Mining citizen emotions to estimate the urgency of urban issues


Christian Masdeval and Adriano Veloso in Information Systems: “Crowdsourcing technology offers exciting possibilities for local governments. Specifically, citizens are increasingly taking part in reporting and discussing issues related to their neighborhood and problems they encounter on a daily basis, such as overflowing trash-bins, broken footpaths and lifts, illegal graffiti, and potholes. Pervasive citizen participation enables local governments to respond more efficiently to these urban issues. This interaction between citizens and municipalities is largely promoted by civic engagement platforms, such as See-Click-Fix, FixMyStreet, CitySourced, and OpenIDEO, which allow citizens to report urban issues by entering free text describing what needs to be done, fixed or changed. In order to develop appropriate action plans and priorities, government officials need to figure out how urgent are the reported issues. In this paper we propose to estimate the urgency of urban issues by mining different emotions that are implicit in the text describing the issue. More specifically, a reported issue is first categorized according to the emotions expressed in it, and then the corresponding emotion scores are combined in order to produce a final urgency level for the reported issue. Our experiments use the SeeClickFix hackathon data and diverse emotion classification algorithms. They indicate that (i) emotions can be categorized efficiently with supervised learning algorithms, and (ii) the use of citizen emotions leads to accurate urgency estimates. Further, using additional features such as the type of issue or its author leads to no further accuracy gains….(More)”

Science to the people!


John Magan, at Digital Agenda for Europe:” …I attended the 2nd Barcelona Citizen Science Day organised as part of the city’s Science Festival. The programme was full and varied and in itself a great example of the wonderful world of do-it-yourself, hands-on, accessible, practical science. A huge variety of projects (see below) was delivered with enthusiasm, passion, and energy!

The day was rounded off with a presentation by Public Lab who showed how a bit of technical ingenuity like cheap cameras on kites and balloons can be used to keep governments and large businesses more honest and accountable – for example, data they collected is being used in court cases against BP for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

But what was most striking is the empowerment that these Citizen Science projects give individuals to do things for themselves – to take measures to monitor, protect or improve their urban or rural environment; to indulge their curiosity or passions; to improve their finances; to work with others; to do good while having serious fun….If you want to have a deeper look, here are some of the many projects presented on a great variety of themes:

Water

Wildlife

Climate

Arts

Public health

Human

A nice booklet capturing them is available and there’s aslo a summary in Catalan only.

Read more about citizen science in the European Commission….(More)”

Open Innovation, Open Science, Open to the World


Speech by Carlos Moedas, EU Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation: “On 25 April this year, an earthquake of magnitude 7.3 hit Nepal. To get real-time geographical information, the response teams used an online mapping tool called Open Street Map. Open Street Map has created an entire online map of the world using local knowledge, GPS tracks and donated sources, all provided on a voluntary basis. It is open license for any use.

Open Street Map was created by a 24 year-old computer science student at University College London in 2004, has today 2 million users and has been used for many digital humanitarian and commercial purposes: From the earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

This story is one of many that demonstrate that we are moving into a world of open innovation and user innovation. A world where the digital and physical are coming together. A world where new knowledge is created through global collaborations involving thousands of people from across the world and from all walks of life.

Ladies and gentlemen, over the next two days I would like us to chart a new path for European research and innovation policy. A new strategy that is fit for purpose for a world that is open, digital and global. And I would like to set out at the start of this important conference my own ambitions for the coming years….

Open innovation is about involving far more actors in the innovation process, from researchers, to entrepreneurs, to users, to governments and civil society. We need open innovation to capitalise on the results of European research and innovation. This means creating the right ecosystems, increasing investment, and bringing more companies and regions into the knowledge economy. I would like to go further and faster towards open innovation….

I am convinced that excellent science is the foundation of future prosperity, and that openness is the key to excellence. We are often told that it takes many decades for scientific breakthroughs to find commercial application.

Let me tell you a story which shows the opposite. Graphene was first isolated in the laboratory by Profs. Geim and Novoselov at the University of Manchester in 2003 (Nobel Prizes 2010). The development of graphene has since benefitted from major EU support, including ERC grants for Profs. Geim and Novoselov. So I am proud to show you one of the new graphene products that will soon be available on the market.

This light bulb uses the unique thermal dissipation properties of graphene to achieve greater energy efficiencies and a longer lifetime that LED bulbs. It was developed by a spin out company from the University of Manchester, called Graphene Lighting, as is expected to go on sale by the end of the year.

But we must not be complacent. If we look at indicators of the most excellent science, we find that Europe is not top of the rankings in certain areas. Our ultimate goal should always be to promote excellence not only through ERC and Marie Skłodowska-Curie but throughout the entire H2020.

