Human-machine superintelligence pegged as key to solving global problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ravi Mandalia at Dispatch Tribunal: “Global complex problems such as climate change and geopolitical conflicts need a new approach if we want to solve them and researchers have suggested that human-machine super intelligence could be the key.

These so called ‘wicked’ problems are some of the most dire ones that need our immediate attention and researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University have presented their new vision of human computation that could help solve these problems in an article published in the journal Science.

Scientists behind the article have cited how power of human computation has helped push the traditional limits to new heights – something that was not achievable until now. Humans are still ahead of machines at great many things – cognitive abilities is one the key areas – but if their powers are combined with those of machines, the result would be multidimensional collaborative networks that achieve what traditional problem-solving cannot.

Researchers have already proved that micro-tasking has helped with some complex problems including build the world’s most complete map of human retinal neurons; however, this approach isn’t always viable to solve much more complex problems of today and entirely new and innovative approach is required to solve “wicked problems” – those that involve many interacting systems that are constantly changing, and whose solutions have unforeseen consequences (e.g., corruption resulting from financial aid given in response to a natural disaster).

Recently developed human computation technologies that provide real-time access to crowd-based inputs could enable creation of more flexible collaborative environments and such setups are more apt for addressing the most challenging issues.

This idea is already taking shape in several human computation projects, including YardMap.org, which was launched by the Cornell in 2012 to map global conservation efforts one parcel at a time.

“By sharing and observing practices in a map-based social network, people can begin to relate their individual efforts to the global conservation potential of living and working landscapes,” says Janis Dickinson, Professor and Director of Citizen Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

YardMap allows participants to interact and build on each other’s work – something that crowdsourcing alone cannot achieve. The project serves as an important model for how such bottom-up, socially networked systems can bring about scalable changes how we manage residential landscapes.

HCI has recently set out to use crowd-power to accelerate Cornell-based Alzheimer’s disease research. WeCureAlz.com combines two successful microtasking systems into an interactive analytic pipeline that builds blood flow models of mouse brains. The stardust@home system, which was used to search for comet dust in one million images of aerogel, is being adapted to identify stalled blood vessels, which will then be pinpointed in the brain by a modified version of the EyeWire system….(More)”

Can crowdsourcing decipher the roots of armed conflict?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stephanie Kanowitz at GCN: “Researchers at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Texas at Dallas are proving that there’s accuracy, not just safety, in numbers. The Correlates of War project, a long-standing effort that studies the history of warfare, is now experimenting with crowdsourcing as a way to more quickly and inexpensively create a global conflict database that could help explain when and why countries go to war.

The goal is to facilitate the collection, dissemination and use of reliable data in international relations, but a byproduct has emerged: the development of technology that uses machine learning and natural language processing to efficiently, cost-effectively and accurately create databases from news articles that detail militarized interstate disputes.

The project is in its fifth iteration, having released the fourth set of Militarized Dispute (MID) Data in 2014. To create those earlier versions, researchers paid subject-matter experts such as political scientists to read and hand code newswire articles about disputes, identifying features of possible militarized incidents. Now, however, they’re soliciting help from anyone and everyone — and finding the results are much the same as what the experts produced, except the results come in faster and with significantly less expense.

As news articles come across the wire, the researchers pull them and formulate questions about them that help evaluate the military events. Next, the articles and questions are loaded onto the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a marketplace for crowdsourcing. The project assigns articles to readers, who typically spend about 10 minutes reading an article and responding to the questions. The readers submit the answers to the project researchers, who review them. The project assigns the same article to multiple workers and uses computer algorithms to combine the data into one annotation.

A systematic comparison of the crowdsourced responses with those of trained subject-matter experts showed that the crowdsourced work was accurate for 68 percent of the news reports coded. More important, the aggregation of answers for each article showed that common answers from multiple readers strongly correlated with correct coding. This allowed researchers to easily flag the articles that required deeper expert involvement and process the majority of the news items in near-real time and at limited cost….(more)”

How Much Development Data Is Enough?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Keith D. Shepherd at Project Syndicate: “Rapid advances in technology have dramatically lowered the cost of gathering data. Sensors in space, the sky, the lab, and the field, along with newfound opportunities for crowdsourcing and widespread adoption of the Internet and mobile telephones, are making large amounts of information available to those for whom it was previously out of reach. A small-scale farmer in rural Africa, for example, can now access weather forecasts and market prices at the tap of a screen.

