Article by Shweta Suran et al: “Digital disruptions caused by use of technologies like social media arguably present a formidable challenge to democratic values and in-turn to Collective Intelligence (CI or “wisdom-of-crowd”), which the former is an emblem of. These challenges such as misinformation, partisan bias, polarization, and rising mistrust in institutions (incl. mainstream media), present a new threat to collectives both online and offline—amplifying the risk of turning “wise” crowds “mad”, and rendering their actions counterproductive. Considering the increasingly important role crowds play in solving today’s socio-political, technological, and economical issues, and in shaping our future, we identify time-critical challenges and potential solutions that require urgent attention if future CI systems are to sustain their indispensable role as global deliberation instruments….(More)”.
Open Science: the Very Idea
Book by Frank Miedema: “This open access book provides a broad context for the understanding of current problems of science and of the different movements aiming to improve the societal impact of science and research.
The author offers insights with regard to ideas, old and new, about science, and their historical origins in philosophy and sociology of science, which is of interest to a broad readership. The book shows that scientifically grounded knowledge is required and helpful in understanding intellectual and political positions in various discussions on the grand challenges of our time and how science makes impact on society. The book reveals why interventions that look good or even obvious, are often met with resistance and are hard to realize in practice.
Based on a thorough analysis, as well as personal experiences in aids research, university administration and as a science observer, the author provides – while being totally open regarding science’s limitations- a realistic narrative about how research is conducted, and how reliable ‘objective’ knowledge is produced. His idea of science, which draws heavily on American pragmatism, fits in with the global Open Science movement. It is argued that Open Science is a truly and historically unique movement in that it translates the analysis of the problems of science into major institutional actions of system change in order to improve academic culture and the impact of science, engaging all actors in the field of science and academia…(More)”.
Quantifying collective intelligence in human groups
Paper by Christoph Riedl et al: “Collective intelligence (CI) is critical to solving many scientific, business, and other problems, but groups often fail to achieve it. Here, we analyze data on group performance from 22 studies, including 5,279 individuals in 1,356 groups. Our results support the conclusion that a robust CI factor characterizes a group’s ability to work together across a diverse set of tasks. We further show that CI is predicted by the proportion of women in the group, mediated by average social perceptiveness of group members, and that it predicts performance on various out-of-sample criterion tasks. We also find that, overall, group collaboration process is more important in predicting CI than the skill of individual members….(More)”.
Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science
Paper by Johan S. G. Chu and James A. Evans: “The size of scientific fields may impede the rise of new ideas. Examining 1.8 billion citations among 90 million papers across 241 subjects, we find a deluge of papers does not lead to turnover of central ideas in a field, but rather to ossification of canon. Scholars in fields where many papers are published annually face difficulty getting published, read, and cited unless their work references already widely cited articles. New papers containing potentially important contributions cannot garner field-wide attention through gradual processes of diffusion. These findings suggest fundamental progress may be stymied if quantitative growth of scientific endeavors—in number of scientists, institutes, and papers—is not balanced by structures fostering disruptive scholarship and focusing attention on novel ideas…(More)”.
Empowering Local Communities Using Artificial Intelligence
Paper by Yen-Chia Hsu et al: “Many powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have been engineered with the goals of high performance and accuracy. Recently, AI algorithms have been integrated into diverse and real-world applications. It has become an important topic to explore the impact of AI on society from a people-centered perspective. Previous works in citizen science have identified methods of using AI to engage the public in research, such as sustaining participation, verifying data quality, classifying and labeling objects, predicting user interests, and explaining data patterns. These works investigated the challenges regarding how scientists design AI systems for citizens to participate in research projects at a large geographic scale in a generalizable way, such as building applications for citizens globally to participate in completing tasks. In contrast, we are interested in another area that receives significantly less attention: how scientists co-design AI systems “with” local communities to influence a particular geographical region, such as community-based participatory projects. Specifically, this article discusses the challenges of applying AI in Community Citizen Science, a framework to create social impact through community empowerment at an intensely place-based local scale. We provide insights in this under-explored area of focus to connect scientific research closely to social issues and citizen needs…(More)”.
