Meet the UK start-ups changing the world with open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Sophie Curtis in The Telegraph: “Data is more accessible today than anyone could have imagined 10 or 20 years ago. From corporate databases to social media and embedded sensors, data is exploding, with total worldwide volume expected to reach 6.6 zettabytes by 2020.
Open data is information that is available for anyone to use, for any purpose, at no cost. For example, the Department for Education publishes open data about the performance of schools in England, so that companies can create league tables and citizens can find the best-performing schools in their catchment area.
Governments worldwide are working to open up more of their data. Since January 2010, more than 18,500 UK government data sets have been released via the data.gov.uk web portal, creating new opportunities for organisations to build innovative digital services.
Businesses are also starting to realise the value of making their non-personal data freely available, with open innovation leading to the creation products and services that they can benefit from….

Now a range of UK start-ups are working with the ODI to build businesses using open data, and have already unlocked a total of £2.5 million worth of investments and contracts.
Mastodon C joined the ODI start-up programme at its inception in December 2012. Shortly after joining, the company teamed up with Ben Goldacre and Open Healthcare UK, and embarked on a project investigating the use of branded statins over the far cheaper generic versions.
The data analysis identified potential efficiency savings to the NHS of £200 million. The company is now also working with the Technology Strategy Board and Nesta to help them gain better insight into their data.
Another start-up, CarbonCulture is a community platform designed to help people use resources more efficiently. The company uses high-tech metering to monitor carbon use in the workplace and help clients save money.
Organisations such as 10 Downing Street, Tate, Cardiff Council, the GLA and the UK Parliament are using the company’s digital tools to monitor and improve their energy consumption. CarbonCulture has also helped the Department of Energy and Climate Change reduce its gas use by 10 per cent.
Spend Network’s business is built on collecting the spend statements and tender documents published by government in the UK and Europe and then publishing this data openly so that anyone can use it. The company currently hosts over £1.2 trillion of transactions from the UK and over 1.8 million tenders from across Europe.
One of the company’s major breakthroughs was creating the first national, open spend analysis for central and local government. This was used to uncover a 45 per cent delay in the UK’s tendering process, holding up £22 billion of government funds to the economy.
Meanwhile, TransportAPI uses open data feeds from Traveline, Network Rail and Transport for London to provide nationwide timetables, departure and infrastructure information across all modes of public transport.
TransportAPI currently has 700 developers and organisations signed up to its platform, including individual taxpayers and public sector organisations like universities and local authorities. Travel portals, hyperlocal sites and business analytics are also integrating features, such as the ‘nearest transport’ widget, into their websites.
These are just four examples of how start-ups are using open data to create new digital services. The ODI this week announced seven new open data start-ups joining the programme, covering 3D printed learning materials, helping disabled communities, renewable energy markets, and smart cities….”

Is Crowdsourcing the Future for Legislation?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Brian Heaton in GovTech: “…While drafting legislation is traditionally the job of elected officials, an increasing number of lawmakers are using digital platforms such as Wikispaces and GitHub to give constituents a bigger hand in molding the laws they’ll be governed by. The practice has been used this year in both California and New York City, and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon, experts say.
Trond Undheim, crowdsourcing expert and founder of Yegii Inc., a startup company that provides and ranks advanced knowledge assets in the areas of health care, technology, energy and finance, said crowdsourcing was “certainly viable” as a tool to help legislators understand what constituents are most passionate about.
“I’m a big believer in asking a wide variety of people the same question and crowdsourcing has become known as the long-tail of answers,” Undheim said. “People you wouldn’t necessarily think of have something useful to say.”
California Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Los Angeles, agreed. He’s spearheaded an effort this year to let residents craft legislation regarding probate law — a measure designed to allow a court to assign a guardian to a deceased person’s pet. Gatto used the online Wikispaces platform — which allows for Wikipedia-style editing and content contribution — to let anyone with an Internet connection collaborate on the legislation over a period of several months.
The topic of the bill may not have been headline news, but Gatto was encouraged by the media attention his experiment received. As a result, he’s committed to running another crowdsourced bill next year — just on a bigger, more mainstream public issue.
New York City Council Member Ben Kallos has a plethora of technology-related legislation being considered in the Big Apple. Many of the bills are open for public comment and editing on GitHub. In an interview with Government Technology last month, Kallos said he believes using crowdsourcing to comment on and edit legislation is empowering and creates a different sense of democracy where people can put forward their ideas.
County governments also are joining the crowdsourcing trend. The Catawba Regional Council of Governments in South Carolina and the Centralia Council of Governments in North Carolina are gathering opinions on how county leaders should plan for future growth in the region.
At a public forum earlier this year, attendees were given iPads to go online and review four growth options and record their views on which they preferred. The priorities outlined by citizens will be taken back to decision-makers in each of the counties to see how well existing plans match up with what the public wants.
Gatto said he’s encouraged by how quickly the crowdsourcing of policy has spread throughout the U.S. He said there’s a disconnect between governments and their constituencies who believe elected officials don’t listen. But that could change as crowdsourcing continues to make its impact on lawmakers.
“When you put out a call like I did and others have done and say ‘I’m going to let the public draft a law and whatever you draft, I’m committed to introducing it … I think that’s a powerful message,” Gatto said. “I think the public appreciates it because it makes them understand that the government still belongs to them.”