This data revolution offers enormous potential for improving decision-making at every level – from the local farmer to world-spanning development organizations. But gathering data is not enough. The information must also be managed and evaluated – and doing this properly can be far more complicated and expensive than the effort to collect it. If the decisions to be improved are not first properly identified and analyzed, there is a high risk that much of the collection effort could be wasted or misdirected.

This conclusion is itself based on empirical analysis. The evidence is weak, for example, that monitoring initiatives in agriculture or environmental management have had a positive impact. Quantitative analysis of decisions across many domains, including environmental policy, business investments, and cyber security, has shown that people tend to overestimate the amount of data needed to make a good decision or misunderstand what type of data are needed.

Furthermore, grave errors can occur when large data sets are mined using machine algorithms without having first having properly examined the decision that needs to be made. There are many examples of cases in which data mining has led to the wrong conclusion – including in medical diagnoses or legal cases – because experts in the field were not consulted and critical information was left out of the analysis.

Decision science, which combines understanding of behavior with universal principles of coherent decision-making, limits these risks by pairing empirical data with expert knowledge. If the data revolution is to be harnessed in the service of sustainable development, the best practices of this field must be incorporated into the effort.

The first step is to identify and frame frequently recurring decisions. In the field of development, these include large-scale decisions such as spending priorities – and thus budget allocations – by governments and international organizations. But it also includes choices made on a much smaller scale: farmers pondering which crops to plant, how much fertilizer to apply, and when and where to sell their produce.

The second step is to build a quantitative model of the uncertainties in such decisions, including the various triggers, consequences, controls, and mitigants, as well as the different costs, benefits, and risks involved. Incorporating – rather than ignoring – difficult-to-measure, highly uncertain factors leads to the best decisions…..

The third step is to compute the value of obtaining additional information – something that is possible only if the uncertainties in all of the variables have been quantified. The value of information is the amount a rational decision-maker would be willing to pay for it. So we need to know where additional data will have value for improving a decision and how much we should spend to get it. In some cases, no further information may be needed to make a sound decision; in others, acquiring further data could be worth millions of dollars….(More)”

Collective Intelligence in Law Reforms: When the Logic of the Crowds and the Logic of Policymaking Collide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tanja Aitamurto: “…shows how the two virtues of collective intelligence – cognitive diversity and large crowds –turn into perils in crowdsourced policymaking. That is because of a conflict between the logic of the crowds and the logic of policymaking. The crowd’s logic differs from that of traditional policymaking in several aspects. To mention some of those: In traditional policymaking it is a small group of experts making proposals to the policy, whereas in crowdsourced policymaking, it is a large, anonymous crowd with a mixed level of expertise. The crowd proposes atomic ideas, whereas traditional policymaking is used to dealing with holistic and synthesized proposals. By drawing on data from a crowdsourced law-making process in Finland, the paper shows how the logics of the crowds and policymaking collide in practice. The conflict prevents policymaking fully benefiting from the crowd’s input, and it also hinders governments from adopting crowdsourcing more widely as a practice for deploying open policymaking practices….(More)”

Living Labs: Concepts, Tools and Cases

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction by Pieter Ballon , Dimitri Schuurman: “This special issue on “Living labs: concepts, tools and cases” comes 10 years after the first scientific publications that defined the notion of living labs, but more than 15 years after the appearance of the first living lab projects (Ballon et al., 2005; Eriksson et al., 2005). This five-year gap demonstrates the extent to which living labs have been a practice-driven phenomenon. Right up to this day, they represent a pragmatic approach to innovation (of information and communication technologies [ICTs] and other artefacts), characterised by a.o. experimentation in real life and active involvement of users.

While there is now a certain body of literature that attempts to clarify and analyse the concept (Følstad, 2008; Almirall et al., 2012; Leminen et al., 2012), living lab practices are still under-researched, and a theoretical and methodological gap continues to exist in terms of the restricted amount and visibility of living lab literature vis-à-vis the rather large community of practice (Schuurman, 2015). The present special issue aims to assist in filling that gap.

This does not mean that the development of living labs has not been informed by scholarly literature previously (Ballon, 2015). Cornerstones include von Hippel’s (1988) work on user-driven innovation because of its emphasis on the ability of so-called lead users, rather than manufacturers, to create (mainly ICT) innovations. Another cornerstone is Silverstone’s (1993) theory on the domestication of ICTs that frames technology adoption as an ongoing struggle between users and technology where the user attempts to take control of the technological artefact and the technology comes to be fitted to users’ daily routines. It has been said that, in living labs, von Hippel’s concept of user-driven design and Silverstone’s insights into the appropriation of technologies are coupled dynamically through experimentation (Frissen and Van Lieshout, 2006).

