Tracking symptoms of respiratory diseases online can give a picture of community health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Mvuyo Makhasi, Cheryl Cohen and Sibongile Walaza: “Participatory surveillance has not yet been implemented in African countries. There has only ever been one pilot study, in Tanzania. In 2016, a pilot study of a mobile app called AfyaData was implemented for participatory surveillance in Tanzania. The aim was to establish a platform where members of the community could report any symptoms they encountered. Based on the clinical data provided these would be grouped into categories of diseases. In the pilot study most of the reported cases were related to the digestive system. The second most frequently reported cases were related to the respiratory system. This demonstrated the potential of obtaining close to real-time data on diseases directly from the community….

Participatory surveillance is in place in 11 European countries that form part of the InfluenzaNet network. Here it’s been shown to address some of the limitations of traditional facility-based systems. For example, it can detect the start of the flu season up to two weeks earlier than traditional facility-based surveillance. This allows public health officials to plan and respond earlier to seasonal outbreaks.

Self-reporting systems provide similar and complementary data to facility-based surveillance. They show:

  • variations over time in cases of acute respiratory tract infection
  • time to peak of incidence of acute cases
  • the peak intensity of acute cases
  • a comparison between participatory and facility-based surveillance trends.

The same analysis can now be done for COVID-19 cases, which were previously not included in participatory surveillance platforms.

The systems enable analysis of health-seeking behaviour in people who don’t see a doctor or nurse. For example, people may use home-based remedies, search for guidelines on the internet or consult traditional healers. Health-seeking surveys are often conducted in research studies for a defined period of time, but data is not routinely collected. Participatory surveillance is a longitudinal and systematic way of collecting information about health-seeking behaviour related to respiratory diseases.

Vaccine effectiveness estimates can also be determined through participatory surveillance data. This includes vaccine coverage for seasonal influenza and COVID-19 and information on how these vaccines perform in preventing illness. These data can be compared with vaccine effectiveness estimates from facility-based surveillance…(More)”.

Archivists Make Sure the Internet Doesn’t Forget Russia’s War on Ukraine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Karl Bode at VICE: “As the Russian invasion of Ukraine accelerates, professional and hobbyist archivists alike are rushing to preserve Ukraine’s online history, cataloging and storing everything from Ukrainian government and university websites, to the torrent of news and social media posts related to the accelerating conflict.

The Internet Archive has been archiving the broader conflict in Ukraine since 2014. But as Ukraine government websites face prolonged outages due to sustained cyber attack—as well as the looming risk of defacement or deletion—the organization has taken on another monumental task: backing up the entirety of the Ukrainian Internet.

Using the crowdsourced auto-archiving software running on a virtual machine they’ve dubbed Archive Team Warrior, the organization has leveraged volunteers around the world, many of whom have donated countless terabytes of storage capacity for the project. These volunteers have been steadily backing up the Ukrainian Internet since before the war began.

All told, 68 million items (web pages, documents, and other files) comprising more than 2.5 TB of data have already been hoovered up from various websites across the .ua top level Ukrainian domain. A second project dubbed Ukr-net aims to preserve tens of millions of additional items and terabytes of additional data across the Ukrainian Internet.

Elsewhere, organizations like the Center For Information Resilience have built a crowdsourced map attempting to document every single war-related post to social media made in the region, ranging from civilian photos of the movement of heavy Russian weaponry, to Ukranian government claims of alleged bombing raids on kindergardens…(More)”.

Crowdsourcing research questions in science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Susanne Beck, Tiare-Maria Brasseur, Marion Poetz and Henry Sauermann: “Scientists are increasingly crossing the boundaries of the professional system by involving the general public (the crowd) directly in their research. However, this crowd involvement tends to be confined to empirical work and it is not clear whether and how crowds can also be involved in conceptual stages such as formulating the questions that research is trying to address. Drawing on five different “paradigms” of crowdsourcing and related mechanisms, we first discuss potential merits of involving crowds in the formulation of research questions (RQs). We then analyze data from two crowdsourcing projects in the medical sciences to describe key features of RQs generated by crowd members and compare the quality of crowd contributions to that of RQs generated in the conventional scientific process. We find that the majority of crowd contributions are problem restatements that can be useful to assess problem importance but provide little guidance regarding potential causes or solutions. At the same time, crowd-generated research questions frequently cross disciplinary boundaries by combining elements from different fields within and especially outside medicine. Using evaluations by professional scientists, we find that the average crowd contribution has lower novelty and potential scientific impact than professional research questions, but comparable practical impact. Crowd contributions outperform professional RQs once we apply selection mechanisms at the level of individual contributors or across contributors. Our findings advance research on crowd and citizen science, crowdsourcing and distributed knowledge production, as well as the organization of science. We also inform ongoing policy debates around the involvement of citizens in research in general, and agenda setting in particular.Author links open overlay panel…(More)”.

