look at startups like Premise who have predicted food trends 25 days faster than national statistics in Brazil, or GiveDirectly who are pushing the boundaries on evidence – from RCTs to new ways of mapping poverty – to fast track the adoption of cash transfers.

Or perhaps you might draw your attention to PetaJakarta who are experimenting with new responses to crises by harnessing human sensor networks. You might be tempted to consider Airbnb’s Disaster Response programme as an indicator of an emerging alternative infrastructure for disaster response (and perhaps raising questions about the political economy of this all).

And could Bitnation’s Refugee Emergency programme in response to the European refugee crisis be the possible precursor of future solutions for transnational issues – among the development sector’s hardest challenges? Are the business models of One Acre Fund, which provides services for smallholder farmers, or Floodtags, which analyses citizen data during floods for water and disaster managers, an indicator of future pathways to scale – that elusive development unicorn?

If you want to look at the future of procuring solutions for the development sector, should you be looking at initiatives like Citymart, which works with municipalities across the world to rethink traditional procurement and unleash the expertise and innovation capabilities of their citizens? By the same token, projects like Pathogen Box, Poverty Stoplight or Patient Innovation point to a brave new world where lead-user innovation and harnessing ‘sticky’ local knowledge becomes the norm, rather than the exception. You would also be forgiven for thinking that social movements across the world are the place to look for signs of future mechanisms for harnessing collective intelligence – Kawal Pamilu’s “citizen experts” self-organising around the Indonesian elections in 2014 is a textbook case study in this department.

The list could go on and on: welcome to the era of development mutants. While established players in the development sector are engrossed in soul-searching and their fitness for purpose is being scrutinised from all quarters, a whole new set of players is emerging, unfettered by legacy and borrowing from a variety of different disciplines. They point to a potentially different future – indeed, many potentially different futures – for the sector…..

But what if we wanted to invert this paradigm? How could we move from denial to fruitful collaboration with the ‘edgeryders’ of the development sector and accelerate its transformation?

Adopting new programming principles

Based on our experience working with development organisations, we believe that partnering with the mutants involves two types of shifts for traditional players: at the programmatic and the operational level. At the programmatic level, our work on the ground led us to articulate the following emerging principles:

  1. Mapping what people have, not what they need: even though approaches like jugaad and positive deviance have been around for a long time, unfortunately the default starting point for many development projects is still mapping needs, not assets. Inverting this paradigm allows for potentially disruptive project design and partnerships to emerge. (Signs of the future: Patient Innovation, Edgeryders, Community Mirror, Premise)

  2. Getting ready for multiple futures: When distributed across an organisation and not limited to a centralised function, the discipline of scanning the horizon for emergent solutions that contradict the dominant paradigm can help move beyond the denial phase and develop new interfaces to collaborate with the mutants. Here the link between analysis (to understand not only what is probable, but also what is possible) and action is critical – otherwise this remains purely an academic exercise. (Signs of the future: OpenCare, Improstuctures, Seeds of Good Anthropocene, Museum of the Future)

  3. Running multiple parallel experiments: According to Dave Snowden, in order to intervene in a complex system “you need multiple parallel experiments and they should be based on different and competing theories/hypotheses”. Unfortunately, many development projects are still based on linear narratives and assumptions such as “if only we run an awareness raising campaign citizens will change their behaviour”. Turning linear narratives into hypotheses to be tested (without becoming religious on a specific approach) opens up the possibility to explore the solution landscape and collaborate with non-obvious partners that bring new approaches to the table. (Signs of the future: Chukua Hakua, GiveDirectly, Finnish PM’s Office of Experiments, Ideas42, Cognitive Edge)

  4. Embracing obliquity: A deep, granular understanding of local assets and dynamics along with system mapping (see point 5 below) and pairing behavioural experts with development practitioners can help identify entry points for exploring new types of intervention based on obliquity principles. Mutants are often faster in adopting this approach and partnering with them is a way to bypass organisational inertia and explore nonlinear interventions. (Signs of the future: Sardex, social prescriptions, forensic architecture)

  5. From projects to systems: development organisations genuinely interested in developing new partnerships need to make the shift from the project logic to system investments. This involves, among other things, shifting the focus from providing solutions to helping every actor in the system to develop a higher level of consciousness about the issues they are facing and to take better decisions over time. It also entails partnering with mutants to explore entirely new financial mechanisms. (Signs of the future: Lankelly Chase, Indonesia waste banks, Dark Matter Labs)

Adopting new interfaces for working with the mutants

Harvard Business School professor Carliss Baldwin argued that most bureaucracies these days have a ‘non-contractible’ problem: they don’t know where smart people are, or how to evaluate how good they are. Most importantly, most smart people don’t want to work for them because they find them either too callous, unrewarding or slow (or a combination of all of these)….(More)”

Wiki-fishing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “….Mr Rhoads is a member of a network started by the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association (ALFA), which aims to do something about this and to reduce by-catch of sensitive species such as rockfish at the same time. Network fishermen, who numbered only 20 at the project’s start, agreed to share data on where and what they were catching in order to create maps that highlighted areas of high by-catch. Within two years they had reduced accidental rockfish harvest by as much as 20%.