For such an objective we have to move forward on two fronts:

First, we are preparing a call for European Science Cloud Project in order to identify the possibility of creating a cloud for our scientists. We need more open access to research results and the underlying data. Open access publication is already a requirement under Horizon 2020, but we now need to look seriously at open data…

When innovators like LEGO start fusing real bricks with digital magic, when citizens conduct their own R&D through online community projects, when doctors start printing live tissues for patients … Policymakers must follow suit…(More)”

Improving Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science as a Policy Mechanism for NASA


Paper by Balcom Brittany: “This article examines citizen science projects, defined as “a form of open collaboration where members of the public participate in the scientific process, including identifying research questions, collecting and analyzing the data, interpreting the results, and problem solving,” as an effective and innovative tool for National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) science in line with the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive. Citizen science projects allow volunteers with no technical training to participate in analysis of large sets of data that would otherwise constitute prohibitively tedious and lengthy work for research scientists. Zooniverse.com hosts a multitude of popular space-focused citizen science projects, many of which have been extraordinarily successful and have enabled new research publications and major discoveries. This article takes a multifaceted look at such projects by examining the benefits of citizen science, effective game design, and current desktop computer and mobile device usage trends. It offers suggestions of potential research topics to be studied with emerging technologies, policy considerations, and opportunities for outreach. This analysis includes an overview of other crowdsourced research methods such as distributed computing and contests. New research and data analysis of mobile phone usage, scientific curiosity, and political engagement among Zooniverse.com project participants has been conducted for this study…(More)”

Rethinking Smart Cities From The Ground Up


New report byTom Saunders and Peter Baeck (NESTA): “This report tells the stories of cities around the world – from Beijing to Amsterdam, and from London to Jakarta – that are addressing urban challenges by using digital technologies to engage and enable citizens.

Key findings

  • Many ‘top down’ smart city ideas have failed to deliver on their promise, combining high costs and low returns.
  • ‘Collaborative technologies’ offer cities another way to make smarter use of resources, smarter ways of collecting data and smarter ways to make decisions.
  • Collaborative technologies can also help citizens themselves shape the future of their cities.
  • We have created five recommendations for city government who want to make their cities smarter.

As cities bring people together to live, work and play, they amplify their ability to create wealth and ideas. But scale and density also bring acute challenges: how to move around people and things; how to provide energy; how to keep people safe.

‘Smart cities’ offer sensors, ‘big data’ and advanced computing as answers to these challenges, but they have often faced criticism for being too concerned with hardware rather than with people.

In this report we argue that successful smart cities of the future will combine the best aspects of technology infrastructure while making the most of the growing potential of ‘collaborative technologies’, technologies that enable greater collaboration between urban communities and between citizens and city governments.

How will this work in practice? Drawing on examples from all around the world we investigate four emerging methods which are helping city governments engage and enable citizens: the collaborative economy, crowdsourcing data, collective intelligence and crowdfunding.

Policy recommendations

  1. Set up a civic innovation lab to drive innovation in collaborative technologies.
  2. Use open data and open platforms to mobilise collective knowledge.
  3. Take human behaviour as seriously as technology.
  4. Invest in smart people, not just smart technology.
  5. Spread the potential of collaborative technologies to all parts of society….(More)”

Harnessing the Crowd to Solve Healthcare


PSFK Labs: “While being sick is never a good situation to be in, the majority of people can still take solace in the fact that modern medicine will be able to diagnose their problem and get them on the path to a quick recovery. For a small percentage of patients, however, simply finding out what ails them can be a challenge. Despite countless visits to specialists and mounting costs, these individuals can struggle for years to find out any reliable information about their illness.

This is only exacerbated by the fact that in a heavily regulated industry like healthcare, words like “personalization,” “transparency” and “collaboration” are near impossibilities, leaving these patients locked into a system that can’t care for them. Enter CrowdMed, an online platform that uses the combined knowledge of its community to overcome these obstacles, getting people the answers and treatment they need.

…we spoke with Jared Heyman, the company’s founder, to understand how the crowd can deliver unprecedented efficiencies to a system sorely in need of them…. “CrowdMed harnesses the wisdom of crowds to solve the world’s most difficult medical cases online. Let’s say that you’ve been bouncing doctor to doctor, but don’t yet have a definitive diagnosis or treatment plan. You can submit your case on our site by answering an in‑depth patient questionnaire, uploading relevant medical records, diagnostic test results or even medical images. We expose your case to our community of currently over 15,000 medical detectives. These are people mostly with medical backgrounds who enjoy solving these challenges.