Protecting the Process

Despite the benefits crowdsourcing brings to the legislative process, there remain some question marks about whether it truly provides insight into the public’s feelings on an issue. For example, because many political issues are driven by the influence of special interest groups, what’s preventing those groups from manipulating the bill-drafting process?
Not much, according to Undheim. He cautioned policymakers to be aware of the motivations from people taking part in crowdsourcing efforts to write and edit laws. Gatto shared Undheim’s concerns, but noted that the platform he used for developing his probate law – Wikispaces – has safeguards in place so that a member of his staff can revert language of a crowdsourced bill back to a previous version if it’s determined that someone was trying to unduly influence the drafting process….”

Urban Analytics (Updated and Expanded)

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. In this edition, we explore the literature on Urban Analytics. To suggest additional readings on this or any other topic, please email biblio@thegovlab.org.

Data and its uses for Governance

Urban Analytics places better information in the hands of citizens as well as government officials to empower people to make more informed choices. Today, we are able to gather real-time information about traffic, pollution, noise, and environmental and safety conditions by culling data from a range of tools: from the low-cost sensors in mobile phones to more robust monitoring tools installed in our environment. With data collected and combined from the built, natural and human environments, we can develop more robust predictive models and use those models to make policy smarter.

With the computing power to transmit and store the data from these sensors, and the tools to translate raw data into meaningful visualizations, we can identify problems as they happen, design new strategies for city management, and target the application of scarce resources where they are most needed.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
Amini, L., E. Bouillet, F. Calabrese, L. Gasparini, and O. Verscheure. “Challenges and Results in City-scale Sensing.” In IEEE Sensors, 59–61, 2011. http://bit.ly/1doodZm.

  • This paper examines “how city requirements map to research challenges in machine learning, optimization, control, visualization, and semantic analysis.”
  • The authors raises several research challenges including how to extract accurate information when the data is noisy and sparse; how to represent findings from digital pervasive technologies; and how people interact with one another and their environment.

Batty, M., K. W. Axhausen, F. Giannotti, A. Pozdnoukhov, A. Bazzani, M. Wachowicz, G. Ouzounis, and Y. Portugali. “Smart Cities of the Future.” The European Physical Journal Special Topics 214, no. 1 (November 1, 2012): 481–518. http://bit.ly/HefbjZ.

  • This paper explores the goals and research challenges involved in the development of smart cities that merge ICT with traditional infrastructures through digital technologies.
  • The authors put forth several research objectives, including: 1) to explore the notion of the city as a laboratory for innovation; 2) to develop technologies that ensure equity, fairness and realize a better quality of city life; and 3) to develop technologies that ensure informed participation and create shared knowledge for democratic city governance.
  • The paper also examines several contemporary smart city initiatives, expected paradigm shifts in the field, benefits, risks and impacts.

Budde, Paul. “Smart Cities of Tomorrow.” In Cities for Smart Environmental and Energy Futures, edited by Stamatina Th Rassia and Panos M. Pardalos, 9–20. Energy Systems. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2014. http://bit.ly/17MqPZW.

  • This paper examines the components and strategies involved in the creation of smart cities featuring “cohesive and open telecommunication and software architecture.”
  • In their study of smart cities, the authors examine smart and renewable energy; next-generation networks; smart buildings; smart transport; and smart government.
  • They conclude that for the development of smart cities, information and communication technology (ICT) is needed to build more horizontal collaborative structures, useful data must be analyzed in real time and people and/or machines must be able to make instant decisions related to social and urban life.

Cardone, G., L. Foschini, P. Bellavista, A. Corradi, C. Borcea, M. Talasila, and R. Curtmola. “Fostering Participaction in Smart Cities: a Geo-social Crowdsensing Platform.” IEEE Communications
Magazine 51, no. 6 (2013): 112–119. http://bit.ly/17iJ0vZ.

  • This article examines “how and to what extent the power of collective although imprecise intelligence can be employed in smart cities.”
  • To tackle problems of managing the crowdsensing process, this article proposes a “crowdsensing platform with three main original technical aspects: an innovative geo-social model to profile users along different variables, such as time, location, social interaction, service usage, and human activities; a matching algorithm to autonomously choose people to involve in participActions and to quantify the performance of their sensing; and a new Android-based platform to collect sensing data from smart phones, automatically or with user help, and to deliver sensing/actuation tasks to users.”

