5 cool ways connected data is being used


 at Wareable: “The real news behind the rise of wearable tech isn’t so much the gadgetry as the gigantic amount of personal data that it harnesses.

Concerns have already been raised over what companies may choose to do with such valuable information, with one US life insurance company already using Fitbits to track customers’ exercise and offer them discounts when they hit their activity goals.

Despite a mildly worrying potential dystopia in which our own data could be used against us, there are plenty of positive ways in which companies are using vast amounts of connected data to make the world a better place…

Parkinson’s disease research

Apple Health ResearchKit was recently unveiled as a platform for collecting collaborative data for medical studies, but Apple isn’t the first company to rely on crowdsourced data for medical research.

The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research recently unveiled a partnership with Intel to improve research and treatment for the neurodegenerative brain disease. Wearables are being used to unobtrusively gather real-time data from sufferers, which is then analysed by medical experts….

Saving the rhino

Connected data and wearable tech isn’t just limited to humans. In South Africa, the Madikwe Conservation Project is using wearable-based data to protect endangered rhinos from callous poachers.

A combination of ultra-strong Kevlar ankle collars powered by an Intel Galileo chip, along with an RFID chip implanted in each rhino’s horn allows the animals to be monitored. Any break in proximity between the anklet and horn results in anti-poaching teams being deployed to catch the bad guys….

Making public transport smart

A company called Snips is collecting huge amounts of urban data in order to improve infrastructure. In partnership with French national rail operator SNCF, Snips produced an app called Tranquilien to utilise location data from commuters’ phones and smartwatches to track which parts of the rail network were busy at which times.

Combining big data with crowdsourcing, the information helps passengers to pick a train where they can find a seat during peak times, while the data can also be useful to local businesses when serving the needs of commuters who are passing through.

Improving the sports fan experience

We’ve already written about how wearable tech is changing the NFL, but the collection of personal data is also set to benefit the fans.

Levi’s Stadium – the new home of the San Francisco 49ers – opened in 2014 and is one of the most technically advanced sports venues in the world. As well as a strong Wi-Fi signal throughout the stadium, fans also benefit from a dedicated app. This not only offers instant replays and real-time game information, but it also helps them find a parking space, order food and drinks directly to their seat and even check the lines at the toilets. As fans use the app, all of the data is collated to enhance the fan experience in future….

Creating interactive art

Don’t be put off by the words ‘interactive installation’. On Broadway is a cool work of art that “represents life in the 21st Century city through a compilation of images and data collected along the 13 miles of Broadway that span Manhattan”….(More)”

The Open Seventeen


Crowdsourcing the Verification of the Sustainable Development Goals with Open Data : In 2015, the United Nations is announcing seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the world. Success at implementing the SDGs by 2030 could put the planet on the right course for the rest of the century. Failure could result in a breakdown of trust in global initiatives and cynical pursuit of self-interest by nations and corporations.

One way to ensure SDGs are achieved is to establish an independent means for verifying that all stakeholders – governments, corporations, NGOs and international organisations – live up to their promises. This requires harnessing the grassroots efforts of concerned citizens on a global scale.

To ignite this effort, ONE– in collaboration with the Citizen Cyberscience Centre and the Crowdcrafting platform for open research – is launching The Open Seventeen, a challenge to develop crowdsourcing projects that tackle SDGs using open data.

How does this challenge work?

You’ll find a big blue button further down this page. Use this to pitch a crowdsourcing project that tackles any of the 17 SDGs, at either a local, regional or global level, and tell us what open data set could be analysed for this purpose.

To inspire you, we’ve provided below some >examples of crowdsourcing projects that have already been tackling different aspects of the SDGs, from deforestation to corruption, and from drought to disease. Projects proposed for the challenge should have clear and realistic goals, and build on existing open data sets.

ONE and its partners will select three proposals and create crowdsourcing projects based on these. The winners and their projects will be profiled by ONE in upcoming international events related to the launch of the SDGs. Your project could inspire the world….

What can you do with open data to help verify SDGs? Have a look at what citizens have already created using the open source technology PyBossa that powers the Crowdcrafting platform and other crowdsourcing projects….(More)”

Video: The power of public art


“Anne Pasternak, President and Artistic Director of Creative Time USA, says artists have the power “to kick open the door to social change.” In this video for the World Economic Forum, Pasternak talks about some of Creative Time’s commissions – from lighting up the New York skyline to shaking the hands of sanitation workers – and how art can help expose and heal social issues.