We have about a 70 percent success rate, bringing patients closer to a direct diagnosis or cure and we do so in a very small fraction of the time and cost of what it would take through the traditional medical system….

Every entrepreneur builds upon the tools and technologies that preceded them. I think that CrowdMed needed the Internet. It needed Facebook. It needed Wikipedia. It needed Quora, and other companies or products that have proven that you can trust in the wisdom of the crowd. I think we’re built upon the shoulders of these other companies.

We looked at all these other companies that have proven the value of social networks through crowdsourcing, and that’s inspired us to do what we do. It’s been instructive for us in the best way to do it, and it’s also prepared society, psychologically and culturally, for what we’re doing. All these things were important….(More)”

What cybersecurity can learn from citizen science


But as anyone who has observed an online forum thread dissecting the minutiae of geek culture can attest, hobbyists can be remarkably thorough in their exploration of topics they are passionate about. And it is often a point of pride to pick the subject that is the least conventional or popular.

The idea of citizen science is to include amateur science enthusiasts in the collection and processing of data. Thanks to the Internet, we’ve seen a surge in the number of self-taught experts in a variety of subjects. New participation platforms are social and gamified – utilizing people’s desire to compete or collaborate with others who share their passion.

How this process plays out differs from one app to the next, according to their needs: StarDust@Home asks volunteers to help sort through samples captured by the Stardust spacecraft when it flew through the coma of comet Wild 2 in 2004. They do this by viewing movies of the contents of the aerogel tiles that were used as collectors.

The security community is ripe for using the citizen science in similar ways to these. Most antimalware vendors make use of customer samples for adding detection and cleaning to their products. Many security companies use customers’ reports to gather file reputation, telemetry and prevalence data. And bug reports come from researchers of all ages and education levels – not just professional security researchers. “Month of Bug” events are a more controversial way that security is gamified. Could security companies or organizations be doing more to engage enthusiasts to help improve our response to security issues?

It could be argued that the stuff of security research – especially malware research – is potentially harmful in the hands of amateurs and should be handled only by seasoned professionals. Not only that, security is an adversarial system where the criminals would likely try to game the system to improve their profits. These are important concerns that would need to be addressed.

But the citizen science approach provides good lessons…(More)”

How Crowdsourcing Can Help Us Fight ISIS


 at the Huffington Post: “There’s no question that ISIS is gaining ground. …So how else can we fight ISIS? By crowdsourcing data – i.e. asking a relevant group of people for their input via text or the Internet on specific ISIS-related issues. In fact, ISIS has been using crowdsourcing to enhance its operations since last year in two significant ways. Why shouldn’t we?

First, ISIS is using its crowd of supporters in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to help strategize new policies. Last December, the extremist group leveraged its global crowd via social media to brainstorm ideas on how to kill 26-year-old Jordanian coalition fighter pilot Moaz al-Kasasba. ISIS supporters used the hashtag “Suggest a Way to Kill the Jordanian Pilot Pig” and “We All Want to Slaughter Moaz” to make their disturbing suggestions, which included decapitation, running al-Kasasba over with a bulldozer and burning him alive (which was the winner). Yes, this sounds absurd and was partly a publicity stunt to boost ISIS’ image. But the underlying strategy to crowdsource new strategies makes complete sense for ISIS as it continues to evolve – which is what the US government should consider as well.

In fact, in February, the US government tried to crowdsource more counterterrorism strategies. Via its official blog, DipNote, the State Departmentasked the crowd – in this case, US citizens – for their suggestions for solutions to fight violent extremism. This inclusive approach to policymaking was obviously important for strengthening democracy, with more than 180 entries posted over two months from citizens across the US. But did this crowdsourcing exercise actually improve US strategy against ISIS? Not really. What might help is if the US government asked a crowd of experts across varied disciplines and industries about counterterrorism strategies specifically against ISIS, also giving these experts the opportunity to critique each other’s suggestions to reach one optimal strategy. This additional, collaborative, competitive and interdisciplinary expert insight can only help President Obama and his national security team to enhance their anti-ISIS strategy.

Second, ISIS has been using its crowd of supporters to collect intelligence information to better execute its strategies. Since last August, the extremist group has crowdsourced data via a Twitter campaign specifically on Saudi Arabia’s intelligence officials, including names and other personal details. This apparently helped ISIS in its two suicide bombing attacks during prayers at a Shite mosque last month; it also presumably helped ISIS infiltrate a Saudi Arabian border town via Iraq in January. This additional, collaborative approach to intelligence collection can only help President Obama and his national security team to enhance their anti-ISIS strategy.