Chen, Chien-Chu. “The Trend towards ‘Smart Cities.’” International Journal of Automation and Smart Technology. June 1, 2014. http://bit.ly/1jOOaAg.

  • In this study, Chen explores the ambitions, prevalence and outcomes of a variety of smart cities, organized into five categories:
    • Transportation-focused smart cities
    • Energy-focused smart cities
    • Building-focused smart cities
    • Water-resources-focused smart cities
    • Governance-focused smart cities
  • The study finds that the “Asia Pacific region accounts for the largest share of all smart city development plans worldwide, with 51% of the global total. Smart city development plans in the Asia Pacific region tend to be energy-focused smart city initiatives, aimed at easing the pressure on energy resources that will be caused by continuing rapid urbanization in the future.”
  • North America, on the other hand is generally more geared toward energy-focused smart city development plans. “In North America, there has been a major drive to introduce smart meters and smart electric power grids, integrating the electric power sector with information and communications technology (ICT) and replacing obsolete electric power infrastructure, so as to make cities’ electric power systems more reliable (which in turn can help to boost private-sector investment, stimulate the growth of the ‘green energy’ industry, and create more job opportunities).”
  • Looking to Taiwan as an example, Chen argues that, “Cities in different parts of the world face different problems and challenges when it comes to urban development, making it necessary to utilize technology applications from different fields to solve the unique problems that each individual city has to overcome; the emphasis here is on the development of customized solutions for smart city development.”

Domingo, A., B. Bellalta, M. Palacin, M. Oliver and E. Almirall. “Public Open Sensor Data: Revolutionizing Smart Cities.” Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE 32, No. 4. Winter 2013. http://bit.ly/1iH6ekU.

  • In this article, the authors explore the “enormous amount of information collected by sensor devices” that allows for “the automation of several real-time services to improve city management by using intelligent traffic-light patterns during rush hour, reducing water consumption in parks, or efficiently routing garbage collection trucks throughout the city.”
  • They argue that, “To achieve the goal of sharing and open data to the public, some technical expertise on the part of citizens will be required. A real environment – or platform – will be needed to achieve this goal.” They go on to introduce a variety of “technical challenges and considerations involved in building an Open Sensor Data platform,” including:
    • Scalability
    • Reliability
    • Low latency
    • Standardized formats
    • Standardized connectivity
  • The authors conclude that, despite incredible advancements in urban analytics and open sensing in recent years, “Today, we can only imagine the revolution in Open Data as an introduction to a real-time world mashup with temperature, humidity, CO2 emission, transport, tourism attractions, events, water and gas consumption, politics decisions, emergencies, etc., and all of this interacting with us to help improve the future decisions we make in our public and private lives.”

Harrison, C., B. Eckman, R. Hamilton, P. Hartswick, J. Kalagnanam, J. Paraszczak, and P. Williams. “Foundations for Smarter Cities.” IBM Journal of Research and Development 54, no. 4 (2010): 1–16. http://bit.ly/1iha6CR.

  • This paper describes the information technology (IT) foundation and principles for Smarter Cities.
  • The authors introduce three foundational concepts of smarter cities: instrumented, interconnected and intelligent.
  • They also describe some of the major needs of contemporary cities, and concludes that Creating the Smarter City implies capturing and accelerating flows of information both vertically and horizontally.

Hernández-Muñoz, José M., Jesús Bernat Vercher, Luis Muñoz, José A. Galache, Mirko Presser, Luis A. Hernández Gómez, and Jan Pettersson. “Smart Cities at the Forefront of the Future Internet.” In The Future Internet, edited by John Domingue, Alex Galis, Anastasius Gavras, Theodore Zahariadis, Dave Lambert, Frances Cleary, Petros Daras, et al., 447–462. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6656. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011. http://bit.ly/HhNbMX.

  • This paper explores how the “Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Services (IoS), can become building blocks to progress towards a unified urban-scale ICT platform transforming a Smart City into an open innovation platform.”
  • The authors examine the SmartSantander project to argue that, “the different stakeholders involved in the smart city business is so big that many non-technical constraints must be considered (users, public administrations, vendors, etc.).”
  • The authors also discuss the need for infrastructures at the, for instance, European level for realistic large-scale experimentally-driven research.

Hoon-Lee, Jung, Marguerite Gong Hancock, Mei-Chih Hu. “Towards an effective framework for building smart cities: Lessons from Seoul and San Francisco.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Ocotober 3, 2013. http://bit.ly/1rzID5v.