The rockfish mapping project expanded to create detailed maps of the sea floor, pooling data gathered by transducers fixed to the bottoms of boats. By combining thousands of data points as vessels traverse the fishing grounds, these “wikimaps”—created and updated through crowdsourcing—show gravel beds where bottom-dwelling halibut are likely to linger, craggy terrain where rockfish tend to lurk, and outcrops that could snag gear.

Public charts are imprecise, and equipment with the capability to sense this level of detail could cost a fisherman more than $70,000. Skippers join ALFA for as little as $250, invest a couple of thousand dollars in computers and software and enter into an agreement to turn over fishing data and not to share the information outside the network, which now includes 85 fishermen.

Skippers say the project makes them more efficient, better able to find the sort of fish they want and avoid squandering time on lost or tangled gear. It also means fewer hooks in the water and fewer hours at sea to catch the same amount of fish….(More)”

The Wisdom of Networks – and the Lessons of Wikipedia

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Philip Reitinger at the Analogies Project: “Douglas Merrill said “All of us are smarter than any of us.”  This motto of crowdsourcing – looking to the information that can arise from the combined observation by and intelligence of many – is also the prescription for a more secure cyber future. Crowdsourcing security among machines – rather than people – is our best path forward.

Attackers have the advantage online for many reasons, including the ability to leverage a simple error into a significant compromise, to scale attacks more readily than defenses can scale, and to attack at a distance.  While the maxim that defenders have to be right all the time, while attackers only have to be right once, is not literally true, it conveys the dilemma of defenders.   The connectivity of our devices and agents is inexorably increasing, creating more targets for attack.  The complexity of the software we use and the network we must defend is also increasing, making an attack on the individual target or the network easier.  And the criticality of our connected systems to our lives is also growing and will continue to grow.  Together, this means that we live in a world of steadily increasing risk.

In this environment, the good guys and gals have one significant but counter-intuitive advantage:  the size of the network being defended. The soaring prevalence of smart devices is a risk only until it is not, until we combine the abilities of these devices to observe, to induce, and to act to defend the network itself.  The cyber ecosystem is the greatest sensor network imaginable, and the data generated by its sensors can drive collective intelligence and collective action to stem threats and isolate infections.  The ability of the network components to defend the network may make the future of cybersecurity on the Internet look very much like Wikipedia – one of the best known examples of crowdsourcing – with some obvious failures, but if of importance, generally quickly corrected….


What is necessary to enable the crowdsourcing of defense among network components?  A few years ago, while I was at the Department of Homeland Security, it published a paper entitled “Enabling Distributed Security in Cyberspace: Building a Healthy and Resilient Cyber Ecosystem with Automated Collective Action.” This paper posits three requirements:  

  • Automation so the network can act at Internet speed;
  • Interoperability so the barriers to effective collective (network or “crowd”) action are those we impose by policy, as opposed to those imposed on us by technology or process; and
  • Authentication to enhance the decision-making and action of the network against attacks.

It has been five years since the paper was published, and I still think these are the key elements of a more secure Internet future.  Until we enable the network to defend itself, using its own wisdom of crowds (of agents), offense wins.  People should do what people do best, adjust how the network defends itself, and take action when necessary based on intuition, rather than responding to alerts.  So when you think about future Internet security problems, think about Stephen Colbert and Wikipedia….(More)”

Next Generation Crowdsourcing for Collective Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by John Prpić : “New techniques leveraging IT-mediated crowds such as Crowdsensing, Situated Crowdsourcing, Spatial Crowdsourcing, and Wearables Crowdsourcing have now materially emerged. These techniques, here termed next generation Crowdsourcing, serve to extend Crowdsourcing efforts beyond the heretofore dominant desktop computing paradigm. Employing new configurations of hardware, software, and people, these techniques represent new forms of organization for IT-mediated crowds. However, it is not known how these new techniques change the processes and outcomes of IT-mediated crowds for Collective Intelligence purposes? The aim of this exploratory work is to begin to answer this question. The work ensues by outlining the relevant findings of the first generation Crowdsourcing paradigm, before reviewing the emerging literature pertaining to the new generation of Crowdsourcing techniques. Premised on this review, a collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive typology is formed, organizing the next generation Crowdsourcing techniques along two salient dimensions common to all first generation Crowdsourcing techniques. As a result, this work situates the next generation Crowdsourcing techniques within the extant Crowdsourcing literature, and identifies new research avenues stemming directly from the analysis….(More)”

A new data viz tool shows what stories are being undercovered in countries around the world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jospeh Lichterman at NiemanLab: “It’s a common lament: Though the Internet provides us access to a nearly unlimited number of sources for news, most of us rarely venture beyond the same few sources or topics. And as news consumption shifts to our phones, people are using even fewer sources: On average, consumers access 1.52 trusted news sources on their phones, according to the 2015 Reuters Digital News Report, which studied news consumption across several countries.