The concept of stigmergy, which refers to addressing complex problems by collective, yet uncoordinated, actions and interactions of communities of individuals, has gradually become the third foundational element, as social media have provided online platforms for stigmergic behaviour, which has subsequently been linked to the “spontaneous” emergence of innovations (Pallot et al., 2010; Kiemen and Ballon, 2012). A fourth cornerstone is the literature on open and business model innovation, which argues that today’s fast-paced innovation landscape requires collaboration between multiple business and institutional stakeholders, and that the business should use these joint innovation endeavours to find the right “business architecture” (Chesbrough, 2003; Mitchell and Coles, 2003).….(More)

What Citizens Can Teach Civil Servants About Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 and  in Governing: “An open government is one that is transparent, participatory and collaborative. But moving from traditional government operating behind closed doors to more open institutions, where civil servants work together with citizens to create policies and solve problems, demands new skills and sensibilities.

As more and more American public-sector leaders embrace the concept of openness as a positive force for governmental effectiveness, they would do well to look toward Brazil’s largest city, where an unusual experiment was just launched: an effort to use a variation on crowdsourcing to retrain Sao Paulo’s 150,000 civil servants. It’s described as the world’s largest open-government training program.

The program, known as Agents of Open Government – part of a wider city initiative called “Sao Paulo Aberta” (Open Sao Paulo) — aims to teach through peer-to-peer learning, where government employees learn from citizens. Twenty-four citizen-led courses that began last month are aimed not only at government employees and elected community representatives but also at social activists and the general population.

Sao Paolo is betting on the radical notion that learning can happen outside of formal civil-service training colleges. This initiative reflects a growing global trend toward recognizing that institutions can become smarter — more effective and efficient — by making use of the skills and experience of those outside of government.

Officials hope to have 25,000 participants over the course of the coming year. To encourage public employees’ participation, city workers who attend the courses gain credits in the municipal evaluation system that allow them to get pay raises….(More)”

Digilantism: An Analysis of Crowdsourcing and the Boston Marathon Bombings

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Johnny Nhan et al: “This paper explores the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing incident and how members of the general public, through the online community Reddit, attempted to provide assistance to law enforcement through conducting their own parallel investigations. As we document through an analysis of user posts, Reddit members shared information about the investigation, searched for information that would identify the perpetrators and, in some cases, drew on their own expert knowledge to uncover clues concerning key aspects of the attack. Although it is the case that the Reddit cyber-sleuths’ did not ultimately solve this case, or provide significant assistance to the police investigation, their actions suggest the potential role the public could play within security networks….(More)”

Controlling the crowd? Government and citizen interaction on emergency-response platforms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Policy and Internet Blog: “My interest in the role of crowdsourcing tools and practices in emergency situations was triggered by my personal experience. In 2010 I was one of the co-founders of the Russian “Help Map” project, which facilitated volunteer-based response to wildfires in central Russia. When I was working on this project, I realized that a crowdsourcing platform can bring the participation of the citizen to a new level and transform sporadic initiatives by single citizens and groups into large-scale, relatively well coordinated operations. What was also important was that both the needs and the forms of participation required in order to address these needs be defined by the users themselves.

To some extent the citizen-based response filled the gap left by the lack of a sufficient response from the traditional institutions.[1] This suggests that the role of ICTs in disaster response should be examined within the political context of the power relationship between members of the public who use digital tools and the traditional institutions. My experience in 2010 was the first time I was able to see that, while we would expect that in a case of natural disaster both the authorities and the citizens would be mostly concerned about the emergency, the actual situation might be different.

Apparently the emergence of independent, citizen-based collective action in response to a disaster was considered as some type of threat by the institutional actors. First, it was a threat to the image of these institutions, which didn’t want citizens to be portrayed as the leading responding actors. Second, any type of citizen-based collective action, even if not purely political, may be an issue of concern in authoritarian countries in particular. Accordingly, one can argue that, while citizens are struggling against a disaster, in some cases the traditional institutions may make substantial efforts to restrain and contain the action of citizens. In this light, the role of information technologies can include not only enhancing citizen engagement and increasing the efficiency of the response, but also controlling the digital crowd of potential volunteers.