  • In this study, the authors aim to “shed light on the process of building an effective smart city by integrating various practical perspectives with a consideration of smart city characteristics taken from the literature.”
  • They propose a conceptual framework based on case studies from Seoul and San Francisco built around the following dimensions:
    • Urban openness
    • Service innovation
    • Partnerships formation
    • Urban proactiveness
    • Smart city infrastructure integration
    • Smart city governance
  • The authors conclude with a summary of research findings featuring “8 stylized facts”:
    • Movement towards more interactive services engaging citizens;
    • Open data movement facilitates open innovation;
    • Diversifying service development: exploit or explore?
    • How to accelerate adoption: top-down public driven vs. bottom-up market driven partnerships;
    • Advanced intelligent technology supports new value-added smart city services;
    • Smart city services combined with robust incentive systems empower engagement;
    • Multiple device & network accessibility can create network effects for smart city services;
    • Centralized leadership implementing a comprehensive strategy boosts smart initiatives.

Kamel Boulos, Maged N. and Najeeb M. Al-Shorbaji. “On the Internet of Things, smart cities and the WHO Healthy Cities.” International Journal of Health Geographics 13, No. 10. 2014. http://bit.ly/Tkt9GA.

  • In this article, the authors give a “brief overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) for cities, offering examples of IoT-powered 21st century smart cities, including the experience of the Spanish city of Barcelona in implementing its own IoT-driven services to improve the quality of life of its people through measures that promote an eco-friendly, sustainable environment.”
  • The authors argue that one of the central needs for harnessing the power of the IoT and urban analytics is for cities to “involve and engage its stakeholders from a very early stage (city officials at all levels, as well as citizens), and to secure their support by raising awareness and educating them about smart city technologies, the associated benefits, and the likely challenges that will need to be overcome (such as privacy issues).”
  • They conclude that, “The Internet of Things is rapidly gaining a central place as key enabler of the smarter cities of today and the future. Such cities also stand better chances of becoming healthier cities.”

Keller, Sallie Ann, Steven E. Koonin, and Stephanie Shipp. “Big Data and City Living – What Can It Do for Us?” Significance 9, no. 4 (2012): 4–7. http://bit.ly/166W3NP.

  • This article provides a short introduction to Big Data, its importance, and the ways in which it is transforming cities. After an overview of the social benefits of big data in an urban context, the article examines its challenges, such as privacy concerns and institutional barriers.
  • The authors recommend that new approaches to making data available for research are needed that do not violate the privacy of entities included in the datasets. They believe that balancing privacy and accessibility issues will require new government regulations and incentives.

Kitchin, Rob. “The Real-Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, July 3, 2013. http://bit.ly/1aamZj2.

  • This paper focuses on “how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’ which enable real-time analysis of city life, new modes of technocratic urban governance, and a re-imagining of cities.”
  • The authors provide “a number of projects that seek to produce a real-time analysis of the city and provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism.”

Mostashari, A., F. Arnold, M. Maurer, and J. Wade. “Citizens as Sensors: The Cognitive City Paradigm.” In 2011 8th International Conference Expo on Emerging Technologies for a Smarter World (CEWIT), 1–5, 2011. http://bit.ly/1fYe9an.

  • This paper argues that. “implementing sensor networks are a necessary but not sufficient approach to improving urban living.”
  • The authors introduce the concept of the “Cognitive City” – a city that can not only operate more efficiently due to networked architecture, but can also learn to improve its service conditions, by planning, deciding and acting on perceived conditions.
  • Based on this conceptualization of a smart city as a cognitive city, the authors propose “an architectural process approach that allows city decision-makers and service providers to integrate cognition into urban processes.”

Oliver, M., M. Palacin, A. Domingo, and V. Valls. “Sensor Information Fueling Open Data.” In Computer Software and Applications Conference Workshops (COMPSACW), 2012 IEEE 36th Annual, 116–121, 2012. http://bit.ly/HjV4jS.

  • This paper introduces the concept of sensor networks as a key component in the smart cities framework, and shows how real-time data provided by different city network sensors enrich Open Data portals and require a new architecture to deal with massive amounts of continuously flowing information.
  • The authors’ main conclusion is that by providing a framework to build new applications and services using public static and dynamic data that promote innovation, a real-time open sensor network data platform can have several positive effects for citizens.

Perera, Charith, Arkady Zaslavsky, Peter Christen and Dimitrios Georgakopoulos. “Sensing as a service model for smart cities supported by Internet of Things.” Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 25, Issue 1. January 2014. http://bit.ly/1qJLDP9.

  • This paper looks into the “enormous pressure towards efficient city management” that has “triggered various Smart City initiatives by both government and private sector businesses to invest in information and communication technologies to find sustainable solutions to the growing issues.”
  • The authors explore the parallel advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT), which “envisions to connect billions of sensors to the Internet and expects to use them for efficient and effective resource management in Smart Cities.”
  • The paper proposes the sensing as a service model “as a solution based on IoT infrastructure.” The sensing as a service model consists of four conceptual layers: “(i) sensors and sensor owners; (ii) sensor publishers (SPs); (iii) extended service providers (ESPs); and (iv) sensor data consumers. They go on to describe how this model would work in the areas of waste management, smart agriculture and environmental management.