In fact, last year, the FBI used crowdsourcing to spot individuals who might be travelling abroad to join terrorist groups. But what if we asked the crowd of US citizens and residents to give us information specifically on where they’ve seen individuals get lured by ISIS in the country, as well as on specific recruitment strategies they may have noted? This might also lead to more real-time data points on ISIS defectors returning to the US – who are they, why did they defect and what can they tell us about their experience in Syria or Iraq? Overall, crowdsourcing such data (if verifiable) would quickly create a clearer picture of trends in recruitment and defectors across the country, which can only help the US enhance its anti-ISIS strategies.

This collaborative approach to data collection could also be used in Syria and Iraq with texts and online contributions from locals helping us to map ISIS’ movements….(More)”

A framework for Adoption of Challenges and Prizes in US Federal Agencies: A Study of Early Adopters


Thesis by Louis, Claudia (Syracuse University): “In recent years we have witnessed a shift in the innovation landscape of organizations from closed to more open models embracing solutions from the outside. Widespread use of the internet and web 2.0 technologies have made it easier for organizations to connect with their clients, service providers, and the public at large for more collaborative problem solving and innovation. Introduction of the Open Government initiative accompanied by the America Competes Reauthorization Act signaled an unprecedented commitment by the US Federal Government to stimulating more innovation and creativity in problem solving. The policy and legislation empowered agencies to open up their problem solving space beyond their regular pool of contractors in finding solutions to the nation’s most complex problems.

This is an exploratory study of the adoption of challenges as an organizational innovation in public sector organizations. The main objective is to understand and explain how, and under what conditions challenges are being used by federal agencies and departments as a tool to promote innovation. The organizational innovation literature provides the main theoretical foundation for this study, but does not directly address contextual aspects regarding the type of innovation and the type of organization. The guiding framework uses concepts drawn from three literature streams: organizational innovation, open innovation, and public sector innovation…. (More)”

A Research Roadmap for Human Computation


Emerging Technology From the arXiv : “The wisdom of the crowd has become so powerful and so accessible via the Internet that it has become a resource in its own right. Various services now tap into this rich supply of human cognition, such as Wikipedia, Duolingo, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

So important is this resource that scientists have given it a name; they call it human computation. And a rapidly emerging and increasingly important question is how best to exploit it.

Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to a group of computer scientists, crowdsourcing pioneers, and visionaries who have created a roadmap for research into human computation. The team, led by Pietro Michelucci at the Human Computation Institute, point out that human computation systems have been hugely successful at tackling complex problems from identifying spiral galaxies to organizing disaster relief.

But their potential is even greater still, provided that human cognition can be efficiently harnessed on a global scale. Last year, they met to discuss these issues and have now published the results of their debate.

The begin by pointing out the extraordinary successes of human computation….then describe the kinds of projects they want to create. They call one idea Project Houston after the crowdsourced effort on the ground that helped bring back the Apollo 13 astronauts after an on-board explosion on the way to the moon.

Their idea is that similar help can be brought to bear from around the world when individuals on earth find themselves in trouble. By this they mean individuals who might be considering suicide or suffering from depression, for example.

The plan is to use state-of-the-art speech analysis and natural language understanding to detect stress and offer help. This would come in the form of composite personalities made up from individuals with varying levels of expertise in the crowd, supported by artificial intelligence techniques. “Project Houston could provide a consistently kind and patient personality even if the “crowd” changes completely over time,” they say.

Another idea is to build on the way that crowdsourcing helps people learn. One example of this is Duolingo, an app that offers free language lessons while simultaneously acting as a document translation service. “Why stop with language learning and translation?” they ask.

A similar approach could help people learn new skills as they work online, a process that should allow them to take on more complex roles. One example is in the field of radiology, where an important job is to recognize tumors on x-ray images. This is a task that machine vision algorithms do not yet perform reliably…..

Yet another idea would be to crowdsource information that helps the poorest families in America find social welfare programs. These programs are often difficult to navigate and represent a disproportionate hardship for the people who are most likely to benefit from them: those who are homeless, who have disabilities, who are on low income, and so on.

The idea is that the crowd should take on some of this burden freeing up this group for other tasks, like finding work, managing health problems and so on.

These are worthy goals but they raise some significant questions. Chief among these is the nature of the ethical, legal, and social implications of human computation. How can this work be designed to allow meaningful and dignified human participation? How can the outcomes be designed so that the most vulnerable people can benefit from it? And what is the optimal division of labor between machines and humans to produce a specific result?

Ref:  arxiv.org/abs/1505.07096 : A U.S. Research Roadmap for Human Computation”