Book edited by Zeadally, Sherali and Badra, Mohamad: “This comprehensive textbook/reference presents a focused review of the state of the art in privacy research, encompassing a range of diverse topics. The first book of its kind designed specifically to cater to courses on privacy, this authoritative volume provides technical, legal, and ethical perspectives on privacy issues from a global selection of renowned experts. Features: examines privacy issues relating to databases, P2P networks, big data technologies, social networks, and digital information networks; describes the challenges of addressing privacy concerns in various areas; reviews topics of privacy in electronic health systems, smart grid technology, vehicular ad-hoc networks, mobile devices, location-based systems, and crowdsourcing platforms; investigates approaches for protecting privacy in cloud applications; discusses the regulation of personal information disclosure and the privacy of individuals; presents the tools and the evidence to better understand consumers’ privacy behaviors….(More)”
Using Crowdsourcing to Track the Next Viral Disease Outbreak
The TakeAway: “Last year’s Ebola outbreak in West Africa killed more than 11,000 people. The pandemic may be diminished, but public health officials think that another major outbreak of infectious disease is fast-approaching, and they’re busy preparing for it.
Boston public radio station WGBH recently partnered with The GroundTruth Project and NOVA Next on a series called “Next Outbreak.” As part of the series, they reported on an innovative global online monitoring system called HealthMap, which uses the power of the internet and crowdsourcing to detect and track emerging infectious diseases, and also more common ailments like the flu.
Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital are the ones behind HealthMap (see below), and they use it to tap into tens of thousands of sources of online data, including social media, news reports, and blogs to curate information about outbreaks. Dr. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and co-founder of HealthMap, says that smarter data collection can help to quickly detect and track emerging infectious diseases, fatal or not.
“Traditional public health is really slowed down by the communication process: People get sick, they’re seen by healthcare providers, they get laboratory confirmed, information flows up the channels to state and local health [agencies], national governments, and then to places like the WHO,” says Dr. Brownstein. “Each one of those stages can take days, weeks, or even months, and that’s the problem if you’re thinking about a virus that can spread around the world in a matter of days.”
The HealthMap team looks at a variety of communication channels to undo the existing hierarchy of health information.
“We make everyone a stakeholder when it comes to data about outbreaks, including consumers,” says Dr. Brownstein. “There are a suite of different tools that public health officials have at their disposal. What we’re trying to do is think about how to communicate and empower individuals to really understand what the risks are, what the true information is about a disease event, and what they can do to protect themselves and their families. It’s all about trying to demystify outbreaks.”
In addition to the map itself, the HealthMap team has a number of interactive tools that individuals can both use and contribute to. Dr. Brownstein hopes these resources will enable the public to care more about disease outbreaks that may be happening around them—it’s a way to put the “public” back in “public health,” he says.
“We have a app called Outbreaks Near Me that allows people to know about what disease outbreaks are happening in their neighborhood,” Dr. Brownstein says. “Flu Near You is a an app that people use to self report on symptoms; Vaccine Finder is a tool that allows people to know what vaccines are available to them and their community.”
In addition to developing their own app, the HealthMap has partnered with existing tech firms like Uber to spread the word about public health.
“We worked closely with Uber last year and actually put nurses in Uber cars and delivered vaccines to people,” Dr. Brownstein says. “The closest vaccine location might still be only a block away for people, but people are still hesitant to get it done.”…(More)”
Smart Citizens, Smarter State
Book by Beth Simone Noveck (TheGovLab): “Government “of the people, by the people, for the people” expresses an ideal that resonates in all democracies. Yet poll after poll reveals deep distrust of institutions that seem to have left “the people” out of the equation. Government bureaucracies that are supposed to solve critical problems on their own are a troublesome outgrowth of the professionalization of public life in the industrial age.They are especially ill-suited to confronting today’s complex challenges. Offering a far-reaching program for innovation, Smart Citizens, Smarter State suggests that public decision-making could be more effective and legitimate if our institutions knew how to use technology to leverage citizens’ expertise.