The purpose of this paper was to conceptualize the tension between the role of ICTs in the engagement of the crowd and its resources, and the role of ICTs in controlling the resources of the crowd. The research suggests a theoretical and methodological framework that allows us to explore this tension. The paper focuses on an analysis of specific platforms and suggests empirical data about the structure of the platforms, and interviews with developers and administrators of the platforms. This data is used in order to identify how tools of engagement are transformed into tools of control, and what major differences there are between platforms that seek to achieve these two goals. That said, obviously any platform can have properties of control and properties of engagement at the same time; however the proportion of these two types of elements can differ significantly.

One of the core issues for my research is how traditional actors respond to fast, bottom-up innovation by citizens.[2]. On the one hand, the authorities try to restrict the empowerment of citizens by the new tools. On the other hand, the institutional actors also seek to innovate and develop new tools that can restore the balance of power that has been challenged by citizen-based innovation. The tension between using digital tools for the engagement of the crowd and for control of the crowd can be considered as one of the aspects of this dynamic.

That doesn’t mean that all state-backed platforms are created solely for the purpose of control. One can argue, however, that the development of digital tools that offer a mechanism of command and control over the resources of the crowd is prevalent among the projects that are supported by the authorities. This can also be approached as a means of using information technologies in order to include the digital crowd within the “vertical of power”, which is a top-down strategy of governance. That is why this paper seeks to conceptualize this phenomenon as “vertical crowdsourcing”.

The question of whether using a digital tool as a mechanism of control is intentional is to some extent secondary. What is important is that the analysis of platform structures relying on activity theory identifies a number of properties that allow us to argue that these tools are primarily tools of control. The conceptual framework introduced in the paper is used in order to follow the transformation of tools for the engagement of the crowd into tools of control over the crowd. That said, some of the interviews with the developers and administrators of the platforms may suggest the intentional nature of the development of tools of control, while crowd engagement is secondary….Read the full article: Asmolov, G. (2015) Vertical Crowdsourcing in Russia: Balancing Governance of Crowds and State–Citizen Partnership in Emergency Situations.”

 

Crowdsourcing Apps to Report Bay Area Public Transportation Delays

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Carolyn Said in the San Francisco Chronicle: “It’s the daily lament of the public transit rider: When will the bus show up?

The NextBus system is supposed to answer that for Muni riders. It displays anticipated arrival times through electronic signs in bus shelters, with a phone service for people who call 511, on a website and on a smartphone app, harvesting information from GPS devices in Muni’s fleet. Now a study by a San Francisco startup says it’s accurate about 70 percent of the time, with the worst performance during commute hours.

The researchers have their own plan to improve accuracy: They created a crowdsourced iOS app called Swyft. Some 40,000 Bay Area residents, about three-quarters of them in San Francisco, now use the app to report when their Muni bus, BART train or AC Transit bus is delayed, overcrowded or otherwise experiencing problems. That lets the app deliver real-time information to its users in conjunction with the NextBus predictions.

“The union of those two provides better context for riders” to figure out when their bus really will arrive, said Jonathan Simkin, co-founder and CEO of Swyft, which has raised a little over $500,000. “We built Swyft to optimize how you get around town.” Swyft has been tested since January in the Bay Area. An Android version is coming soon.

An app for iOS and Android called Moovit also uses crowdsourcing combined with transit information to predict bus or train arrivals. Moovit, released in 2012, now has 35 million users in more than 800 cities in 60 countries, giving it a bigger user base than Google Maps, it said. The company couldn’t say how many users it has in San Francisco. The Israeli company has more than $81 million in venture backing.
When users ride public transit with the Moovit app open, it anonymously tracks their speed and location, and integrates that with schedules to predict when a bus will arrive. It also lets users report problems such as how crowded or clean a vehicle is, for instance….(More)”

Peering at Open Peer Review

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at the Political Methodologist: “Peer review is an essential part of the modern scientific process. Sending manuscripts for others to scrutinize is such a widespread practice in academia that its importance cannot be overstated. Since the late eighteenth century, when the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society pioneered editorial review,1 virtually every scholarly outlet has adopted some sort of pre-publication assessment of received works. Although the specifics may vary, the procedure has remained largely the same since its inception: submit, receive anonymous criticism, revise, restart the process if required. A recent survey of APSA members indicates that political scientists overwhelmingly believe in the value of peer review (95%) and the vast majority of them (80%) think peer review is a useful tool to keep themselves up to date with cutting-edge research (Djupe 2015, 349). But do these figures suggest that journal editors can rest upon their laurels and leave the system as it is?