Privacy, Big Data, and the Public Good: Frameworks for Engagement. Edited by Julia Lane, Victoria Stodden, Stefan Bender, and Helen Nissenbaum; Cambridge University Press, 2014. http://bit.ly/UoGRca.

  • This book focuses on the legal, practical, and statistical approaches for maximizing the use of massive datasets while minimizing information risk.
  • “Big data” is more than a straightforward change in technology.  It poses deep challenges to our traditions of notice and consent as tools for managing privacy.  Because our new tools of data science can make it all but impossible to guarantee anonymity in the future, the authors question whether it possible to truly give informed consent, when we cannot, by definition, know what the risks are from revealing personal data either for individuals or for society as a whole.
  • Based on their experience building large data collections, authors discuss some of the best practical ways to provide access while protecting confidentiality.  What have we learned about effective engineered controls?  About effective access policies?  About designing data systems that reinforce – rather than counter – access policies?  They also explore the business, legal, and technical standards necessary for a new deal on data.
  • Since the data generating process or the data collection process is not necessarily well understood for big data streams, authors discuss what statistics can tell us about how to make greatest scientific use of this data. They also explore the shortcomings of current disclosure limitation approaches and whether we can quantify the extent of privacy loss.

Schaffers, Hans, Nicos Komninos, Marc Pallot, Brigitte Trousse, Michael Nilsson, and Alvaro Oliveira. “Smart Cities and the Future Internet: Towards Cooperation Frameworks for Open Innovation.” In The Future Internet, edited by John Domingue, Alex Galis, Anastasius Gavras, Theodore Zahariadis, Dave Lambert, Frances Cleary, Petros Daras, et al., 431–446. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6656. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011. http://bit.ly/16ytKoT.

  • This paper “explores ‘smart cities’ as environments of open and user-driven innovation for experimenting and validating Future Internet-enabled services.”
  • The authors examine several smart city projects to illustrate the central role of users in defining smart services and the importance of participation. They argue that, “Two different layers of collaboration can be distinguished. The first layer is collaboration within the innovation process. The second layer concerns collaboration at the territorial level, driven by urban and regional development policies aiming at strengthening the urban innovation systems through creating effective conditions for sustainable innovation.”

Suciu, G., A. Vulpe, S. Halunga, O. Fratu, G. Todoran, and V. Suciu. “Smart Cities Built on Resilient Cloud Computing and Secure Internet of Things.” In 2013 19th International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS), 513–518, 2013. http://bit.ly/16wfNgv.

  • This paper proposes “a new platform for using cloud computing capacities for provision and support of ubiquitous connectivity and real-time applications and services for smart cities’ needs.”
  • The authors present a “framework for data procured from highly distributed, heterogeneous, decentralized, real and virtual devices (sensors, actuators, smart devices) that can be automatically managed, analyzed and controlled by distributed cloud-based services.”

Townsend, Anthony. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.

  • In this book, Townsend illustrates how “cities worldwide are deploying technology to address both the timeless challenges of government and the mounting problems posed by human settlements of previously unimaginable size and complexity.”
  • He also considers “the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings” of the many stakeholders involved in the development of smart cities, and poses a new civics to guide these efforts.
  • He argues that smart cities are not made smart by various, soon-to-be-obsolete technologies built into its infrastructure, but how citizens use these ever-changing technologies to be “human-centered, inclusive and resilient.”

To stay current on recent writings and developments on Urban Analytics, please subscribe to the GovLab Digest.
Did we miss anything? Please submit reading recommendations to biblio@thegovlab.org or in the comments below.

Making We the People More User-Friendly Than Ever

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The White House: “With more than 14 million users and 21 million signatures, We the People, the White House’s online petition platform, has proved more popular than we ever thought possible. In the nearly three years since launch, we’ve heard from you on a huge range of topics, and issued more than 225 responses.

But we’re not stopping there. We’ve been working to make it easier to sign a petition and today we’re proud to announce the next iteration of We the People.

Since launch, we’ve heard from users who wanted a simpler, more streamlined way to sign petitions without creating an account and logging in every time. This latest update makes that a reality.

We’re calling it “simplified signing” and it takes the account creation step out of signing a petition. As of today, just enter your basic information, confirm your signature via email and you’re done. That’s it. No account to create, no logging in, no passwords to remember.

We the People User Statistics

That’s great news for new users, but we’re betting it’ll be welcomed by our returning signers, too. If you signed a petition six months ago and you don’t remember your password, you don’t have to worry about resetting it. Just enter your email address, confirm your signature, and you’re done.