Click on the video to watch the full talk, or read selected quotes below

Law school students crowdsource commencement address


Chronicle of Higher Education: “Though higher education is constantly changing, commencement ceremonies have largely stayed the same. A graduating student at Stanford Law School is trying to change that.

Marta F. Belcher is crowdsourcing the speech she will give next month at the law school’s precommencement diploma ceremony, offering her classmates an opportunity to share in crafting that final message.

The point of a student commencement speaker, Ms. Belcher said, is to have someone who can speak to the student experience. But as she learned when she gave the student address at her undergraduate ceremony, it’s not easy for one person to represent hundreds, or even thousands, of classmates.

With all the online collaboration tools that are available today, Ms. Belcher saw the possibility of updating the tradition. So she competed to be the student speaker and invited classmates to contribute to her address.

“That was so clearly the right choice — for Stanford, especially, in the Silicon Valley at the cutting edge of innovation — that we should be the ones to sort of pioneer this new kind of way of writing a graduation speech,” she said.

After holding a number of meetings and fielding questions from skeptics, Ms. Belcher set up a wiki to gather ideas. The months-long effort was divided into three stages. First students would establish themes and ideas; next they would start contributing actual content for the speech; and finally, those pieces would be edited into a cohesive narrative during collaborative “edit-a-thons.”

Since the wiki went up, in February, 85 students have contributed to it….(More)”

Navigating the Health Data Ecosystem


New book on O’Reilly Media on “The “Six C’s”: Understanding the Health Data Terrain in the Era of Precision Medicine”: “Data-driven technologies are now being adopted, developed, funded, and deployed throughout the health care market at an unprecedented scale. But, as this O’Reilly report reveals, health care innovation contains more hurdles and requires more finesse than many tech startups expect. By paying attention to the lessons from the report’s findings, innovation teams can better anticipate what they’ll face, and plan accordingly.

Simply put, teams looking to apply collective intelligence and “big data” platforms to health and health care problems often don’t appreciate the messy details of using and making sense of data in the heavily regulated hospital IT environment. Download this report today and learn how it helps prepare startups in six areas:

  1. Complexity: An enormous domain with noisy data not designed for machine consumption
  2. Computing: Lack of standard, interoperable schema for documenting human health in a digital format
  3. Context: Lack of critical contextual metadata for interpreting health data
  4. Culture: Startup difficulties in hospital ecosystems: why innovation can be a two-edged sword
  5. Contracts: Navigating the IRB, HIPAA, and EULA frameworks
  6. Commerce: The problem of how digital health startups get paid

This report represents the initial findings of a study funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Subsequent reports will explore the results of three deep-dive projects the team pursued during the study. (More)”

Platform helps displaced families in Haiti crowdfund new homes


Springwise: “We have seen a number of products — such as HUSH2 — which aim to provide short-term housing for the displaced or homeless in the wake of conflicts or natural disasters. These shelters are undoubtedly vital but they are essentially temporary, so New Story — a non profit based in Haiti — has another solution. New Story is a crowdfunding platform which enables families to raise the USD 6,000 necessary to finance building a new, long-term home.

New Story has partnered with Mission of Hope, which sources families in need and helps them to launch a crowdfunding campaign via the platform. Potential donors can read the family’s story and see a breakdown of expenses — including materials and labor — before choosing to donate. All the money raised goes directly to each project, which is then carried out by local contractors in Haiti. The houses, which are three room block homes, are usually completed within two months, after which families post video updates for their donors….(More)”

Citizen Science in the Unexplored Terrain of the Brain


Aaron Krol at BioITWorld: “The game is simple. On the left-hand side of the screen you see a cube containing a misshapen 3D figure, a bit like a tree branch with a gall infestation. To the right is a razor-thin cross-section of the cube, a grainy image of overlapping gray blobs. Clicking on a blob colors it in, like using the paint bucket tool in MS Paint, while also sending colorful extensions out from the branch to the left. Working your way through 256 of these cross-sections, your job is to extend the branch through the cube, identifying which blobs are continuous with the branch and which are nearby distractions.
It hardly sounds like a game at all, but strange to say, there’s something very compelling about playing EyeWire. Maybe it’s watching the branches grow and fork as you discover new connections. Maybe it’s how quickly you can rack up progress, almost not noticing time go by as you span your branches through cube after cube.
“It draws you in,” says Nikitas Serafetinidis ― or Nseraf, as he’s known in-game. “There’s an unexplained component that makes this game highly addictive.”
Serafetinidis is the world record holder in EyeWire, a game whose players are helping to build a three-dimensional map of brain cells in the retina. The images in EyeWire are in fact photos taken with an electron microscope at the Max Planck Institute of Medical Research in Heidelberg: each one represents a tiny sliver of a mouse’s retina, just 20 nanometers thick. The “blobs” are thin slices of closely adjoined neurons, and the “branch” shows the path of a single cell, which can cross through hundreds of thousands of those images….(More)”