Public Provides NASA with New Innovations through Prize Competitions, Crowdsourcing, Citizen Science Opportunities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

NASA Report: “Whether problem-solving during the pandemic, establishing a long-term presence at the Moon, or advancing technology to adapt to life in space, NASA has leveraged open innovation tools to inspire solutions to some of our most timely challenges – while using the creativity of everyone from garage tinkerers to citizen scientists and students of all ages.

Open Innovation: Boosting NASA Higher, Faster, and Farther highlights some of those breakthroughs, which accelerate space technology development and discovery while giving the public a gateway to work with NASA. Open innovation initiatives include problem-focused challenges and prize competitions, data hackathons, citizen science, and crowdsourcing projects that invite the public to lend their skills, ideas, and time to support NASA research and development programs.

NASA engaged the public with 56 public prize competitions and challenges and 14 citizen science and crowdsourcing activities over fiscal years 2019 and 2020. NASA awarded $2.2 million in prize money, and members of the public submitted over 11,000 solutions during that period.

“NASA’s accomplishments have hardly been NASA’s alone. Tens of thousands more individuals from academic institutions, private companies, and other space agencies also contribute to these solutions. Open innovation expands the NASA community and broadens the agency’s capacity for innovation and discovery even further,” said Amy Kaminski, Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We harness the perspectives, expertise, and enthusiasm of ‘the crowd’ to gain diverse solutions, speed up projects, and reduce costs.”

This edition of the publication highlights:

  • How NASA used open innovation tools to accelerate the pace of problem-solving during the COVID-19 pandemic, enabling a sprint of creativity to create valuable solutions in support of this global crisis
  • How NASA invited everyone to embrace the Moon as a technological testing ground through public prize competitions and challenges, sparking development that could help prolong human stays on the Moon and lay the foundation for human exploration to Mars and beyond  
  • How citizen scientists gather, sort, and upload data, resulting in fruitful partnerships between the public and NASA scientists
  • How NASA’s student-focused challenges have changed lives and positively impacted underserved communities…(More)”.

What’s the problem? How crowdsourcing and text-mining may contribute to the understanding of unprecedented problems such as COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Julian Wahl, Johann Füller, and Katja Hutter: “In this research, we explore how crowdsourcing combined with text-mining can help to build a sound understanding of unstructured, complex and ill-defined problems. Therefore, we gathered 101 problem descriptions contributed to a crowdsourcing contest about the impact of COVID-19 on the tourism industry. Based on our findings we propose a five-phase process model for problem understanding consisting of: (1) information gathering, (2) information pre-structuring, (3) problem space mapping, (4) problem space exploration, and (5) problem understanding for solution search. While our study confirms that crowdsourcing and text-mining facilitate fast generation and exploration of problem spaces at limited cost, it also reveals the necessity to follow certain process steps and to deal with challenges such as information loss and human interpretation. For practitioners, our model presents a guideline for how to get a faster grasp on complex and rather unprecedented problems…(More)”.

Expecting the Unexpected: Effects of Data Collection Design Choices on the Quality of Crowdsourced User-Generated Content

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Roman Lukyanenko: “As crowdsourced user-generated content becomes an important source of data for organizations, a pressing question is how to ensure that data contributed by ordinary people outside of traditional organizational boundaries is of suitable quality to be useful for both known and unanticipated purposes. This research examines the impact of different information quality management strategies, and corresponding data collection design choices, on key dimensions of information quality in crowdsourced user-generated content. We conceptualize a contributor-centric information quality management approach focusing on instance-based data collection. We contrast it with the traditional consumer-centric fitness-for-use conceptualization of information quality that emphasizes class-based data collection. We present laboratory and field experiments conducted in a citizen science domain that demonstrate trade-offs between the quality dimensions of accuracy, completeness (including discoveries), and precision between the two information management approaches and their corresponding data collection designs. Specifically, we show that instance-based data collection results in higher accuracy, dataset completeness and number of discoveries, but this comes at the expense of lower precision. We further validate the practical value of the instance-based approach by conducting an applicability check with potential data consumers (scientists, in our context of citizen science). In a follow-up study, we show, using human experts and supervised machine learning techniques, that substantial precision gains on instance-based data can be achieved with post-processing. We conclude by discussing the benefits and limitations of different information quality and data collection design choice for information quality in crowdsourced user-generated content…(More)”.