Go check it out right now on petitions.whitehouse.gov.“

How Crowdsourced Astrophotographs on the Web Are Revolutionizing Astronomy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Astrophotography is currently undergoing a revolution thanks to the increased availability of high quality digital cameras and the software available to process the pictures after they have been taken.
Since photographs of the night sky are almost always better with long exposures that capture more light, this processing usually involves combining several images of the same part of the sky to produce one with a much longer effective exposure.
That’s all straightforward if you’ve taken the pictures yourself with the same gear under the same circumstances. But astronomers want to do better.
“The astrophotography group on Flickr alone has over 68,000 images,” say Dustin Lang at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a couple of pals. These and other images represent a vast source of untapped data for astronomers.
The problem is that it’s hard to combine images accurately when little is known about how they were taken. Astronomers take great care to use imaging equipment in which the pixels produce a signal that is proportional to the number of photons that hit.
But the same cannot be said of the digital cameras widely used by amateurs. All kinds of processes can end up influencing the final image.
So any algorithm that combines them has to cope with these variations. “We want to do this without having to infer the (possibly highly nonlinear) processing that has been applied to each individual image, each of which has been wrecked in its own loving way by its creator,” say Lang and co.
Now, these guys say they’ve cracked it. They’ve developed a system that automatically combines images from the same part of the sky to increase the effective exposure time of the resulting picture. And they say the combined images can rival those from much professional telescopes.
They’ve tested this approach by downloading images of two well-known astrophysical objects: the NGC 5907 Galaxy and the colliding pair of galaxies—Messier 51a and 51b.
For NGC 5907, they ended up with 4,000 images from Flickr, 1,000 from Bing and 100 from Google. They used an online system called astrometry.net that automatically aligns and registers images of the night sky and then combined the images using their new algorithm, which they call Enhance.
The results are impressive. They say that the combined images of NGC5907 (bottom three images) show some of the same faint features that revealed a single image taken over 11 hours of exposure using a 50 cm telescope (the top left image). All the images reveal the same kind of fine detail such as a faint stellar stream around the galaxy.
The combined image for the M51 galaxies is just as impressive, taking only 40 minutes to produce on a single processor. It reveals extended structures around both galaxies, which astronomers know to be debris from their gravitational interaction as they collide.
Lang and co say these faint features are hugely important because they allow astronomers to measure the age, mass ratios, and orbital configurations of the galaxies involved. Interestingly, many of these faint features are not visible in any of the input images taken from the Web. They emerge only once images have been combined.
One potential problem with algorithms like this is that they need to perform well as the number of images they combine increases. It’s no good if they grind to a halt as soon as a substantial amount of data becomes available.
On this score, Lang and co say astronomers can rest easy. The performance of their new Enhance algorithm scales linearly with the number of images it has to combine. That means it should perform well on large datasets.
The bottom line is that this kind of crowd-sourced astronomy has the potential to make a big impact, given that the resulting images rival those from large telescopes.
And it could also be used for historical images, say Lang and co. The Harvard Plate Archives, for example, contain half a million images dating back to the 1880s. These were all taken using different emulsions, with different exposures and developed using different processes. So the plates all have different responses to light, making them hard to compare.
That’s exactly the problem that Lang and co have solved for digital images on the Web. So it’s not hard to imagine how they could easily combine the data from the Harvard archives as well….”
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1406.1528 : Towards building a Crowd-Sourced Sky Map

Every citizen a scientist? An EU project tries to change the face of research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Project News from the European Commission:  “SOCIENTIZE builds on the concept of ‘Citizen Science’, which sees thousands of volunteers, teachers, researchers and developers put together their skills, time and resources to advance scientific research. Thanks to open source tools developed under the project, participants can help scientists collect data – which will then be analysed by professional researchers – or even perform tasks that require human cognition or intelligence like image classification or analysis.