To try and diversify people’s perspectives on the news, Jigsaw — the techincubator, formerly known as Google Ideas, that’s run by Google’s parentcompany Alphabet — this week launched Unfiltered.News, an experimentalsite that uses Google News data to show users what topics are beingunderreported or are popular in regions around the world.

Screen Shot 2016-03-18 at 11.45.09 AM

Unfiltered.News’ main data visualization shows which topics are most reported in countries around the world. A column on the right side of the page highlights stories that are being reported widely elsewhere in the world, but aren’t in the top 100 stories on Google News in the selected country. In the United States yesterday, five of the top 10 underreported topics, unsurprisingly, dealt with soccer. In China, Barack Obama was the most undercovered topic….(More)”

Responsible Data reflection stories

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Responsible Data Forum: “Through the various Responsible Data Forum events over the past couple of years, we’ve heard many anecdotes of responsible data challenges faced by people or organizations. These include potentially harmful data management practices, situations where people have experienced gut feelings that there is potential for harm, or workarounds that people have created to avoid those situations.

But we feel that trading in these “war stories” isn’t the most useful way for us to learn from these experiences as acommunity. Instead, we have worked with our communities to build a set of Reflection Stories: a structured, well-researched knowledge base on the unforeseen challenges and (sometimes) negative consequences of usingtechnology and data for social change.

We hope that this can offer opportunities for reflection and learning, as well as helping to develop innovativestrategies for engaging with technology and data in new and responsible ways….

What we learned from the stories

New spaces, new challenges

Moving into new digital spaces is bringing new challenges, and social media is one such space where these challengesare proving very difficult to navigate. This seems to stem from a number of key points:

  • organisations with low levels of technical literacy and experience in tech- or data-driven projects, deciding toengage suddenly with a certain tool or technology without realising what this entails. For some, this seems to stemfrom funders being more willing to support ‘innovative’ tech projects.
  • organisations wishing to engage more with social media while not being aware of more nuanced understandingsof public/private spaces online, and how different communities engage with social media. (see story #2)
    unpredictability and different levels of visibility: due to how privacy settings on Twitter are currently set, visibilityof users can be increased hugely by the actions of others – and once that happens, a user actually has very littleagency to change or reverse that. Sadly, being more visible on, for example, Twitter disproportionately affectswomen and minority groups in a negative way – so while ‘signal boosting’ to raise someone’s profile might be well-meant, the consequences are hard to predict, and almost impossible to reverse manually. (see story #4)
  • consent: related to the above point, “giving consent” can mean many different things when it comes to digitalspaces, especially if the person in question has little experience or understanding of using the technology inquestion (see stories #4 and #5).

Grey areas of responsible data

In almost all of the cases we looked at, very few decisions were concretely “right” or “wrong”. There are many, manygrey areas here, which need to be addressed on a case by case basis. In some cases, people involved really did thinkthrough their actions, and approached their problems thoughtfully and responsibly – but consequences they had notimagined, happened (see story #8).

Additionally, given the quickly moving nature of the space, challenges can arise that simply would not have beenpossible at the start.

….Despite the very varying settings of the stories collected, the shared mitigation strategies indicate that there areindeed a few key principles that can be kept in mind throughout the development of a new tech- or data-drivenproject.

The most stark of these – and one key aspect that is underlying many of these challenges – is a fundamental lack of technical literacy among advocacy organisations. This affects the way they interact with technical partners, the decisions they make around the project, the level to which they can have meaningful input, and more. Perhaps more crucially, it also affects the ability to know what to ask for help about – ie, to ‘know the unknowns’.

Building an organisation’s technical literacy might not mean being able to answer all technical questions in-house, but rather knowing what to ask and what to expect in an answer, from others. For advocacy organisations who don’t (yet)have this, it becomes all too easy to outsource not just the actual technical work but the contextual decisions too, which should be a collaborative process, benefiting from both sets of expertise.

There seems to be a lot of scope to expand this set of stories both in terms of collecting more from other advocacy organisations, and into other sectors, too. Ultimately, we hope that sharing our collective intelligence around lessonslearned from responsible data challenges faced in projects, will contribute to a greater understanding for all of us….Read all the stories here

Platform for Mumbai’s slum entrepreneurs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “We recently saw an initiative that empowered startup talent in a Finnish refugee camp, and now Design Museum Dharavi is a mobile museum that will provide a platform for makers in the Mumbai neighborhood.

The initiative is a brainchild of artist Jorge Rubio and Creative Industries Fund NL. Taking the model of a pop-up, it will stop at various locations throughout the neighborhood. Despite being an ‘informal settlement’, Dharavi is famed for producing very little waste due to a culture of recycling and repurposing. The mobile museum will showcase local makers, enable them to connect with potential clients and run workshops, ultimately elevating the global social perception towards life in the so-called ‘slums’. Home to over a million people, Dharavi has the additional tourism pull from appearing on the film Slumdog Millionaire…..(More)”