Making Space for Everyone

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Amy Paige Kaminski at Issues: “The story of how NASA came to see the public as instrumental in accomplishing its mission provides insights for R&D agencies trying to create societal value, relevance, and connection….Over the decades since, NASA’s approaches to connecting with citizens have evolved with the introduction of new information and communications technologies, social change, legal developments, scientific progress, and external trends in space activities and public engagement. The result has been an increasing and increasingly accessible set of opportunities that have enabled diverse segments of society to connect more closely with NASA’s work and, in turn, boost the agency’s techno-scientific and societal value….

Another significant change in public engagement practices has been providing more people with opportunities to do space-related R&D. Through the shuttle program, the agency enabled companies, universities, high schools, and an eclectic set of participants ranging from artists to garden seed companies to develop and fly payloads. The stated purpose was to advance knowledge of the effects of the space environment—a concept that was sometimes loosely defined. 

Today NASA similarly encourages a broad set of players to use the International Space Station (ISS) for R&D. While some of the shuttle and ISS programs have charged fees to payload owners, NASA has instead offered grants, primarily to the university community, for competitively selected research projects in space science. The agency also invites various groups to propose experiments and technology development projects through government-wide programs such as the Small Business Innovative Research program, which aims to foster innovation in small businesses, as well as the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (better known by its EPSCoR acronym), which seeks to enhance research infrastructure and competitiveness at the state level….(More)”.

Public Crowdsourcing: Analyzing the Role of Government Feedback on Civic Digital Platforms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Lisa Schmidthuber, Dennis Hilgers, and Krithika Randhawa: “Government organizations increasingly use crowdsourcing platforms to interact with citizens and integrate their requests in designing and delivering public services. Government usually provides feedback to individual users on whether the request can be considered. Drawing on attribution theory, this study asks how the causal attributions of the government response affect continued participation in crowdsourcing platforms. To test our hypotheses, we use a 7-year dataset of both online requests from citizens to government and government responses to citizen requests. We focus on citizen requests that are denied by government, and find that stable and uncontrollable attributions of the government response have a negative effect on future participation behavior. Also, a local government’s locus of causality negatively affects continued participation. This study contributes to research on the role of responsiveness in digital interaction between citizens and government and highlights the importance of rationale transparency to sustain citizen participation…(More)”.

Information Disorder in the Glam Sector: The Challenges of Crowd Sourced Contributions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Saima Qutab, Michael David Myers and Lesley Gardner: “For some years information systems researchers have looked at crowdsourcing as a way for individuals, organizations and institutions to co-create content and generate value. Although there are many potential benefits of crowdsourcing, the quality control of crowd contributions stands out as one of the most significant challenges. Crowds can create the information contents but at the same time can facilitate information disorder: misinformation, disinformation and mal-information.

Crowd created information is a dominant element in what is sometimes called the post-truth era. A small piece of misleading information can constitute significant challenges to the information sharing group or society. This misinformation can reshape in various ways how information-driven communities make sense of their world. As information disorder and its effects have recently started to be recognised as a potential problem in IS research, we need to explore this phenomenon in more detail, to understand how it happens and why. This multiple case study is aimed at appraising information disorder through crowd-created contents in the knowledge and cultural heritage organisations such as Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM). We intend to investigate the quality control mechanisms that might be used to prevent and minimise the effects of information disorder from crowdsourced contributions….(More)”.

Afyanet

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Afyanet is a voluntary, non-profit network of National Health Institutes and Research Centers seeking to leverage crowdsourced health data for disease surveillance and forecasting. Participation in AfyaNet for countries is free.

We aim to use technology and digital solutions to radically enhance how traditional disease surveillance systems function and the ways we can model epidemics.

Our vision is to create a common framework to collect standardized real-time data from the general population, allowing countries to leapfrog existing hurdles in disease surveillance and information sharing.

Our solution is an Early Warning System for Health based on participatory data gathering. A common, real-time framework for disease collection will help countries identify and forecast outbreaks faster and more effectively.

Crowdsourced data is gathered directly from citizens, then aggregated, anonymized, and processed in a cloud-based data lake. Our high-performance computing architecture analyzes the data and creates valuable disease spread models, which in turn provide alerts and notifications to participating countries and helps public health authorities make evidence-based decisions….(More)”