Wiki (POCC) Authorship: The Case for An Inclusive Copyright
Paper by Sunimal Mendis: “Public open collaborative creation (POCC) constitutes an innovative form of collaborative authorship that is emerging within the digital humanities. At present, the use of the POCC (Wiki) model can be observed in many online creation projects the best known examples being Wikipedia and free-open source software (FOSS). This paper presents the POCC model as a new archetype of authorship that is founded on a creation ideology that is collective and inclusive. It posits that the POCC authorship model challenges the existing individualistic conception of authorship in exclusivity-based copyright law. Based on a comparative survey of the copyright law frameworks on collaborative authorship in France, the UK and the US, the paper demonstrates the inability of the existing framework of exclusivity-based copyright law (including copyleft licenses which are based on exclusive copyright) to give adequate legal expression to the relationships between co-authors engaged in collaborative creation within the POCC model. It proposes the introduction of an ‘inclusive’ copyright to the copyright law toolbox which would be more suited for giving legal expression to the qualities of inclusivity and dynamism that are inherent in these relationships. The paper presents an outline of the salient features of the proposed inclusive copyright, its application and effects. It concludes by outlining the potential of the ‘inclusive’ copyright to extend to other fields of application such as traditional cultural expression (TCE)….(More)”
Goldman Sachs will soon launch its own version of LinkedIn
Sarah Butcher at EFC: “Sometime soon, it will happen. After two years of construction, Goldman Sachs is expected to launch its own version of LinkedIn – first at Goldman, and then into the world at large.
Known as Louisa, the platform was conceived by Rohan Doctor, a former head of bank solutions sales at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. Doctor submitted his idea for a kind of “internal LinkedIn network” to Accelerate, Goldman Sachs’ internal incubator program in 2019. He’s been building it from New York ever since. It’s thought to be ready soon.
Neither Doctor nor Goldman Sachs would comment for this article, but based on statements Doctor has made on his LinkedIn profile and recent job advertisements for members of his team, Louisa is a “collective intelligence platform” that will enable Goldman staff to connect with each other and to share information in a more meaningful and intuitive way. In doing so, it’s hoped that Goldman will be able to improve knowledge transfer within the firm and that Goldman people will be able to serve clients better as a result.
Goldman has built Louisa around artificial intelligence. When an employee asks Louisa a question, the platform uses natural language processing (NLP) techniques like named entity recognition, language modelling and query parsing to understand the kind of information that’s being sought. Data from user interactions is then used to build user preference feedback loops and user representation models that can target content to particular users and suggest topics. Network analysis is used to identify how users are engaging with each other, to suggest other users or groups of users to engage with, and to look at how Louisa’s features are being used by particular user clusters…(More)”.
Introducing collective crisis intelligence
Blogpost by Annemarie Poorterman et al: “…It has been estimated that over 600,000 Syrians have been killed since the start of the civil war, including tens of thousands of civilians killed in airstrike attacks. Predicting where and when strikes will occur and issuing time-critical warnings enabling civilians to seek safety is an ongoing challenge. It was this problem that motivated the development of Sentry Syria, an early warning system that alerts citizens to a possible airstrike. Sentry uses acoustic sensor data, reports from on-the-ground volunteers, and open media ‘scraping’ to detect warplanes in flight. It uses historical data and AI to validate the information from these different data sources and then issues warnings to civilians 5-10 minutes in advance of a strike via social media, TV, radio and sirens. These extra minutes can be the difference between life and death.