Not quite. A number of studies have been written about the shortcomings of peer review. The system has been criticised for being too slow (Ware 2008), conservative (Eisenhart 2002), inconsistent (Smith 2006; Hojat, Gonnella, and Caelleigh 2003), nepotist (Sandström and Hällsten 2008), biased against women (Wold and Wennerås 1997), affiliation (Peters and Ceci 1982), nationality (Ernst and Kienbacher 1991) and language (Ross et al. 2006). These complaints have fostered interesting academic debates (e.g. Meadows 1998; Weller 2001), but thus far the literature offers little practical advice on how to tackle peer review problems. One often overlooked aspect in these discussions is how to provide incentives for reviewers to write well-balanced reports. On the one hand, it is not uncommon for reviewers to feel that their work is burdensome and not properly acknowledged. Further, due to the anonymous nature of the reviewing process itself, it is impossible to give the referee proper credit for a constructive report. On the other hand, the reviewers’ right to full anonymity may lead to sub-optimal outcomes as referees can rarely be held accountable for being judgmental (Fabiato 1994).

…

Open peer review (henceforth OPR) is largely in line with this trend towards a more transparent political science. Several definitions of OPR have been suggested, including more radical ones such as allowing anyone to write pre-publication reviews (crowdsourcing) or by fully replacing peer review with post-publication comments (Ford 2013). However, I believe that by adopting a narrow definition of OPR – only asking referees to sign their reports – we can better accommodate positive aspects of traditional peer review, such as author blinding, into an open framework. Hence, in this text OPR is understood as a reviewing method where both referee information and their reports are disclosed to the public, while the authors’ identities are not known to the reviewers before manuscript publication.

How exactly would OPR increase transparency in political science? As noted by a number of articles on the topic, OPR creates incentives for referees to write insightful reports, or at least it has no adverse impact over the quality of reviews (DeCoursey 2006; Godlee 2002; Groves 2010; Pöschl 2012; Shanahan and Olsen 2014). In a study that used randomized trials to assess the effect of OPR in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Walsh et al. (2000) show that “signed reviews were of higher quality, were more courteous and took longer to complete than unsigned reviews.” Similar results were reported by McNutt et al. (1990, 1374), who affirm that “editors graded signers as more constructive and courteous […], [and] authors graded signers as fairer.” In the same vein, Kowalczuk et al. (2013) measured the difference in review quality in BMC Microbiology and BMC Infectious Diseases and stated that signers received higher ratings for their feedback on methods and for the amount of evidence they mobilised to substantiate their decisions. Van Rooyen and her colleagues ((1999; 2010)) also ran two randomized studies on the subject, and although they did not find a major difference in perceived quality of both types of review, they reported that reviewers in the treatment group also took significantly more time to evaluate the manuscripts in comparison with the control group. They also note authors broadly favored the open system against closed peer review.

Another advantage of OPR is that it offers a clear way for referees to highlight their specialized knowledge. When reviews are signed, referees are able to receive credit for their important, yet virtually unsung, academic contributions. Instead of just having a rather vague “service to profession” section in their CVs, referees can precise information about the topics they are knowledgeable about and which sort of advice they are giving to prospective authors. Moreover, reports assigned a DOI number can be shared as any other piece of scholarly work, which leads to an increase in the body of knowledge of our discipline and a higher number of citations to referees. In this sense, signed reviews can also be useful for universities and funding bodies. It is an additional method to assess the expert knowledge of a prospective candidate. As supervising skills are somewhat difficult to measure, signed reviews are a good proxy for an applicant’s teaching abilities.

OPR provides background to manuscripts at the time of publication (Ford 2015; Lipworth et al. 2011). It is not uncommon for a manuscript to take months, or even years, to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. In the meantime, the text usually undergoes several major revisions, but readers rarely, if ever, see this trial-and-error approach in action. With public reviews, everyone would be able to track the changes made in the original manuscript and understand how the referees improved the text before its final version. Hence, OPR makes the scientific exchange clear, provides useful background information to manuscripts and fosters post-publication discussions by the readership at large.

Signed and public reviews are also important pedagogical tools. OPR gives a rare glimpse of how academic research is actually conducted, making explicit the usual need for multiple iterations between the authors and the editors before an article appears in print. Furthermore, OPR can fill some of the gap in peer-review training for graduate students. OPR allows junior scholars to compare different review styles, understand what the current empirical or theoretical puzzles of their discipline are, and engage in post-publication discussions about topics in which they are interested (Ford 2015; Lipworth et al. 2011)….(More)”