Every citizen can be a scientist
The project helps usher in new advances in everything from astronomy to social science.
‘One breakthrough is our increased capacity to reproduce, analyse and understand complex issues thanks to the engagement of large groups of volunteers,’ says Mr Fermin Serrano Sanz, researcher at the University of Zaragoza and Project Coordinator of SOCIENTIZE. ‘And everyone can be a neuron in our digitally-enabled brain.’
But how can ordinary citizens help with such extraordinary science? The key, says Mr Serrano Sanz, is in harnessing the efforts of thousands of volunteers to collect and classify data. ‘We are already gathering huge amounts of user-generated data from the participants using their mobile phones and surrounding knowledge,’ he says.
For example, the experiment ‘SavingEnergy@Home’ asks users to submit data about the temperatures in their homes and neighbourhoods in order to build up a clearer picture of temperatures in cities across the EU, while in Spain, GripeNet.es asks citizens to report when they catch the flu in order to monitor outbreaks and predict possible epidemics.
Many Hands Make Light Work
But citizens can also help analyse data. Even the most advanced computers are not very good at recognising things like sun spots or cells, whereas people can tell the difference between living and dying cells very easily, given only a short training.
The SOCIENTIZE projects ‘Sun4All’ and ‘Cell Spotting’ ask volunteers to label images of solar activity and cancer cells from an application on their phone or computer. With Cell Spotting, for instance, participants can observe cell cultures being studied with a microscope in order to determine their state and the effectiveness of medicines. Analysing this data would take years and cost hundreds of thousands of euros if left to a small team of scientists – but with thousands of volunteers helping the effort, researchers can make important breakthroughs quickly and more cheaply than ever before.
But in addition to bringing citizens closer to science, SOCIENTIZE also brings science closer to citizens. On 12-14 June, the project participated in the SONAR festival with ‘A Collective Music Experiment’ (CME). ‘Two hundred people joined professional DJs and created musical patterns using a web tool; participants shared their creations and re-used other parts in real time. The activity in the festival also included a live show of RdeRumba and Mercadal playing amateurs rhythms’ Mr. Serrano Sanz explains.
The experiment – which will be presented in a mini-documentary to raise awareness about citizen science – is expected to help understand other innovation processes observed in emergent social, technological, economic or political transformations. ‘This kind of event brings together a really diverse set of participants. The diversity does not only enrich the data; it improves the dialogue between professionals and volunteers. As a result, we see some new and innovative approaches to research.’
The EUR 0.7 million project brings together 6 partners from 4 countries: Spain (University of Zaragoza and TECNARA), Portugal (Museu da Ciência-Coimbra, MUSC ; Universidade de Coimbra),  Austria (Zentrum für Soziale Innovation) and Brazil (Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, UFCG).
SOCIENTIZE will end in October 2104 after bringing together 12000 citizens in different phases of research activities for 24 months.”

Government, Foundations Turn to Cash Prizes to Generate Solutions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Megan O’Neil at the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Government agencies and philanthropic organizations are increasingly staging competitions as a way generate interest in solving difficult technological, social, and environmental problems, according to a new report.
“The Craft of Prize Design: Lessons From the Public Sector” found that well-designed competitions backed by cash incentives can help organizations attract new ideas, mobilize action, and stimulate markets.
“Incentive prizes have transformed from an exotic open innovation to a proven innovation strategy for the public, private, and philanthropic sectors,” the report says.
Produced by Deloitte Consulting’s innovation practice, the report was financially supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Case; Joyce; John S. and James L. Knight; Kresge; and Rockefeller foundations.
The federal government has staged more than 350 prize competitions during the past five years to stimulate innovation and crowdsource solutions, according to the report. And philanthropic organizations are also fronting prizes for competitions promoting innovative responses to questions such as how to strengthen communities and encourage sustainable energy consumption.
One example cited by the report is the Talent Dividend Prize, sponsored by CEOs for Cities and the Kresge Foundation, which awards $1-million to the city that most increases its college graduation rate during a four-year period. A second example is the MIT Clean Energy Prize, co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, which offered a total of $1 million in prize money. Submissions generated $85 million in capital and research grants, according to the report.
A prize-based project should not be adopted when an established approach to solve a problem already exists or if potential participants don’t have the interest or time to work on solving a problem, the report concludes. Instead, prize designers must gauge the capacity of potential participants before announcing a prize, and make sure that it will spur the discovery of new solutions.”

How collective intelligence emerges: knowledge creation process in Wikipedia from microscopic viewpoint

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kyungho Lee  for the 2014 International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces: “The Wikipedia, one of the richest human knowledge repositories on the Internet, has been developed by collective intelligence. To gain insight into Wikipedia, one asks how initial ideas emerge and develop to become a concrete article through the online collaborative process? Led by this question, the author performed a microscopic observation of the knowledge creation process on the recent article, “Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.” The author collected not only the revision history of the article but also investigated interactions between collaborators by making a user-paragraph network to reveal an intellectual intervention of multiple authors. The knowledge creation process on the Wikipedia article was categorized into 4 major steps and 6 phases from the beginning to the intellectual balance point where only revisions were made. To represent this phenomenon, the author developed a visaphor (digital visual metaphor) to digitally represent the article’s evolving concepts and characteristics. Then the author created a dynamic digital information visualization using particle effects and network graph structures. The visaphor reveals the interaction between users and their collaborative efforts as they created and revised paragraphs and debated aspects of the article.”