Drawing on a wide range of disciplines and practical examples from her work as an adviser to governments on innovation, Noveck explores how to create more open and collaborative institutions. She puts forward a profound new vision for participatory democracy rooted not in the paltry act of occasional voting or the serendipity of crowdsourcing, but in people’s knowledge and know-how.”
Check out http://smarterstate.org/
Smarter Government For Social Impact: A New Mindset For Better Outcomes
Report by Drive Impact: “From Kentucky to Arkansas to New York, government leaders across the United States are leveraging data, technology, and a heightened focus on outcomes to deliver social impact with modern solutions. In Louisville, Kentucky, “smart” asthma inhalers track where attacks happen citywide and feed this data into a government dashboard, helping policymakers identify hot spots to improve air quality and better treat patients. Policy leaders in New York and Texas are reforming Medicaid with “value-based payments” that reward doctors for performing preventive procedures that protect against costly tests and treatments down the road. In Arkansas, a digital government platform called Gov2Go connects citizens with a personalized console that sends reminders to file paperwork, renew registrations, and seek out other relevant government services.
What all of these initiatives share is a smarter approach to policymaking: an operating belief that government can and should reward the best policies and programs by paying for the best outcomes and using the best data and technology to identify solutions that can transform service delivery and strengthen citizens’ connection to government. These transformational policies are smarter government, and America needs more of it. Smarter government uses an outcomes mindset to embrace cutting-edge data and technology, make better funding choices, learn from policy failures and successes, act on new knowledge about what works, and align clear goals with the right incentives to achieve them. Americans need a smarter, outcomes-focused government for the twenty-first century—one that can identify and address systemic barriers to effective service delivery and seek out and promote innovative solutions to our greatest social challenges….(More)”
Distinguishing ‘Crowded’ Organizations from Groups and Communities: Is Three a Crowd?
Paper by Gianluigi Viscusi and Christopher L. Tucci: “In conventional wisdom on crowdsourcing, the number of people define the crowd and maximizing this number is often assumed to be the goal of any crowdsourcingexercise. However, we propose that there are structural characteristics of the crowd that might be more important than the sheer number of participants. These characteristics include (1) growth rate and its attractiveness to the members, (2) the equality among members, (3) the density within provisional boundaries, (4) the goal orientation of the crowd, and (5) the “seriality” of the interactions between members of the crowd. We then propose a typology that may allow managers to position their companies’ initiatives among four strategic types: crowd crystals, online communities, closed crowd, and open crowd driven innovation. We show that incumbent companies may prefer a closed and controlled access to the crowd, limiting the potential for gaining results and insights from fully open crowd-driven innovation initiatives. Consequently, we argue that the effects on industries and organizations by open crowds are still to be explored, possibly via the mechanisms of entrepreneurs exploiting open crowds as new entrants, but also for the configuration of industries such as, e.g., finance, pharmaceuticals, or even the public sector where the value created usually comes from interpretation issues and exploratory problem solving…(More).”
What is Citizensourcing?
Cities are a powerhouse of collective intelligence. Thanks to modern technologies, time has come to unlock the wisdom of the crowd.
Yesterday
Today
Tomorrow
Anyone can help with crowdsourcing future antibiotics
Springwise: “We’ve seen examples of researchers utilizing crowdsourcing to expand their datasets, such as a free mobile app where users help find data patterns in cancer research by playing games. Now a pop-up home lab is harnessing the power of citizen scientists to find future antibiotics in their backyards.
By developing a small home lab, UK-based Post/Biotics is encouraging anyone, including school children, to help find solutions to the growing antibiotics resistance crisis. Post/Biotics is a citizen’s science platform, which provides the toolkit, knowledge and science network so anyone can support antibiotic development. Participants can test samples of basically anything they find in natural areas, from soil to mushrooms, and if their sample has antibacterial properties, their tool will change color. They can then send results, along with a photo and GPS location to an online database. When the database notices a submission that may be interesting, it alerts researchers, who can then ask for samples. An open-source library of potential antimicrobials is then established, and users simultaneously benefit from learning how to conduct microbiology experiments.