Advances in Crowdsourcing


New book edited by Garrigos-Simon, Fernando J., Gil-Pechuán, Ignacio, Estelles-Miguel, Sofia: “This book attempts to link some of the recent advances in crowdsourcing with advances in innovation and management. It contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it provides a global definition, insights and examples of this managerial perspective resulting in a theoretical framework. Second, it explores the relationship between crowdsourcing and technological innovation, the development of social networks and new behaviors of Internet users. Third, it explores different crowdsourcing applications in various sectors such as medicine, tourism, information and communication technology (ICT), and marketing. Fourth, it observes the ways in which crowdsourcing can improve production, finance, management and overall managerial performance.

Crowdsourcing, also known as “massive outsourcing” or “voluntary outsourcing,” is the act of taking a job or a specific task usually performed by an employee of a company or contractors, and outsourcing it to a large group of people or a community (crowd or mass) via the Internet, through an open call. The term was coined by Jeff Howe in a 2006 issue of Wired magazine. It is being developed in different sciences (i.e., medicine, engineering, ICT, management) and is used in the most successful companies of the modern era (i.e., Apple, Facebook, Inditex, Starbucks). The developments in crowdsourcing has theoretical and practical implications, which will be explored in this book.

Including contributions from international academics, scholars and professionals within the field, this book provides a global, multidimensional perspective on crowdsourcing.​…(More)”

Slacktivism and the social benefits of social video: Sharing a video to ‘help’ a cause


Cat Jones at FirstMonday: “Interest in online ‘slacktivism’ is high both within and outside academia, and the online sharing of cause-related campaigns is increasing, but research into the extent to which ‘slacktivism’ applies to the act of sharing online content to ‘help’ a cause is limited. Slacktivism, as used in much of today’s popular discourse, is defined as ‘feel-good online activism [with] zero political or social impact’ (Morozov, 2009). Here, a survey-based analysis investigates social videos’ impacts on U.K. and U.S. viewers. Results show that the stronger viewers’ motivations are to share to help a cause, the stronger their motivations are to find out more afterwards. Further, a case study shows that social videos that motivate viewers to share the video ‘because it’s for a good cause, and I want to help’ (cause-related sharing versus, for example, to appear knowledgeable about a subject), can also prompt real-life actions, including donations. These results indicate that cause-related video sharing does have an impact, and therefore is not slacktivism by Morozov’s definition. Preliminary analysis suggests that of viewers sharing to ‘help’ causes, those discriminating in their choice of sharing audience (narrow vs. broad) are more likely to further engage than indiscriminate sharers. Result patterns from U.S. narrowcast sharers differ from those of other groups, indicating that tie strength and cultural differences may play a role in modifying slacktivist behaviors….(More)”

India asks its citizens: please digitise our files


Joshua Chambers in FutureGov: “India has asked its citizens to help digitise records so that it can move away from paper processes.

Using its crowdsourcing web site MyGov, the government wrote that “we cannot talk of Digital India and transforming India into a knowledge society if most of the transactions continue to be physical.”

It is “essential” that paper records are converted into machine readable digital versions, the government added, but “the cost of such digitisation is very large and existing budgetary constraints of government and many other organisations do not allow such lavish digitisation effort.”

Consequently, the government is asking citizens for advice on how to build a cheap content management system and tools that will allow it to crowdsource records transcriptions. Citizens would be rewarded for every word that they transcribe through a points system, which can then be recouped into cash prizes.

“The proposed platform will create earning and income generation opportunities for our literate rural and urban citizens, develop digital literacy and IT skills and include them in the making of Digital India,” the government added.

The announcement also noted the importance of privacy, suggesting that documents are split so that no portion gives any clue regarded the overall content of the document.

Instead, two people will be given the same words to transcribe, and the software will compare their statements to ensure accuracy. Only successful transcription will be rewarded with points….(More)”