Sentry Syria is just one example of an emerging approach in the humanitarian response we call collective crisis intelligence (CCI). CCI methods combine the collective intelligence (CI) of local community actors (e.g. volunteer plane spotters in the case of Sentry) with a wide range of additional data sources, artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics to support crisis management and reduce the devastating impacts of humanitarian emergencies….(More)”
“We do not feel safe”: A Kabul-based crisis alert app struggles to protect its own employees
Q and A with Sara Wahedi by Hajira Maryam: “Ehtesab, a Kabul-based startup, emerged out of a personal security-related incident that Sara Wahedi, a former Afghan government employee, experienced in May 2018. After witnessing a suicide bomb attack firsthand, Wahedi rushed home, where she could see militants roaming the streets from her balcony. The city was put on lockdown for 12 hours and left without electricity. No one, Wahedi said, knew when the electricity would be restored or when roads would be cleared. The authorities were of little help.
“Since that moment, I kept pondering about the idea of accountability and information provision. I jotted down a few words in different languages for accountability, namely Dari and Pashto. That was the moment the term Ehtesab came to my mind.”
Ehtesab means “accountability” in Dari and Pashto, and the app, formally launched in March 2020, offers streamlined security-related information, including general security updates in Kabul to its users. With real-time, crowdsourced alerts, users across the city can track bomb blasts, roadblocks, electricity outages, or other problems in locations close to them. The app, which generates push notifications about nearby security risks, is supported by 20 employees working out of the company’s Kabul office, according to Wahedi.
Despite the company’s single-minded focus on security, the Ehtesab team was caught off-guard by the sudden collapse of the Afghan government over the weekend. “It was inevitable that there would be a significant shift in governance … but we weren’t expecting the Taliban to come in within the first eight hours of the day,” Wahedi said….(More)”.
The people’s panopticon: Open-source intelligence comes of age
The Economist: “The great hope of the 1990s and 2000s was that the internet would be a force for openness and freedom. As Stewart Brand, a pioneer of online communities, put it: “Information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.” It was not to be. Bad information often drove out good. Authoritarian states co-opted the technologies that were supposed to loosen their grip. Information was wielded as a weapon of war. Amid this disappointment one development offers cause for fresh hope: the emerging era of open-source intelligence (osint).
New sensors, from humdrum dashboard cameras to satellites that can see across the electromagnetic spectrum, are examining the planet and its people as never before. The information they collect is becoming cheaper. Satellite images cost several thousand dollars 20 years ago, today they are often provided free and are of incomparably higher quality. A photograph of any spot on Earth, of a stricken tanker or the routes taken by joggers in a city is available with a few clicks. And online communities and collaborative tools, like Slack, enable hobbyists and experts to use this cornucopia of information to solve riddles and unearth misdeeds with astonishing speed.
Human Rights Watch has analysed satellite imagery to document ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. Nanosatellites tag the automatic identification system of vessels that are fishing illegally. Amateur sleuths have helped Europol, the European Union’s policing agency, investigate child sexual exploitation by identifying geographical clues in the background of photographs. Even hedge funds routinely track the movements of company executives in private jets, monitored by a web of amateurs around the world, to predict mergers and acquisitions.
osint thus bolsters civil society, strengthens law enforcement and makes markets more efficient. It can also humble some of the world’s most powerful countries.
In the face of vehement denials from the Kremlin, Bellingcat, an investigative group, meticulously demonstrated Russia’s role in the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight mh17 over Ukraine in 2014, using little more than a handful of photographs, satellite images and elementary geometry. It went on to identify the Russian agents who attempted to assassinate Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, in England in 2018. amateur analysts and journalists used osint to piece together the full extent of Uyghur internment camps in Xinjiang. In recent weeks researchers poring over satellite imagery have spotted China constructing hundreds of nuclear-missile silos in the desert.
Such an emancipation of information promises to have profound effects. The decentralised and egalitarian nature of osint erodes the power of traditional arbiters of truth and falsehood, in particular governments and their spies and soldiers. For those like this newspaper who believe that secrecy can too easily be abused by people in power, osint is welcome….(More)”.