Post/Biotics are using the power of an unlimited amount of citizen scientists to increase the research potential of antibiotic discovery….(More)”
Lawyer’s crowdsourcing site aims to help people have their day in court
Mary O’Hara in The Guardian: “With warnings coming thick and fast about the stark ramifications of the government’s sweeping cuts to legal aid, it was probably inevitable that someone would come up with a new way to plug some gaps in access to justice. Enter the legal crowdfunder, CrowdJustice, an online platform where people who might not otherwise get their case heard can raise cash to pay for legal representation and court costs.
The brainchild of 33-year-old lawyer Julia Salasky, and the first of its kind in the UK, CrowdJustice provides people who have a public interest case but lack adequate financial resources with a forum where they can publicise their case and, if all goes to plan, generate funding for legal action by attracting public support and donations.
“We are trying to increase access to justice – that’s the baseline,” says Salasky. “I think it’s a social good.”
The platform was launched just a few months ago, but has already attracteda range of cases both large and small, including some that could set important legal precedents.
CrowdJustice has helped the campaign, Jengba (Joint Enterprise: Not Guilty by Association) to raise funds to intervene in a supreme court case to consider reforming the law of joint enterprise that can find people guilty of a crime, including murder, committed by someone else. The group amassed £10,000 in donations for legal assistance as part of their ongoing challenge to the legal doctrine of “joint enterprise”, which disproportionately prosecutes people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds for violent crimes where it is alleged they have acted together for a common purpose.
In another case, a Northern Irish woman who discovered she wasn’t entitled to her partner’s occupational pension after he died because of a bureaucratic requirement that did not apply to married couples, used CrowdJustice to help raise money to take her case all the way to the supreme court. “If she wins, it will have an enormous precedent-setting value for the legal rights of all couples who cohabit,” Salasky says….(The Guardian)”
The Crowdsourcing Site That Wants to Pool Our Genomes
Ed Jong at the Atlantic: “…In 2010, I posted a vial of my finest spit to the genetic-testing company 23andme. In return, I got to see what my genes reveal about my ancestry, how they affect my risk of diseases or my responses to medical drugs, and even what they say about the texture of my earwax. (It’s dry.) 23andme now has around a million users, as do other similar companies like Ancestry.com.
But these communities are largely separated from one another, a situation that frustrated Yaniv Erlich from the New York Genome Center and Columbia University. “Tens of millions of people will soon have access to their genomes,” he says. “Are we just going to let these data sit in silos, or can we partner with these large communities to enable some really large science? That’s why we developed DNA.LAND.”
DNA.LAND, which Erlich developed together with colleague Joe Pickrell, is a website that allows customers of other genetic-testing services to upload files containing their genetic data. Scientists can then use this data for research, to the extent that each user consents to. “DNA.LAND is a way for getting the general public to participate in large-scale genetic studies,” says Erlich. “And we’re not a company. We’re a non-profit website, run by scientists.”…(More)”
Effectively Crowdsourcing the Acquisition and Analysis of Visual Data for Disaster Response
Hien To, Seon Ho Kim, and Cyrus Shahabi: “Efficient and thorough data collection and its timely analysis are critical for disaster response and recovery in order to save peoples lives during disasters. However, access to comprehensive data in disaster areas and their quick analysis to transform the data to actionable knowledge are challenging. With the popularity and pervasiveness of mobile devices, crowdsourcing data collection and analysis has emerged as an effective and scalable solution. This paper addresses the problem of crowdsourcing mobile videos for disasters by identifying two unique challenges of 1) prioritizing visualdata collection and transmission under bandwidth scarcity caused by damaged communication networks and 2) analyzing the acquired data in a timely manner. We introduce a new crowdsourcing framework for acquiring and analyzing the mobile videos utilizing fine granularity spatial metadata of videos for a rapidly changing disaster situation. We also develop an analytical model to quantify the visual awareness of a video based on its metadata and propose the visual awareness maximization problem for acquiring the most relevant data under bandwidth constraints. The collected videos are evenly distributed to off-site analysts to collectively minimize crowdsourcing efforts for analysis. Our simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed framework….(More)”