Crowdsourcing moving beyond the fringe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bob Brown in Networked World: ” Depending up on how you look at it, crowdsourcing is all the rage these days — think Wikipedia, X Prize and Kickstarter — or at the other extreme, greatly underused.
To the team behind the new “insight network” Yegii, crowdsourcing has not nearly reached its potential despite having its roots as far back as the early 1700s and a famous case of the British Government seeking a solution to “The Longitude Problem” in order to make sailing less life threatening. (I get the impression that mention of this example is obligatory at any crowdsourcing event.)
This angel-funded startup, headed by an MIT Sloan School of Management senior lecturer and operating from a Boston suburb, is looking to exploit crowdsourcing’s potential through a service that connects financial, healthcare, technology and other organizations seeking knowledge with experts who can provide it – and fairly fast. To CEO Trond Undheim, crowdsourcing is “no longer for fringe freelance work,” and the goal is to get more organizations and smart individuals involved.
“Yegii is essentially a network of networks, connecting people, organizations, and knowledge in new ways,” says Undheim, who explains that the name Yegii is Korean for “talk” or “discussion”. “Our focus is laser sharp: we only rank and rate knowledge that says something essential about what I see as the four forces of industry disruption: technology, policy, user dynamics and business models.  We tackle challenging business issues across domains, from life sciences to energy to finance.  The point is that today’s industry classification is falling apart. We need more specific insight than in-house strategizing or generalist consulting advice.”
Undheim attempted to drum up interest in the new business last week at an event at Babson College during which a handful of crowdsourcing experts spoke. Harvard Business School adjunct professor Alan MacCormack discussed the X Prize, Netflix Prize and other examples of spurring competition through crowdsourcing. MIT’s Peter Gloor extolled the virtue of collaborative and smart swarms of people vs. stupid crowds (such as football hooligans). A couple of advertising/marketing execs shared stories of how clients and other brands are increasingly tapping into their customer base and the general public for new ideas from slogans to products, figuring that potential new customers are more likely to trust their peers than corporate ads. Another speaker dove into more details about how to run a crowdsourcing challenge, which includes identifying motivation that goes beyond money.
All of this was to frame Yegii’s crowdsourcing plan, which is at the beta stage with about a dozen clients (including Akamai and Santander bank) and is slated for mass production later this year. Yegii’s team consists of five part-timers, plus a few interns, who are building a web-based platform that consists of “knowledge assets,” that is market research, news reports and datasets from free and paid sources. That content – on topics that range from Bitcoin’s impact on banks to telecom bandwidth costs — is reviewed and ranked through a combination of machine learning and human peers. Information seekers would pay Yegii up to hundreds of dollars per month or up to tens of thousands of dollars per project, and then multidisciplinary teams would accept the challenge of answering their questions via customized reports within staged deadlines.
“We are focused on building partnerships with other expert networks and associations that have access to smart people with spare capacity, wherever they are,” Undheim says.
One reason organizations can benefit from crowdsourcing, Undheim says, is because of the “ephemeral nature of expertise in today’s society.” In other words, people within your organization might think of themselves as experts in this or that, but when they really think about it, they might realize their level of expertise has faded. Yegii will strive to narrow down the best sources of information for those looking to come up to speed on a subject over a weekend, whereas hunting for that information across a vast search engine would not be nearly as efficient….”

Let's amplify California's collective intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gavin Newsom and Ken Goldberg at the SFGate: “Although the results of last week’s primary election are still being certified, we already know that voter turnout was among the lowest in California’s history. Pundits will rant about the “cynical electorate” and wag a finger at disengaged voters shirking their democratic duties, but we see the low turnout as a symptom of broader forces that affect how people and government interact.
The methods used to find out what citizens think and believe are limited to elections, opinion polls, surveys and focus groups. These methods may produce valuable information, but they are costly, infrequent and often conducted at the convenience of government or special interests.
We believe that new technology has the potential to increase public engagement by tapping the collective intelligence of Californians every day, not just on election day.
While most politicians already use e-mail and social media, these channels are easily dominated by extreme views and tend to regurgitate material from mass media outlets.
We’re exploring an alternative.
The California Report Card is a mobile-friendly web-based platform that streamlines and organizes public input for the benefit of policymakers and elected officials. The report card allows participants to assign letter grades to key issues and to suggest new ideas for consideration; public officials then can use that information to inform their decisions.
In an experimental version of the report card released earlier this year, residents from all 58 counties assigned more than 20,000 grades to the state of California and also suggested issues they feel deserve priority at the state level. As one participant noted: “This platform allows us to have our voices heard. The ability to review and grade what others suggest is important. It enables elected officials to hear directly how Californians feel.”
Initial data confirm that Californians approve of our state’s rollout of Obamacare, but are very concerned about the future of our schools and universities.
There was also a surprise. California Report Card suggestions for top state priorities revealed consistently strong interest and support for more attention to disaster preparedness. Issues related to this topic were graded as highly important by a broad cross section of participants across the state. In response, we’re testing new versions of the report card that can focus on topics related to wildfires and earthquakes.
The report card is part of an ongoing collaboration between the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative at UC Berkeley and the Office of the Lieutenant Governor to explore how technology can improve public communication and bring the government closer to the people. Our hunch is that engineering concepts can be adapted for public policy to rapidly identify real insights from constituents and resist gaming by special interests.
You don’t have to wait for the next election to have your voice heard by officials in Sacramento. The California Report Card is now accessible from cell phones, desktop and tablet computers. We encourage you to contribute your own ideas to amplify California’s collective intelligence. It’s easy, just click “participate” on this website: CaliforniaReportCard.org”