Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World

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Book by Andrew Leigh: “Experiments have consistently been used in the hard sciences, but in recent decades social scientists have adopted the practice. Randomized trials have been used to design policies to increase educational attainment, lower crime rates, elevate employment rates, and improve living standards among the poor.

This book tells the stories of radical researchers who have used experiments to overturn conventional wisdom. From finding the cure for scurvy to discovering what policies really improve literacy rates, Leigh shows how randomistas have shaped life as we know it. Written in a “Gladwell-esque” style, this book provides a fascinating account of key randomized control trial studies from across the globe and the challenges that randomistas have faced in getting their studies accepted and their findings implemented. In telling these stories, Leigh draws out key lessons learned and shows the most effective way to conduct these trials….(More)”.

The Wisdom of the Network: How Adaptive Networks Promote Collective Intelligence

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Paper by Alejandro Noriega-Campero , Abdullah Almaatouq, Peter Krafft, Abdulrahman Alotaibi, Mehdi Moussaid and Alex Pentland: “Social networks continuously change as people create new ties and break existing ones. It is widely noted that our social embedding exerts strong influence on what information we receive, and how we form beliefs and make decisions. However, most studies overlook the dynamic nature of social networks, and its role in fostering adaptive collective intelligence. It remains unknown (1) how network structures adapt to the performances of individuals, and (2) whether this adaptation promotes the accuracy of individual and collective decisions.

Here, we answer these questions through a series of behavioral experiments and simulations. Our results reveal that groups of people embedded in dynamic social networks can adapt to biased and non-stationary information environments. As a result, individual and collective accuracy is substantially improved over static networks and unconnected groups. Moreover, we show that groups in dynamic networks far outperform their best-performing member, and that even the best member’s judgment substantially benefits from group engagement. Thereby, our findings substantiate the role of dynamic social networks as adaptive mechanisms for refining individual and collective judgments….(More)”.

Crowdbreaks: Tracking Health Trends using Public Social Media Data and Crowdsourcing

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Paper by Martin Mueller and Marcel Salath: “In the past decade, tracking health trends using social media data has shown great promise, due to a powerful combination of massive adoption of social media around the world, and increasingly potent hardware and software that enables us to work with these new big data streams.

At the same time, many challenging problems have been identified. First, there is often a mismatch between how rapidly online data can change, and how rapidly algorithms are updated, which means that there is limited reusability for algorithms trained on past data as their performance decreases over time. Second, much of the work is focusing on specific issues during a specific past period in time, even though public health institutions would need flexible tools to assess multiple evolving situations in real time. Third, most tools providing such capabilities are proprietary systems with little algorithmic or data transparency, and thus little buy-in from the global public health and research community.

Here, we introduce Crowdbreaks, an open platform which allows tracking of health trends by making use of continuous crowdsourced labelling of public social media content. The system is built in a way which automatizes the typical workflow from data collection, filtering, labelling and training of machine learning classifiers and therefore can greatly accelerate the research process in the public health domain. This work introduces the technical aspects of the platform and explores its future use cases…(More)”.

Smarter Crowdsourcing for Anti-Corruption: A Handbook of Innovative Legal, Technical, and Policy Proposals and a Guide to their Implementation

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Paper by Noveck, Beth Simone; Koga, Kaitlin; Aceves Garcia, Rafael; Deleanu, Hannah; Cantú-Pedraza, Dinorah: “Corruption presents a fundamental threat to the stability and prosperity of Mexico and combating it demands approaches that are both principled and practical. In 2017, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) approved project ME-T1351 to support Mexico in its fight against corruption using Open Innovation. Thus, the IDB partnered with the Governance Lab at NYU to support Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Service (Secretaría de la Función Pública) to identify innovative ideas and then turns them into practical implementation plans for the measurement, detection, and prevention of corruption in Mexico using the GovLab’s open innovation methodology named Smarter Crowdsourcing.

The purpose of Smarter Crowdsourcing was to identify concrete solutions that include the use of data analysis and technology to tackle corruption in the public sector. This document contains 13 implementation plans laying out practical ways to address corruption. The plans emerged from “Smarter Crowdsourcing Anti-Corruption,” a method that is an agile process, which begins with robust problem definition followed by online sourcing of global expertise to surface innovative solutions. Smarter Crowdsourcing Anti-Corruption focused on six specific challenges: (i) measuring corruption and its costs, (ii) strengthening integrity in the judiciary, (iii) engaging the public in anti-corruption efforts, (iv) whistleblowing, (v) effective prosecution, and (vi) tracking and analyzing money flows…(More)”.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together

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Book by Thomas W. Malone: “If you’re like most people, you probably believe that humans are the most intelligent animals on our planet. But there’s another kind of entity that can be far smarter: groups of people. In this groundbreaking book, Thomas Malone, the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, shows how groups of people working together in superminds — like hierarchies, markets, democracies, and communities — have been responsible for almost all human achievements in business, government, science, and beyond. And these collectively intelligent human groups are about to get much smarter.

Using dozens of striking examples and case studies, Malone shows how computers can help create more intelligent superminds not just with artificial intelligence, but perhaps even more importantly with hyperconnectivity:  connecting humans to one another at massive scales and in rich new ways. Together, these changes will have far-reaching implications for everything from the way we buy groceries and plan business strategies to how we respond to climate change, and even for democracy itself. By understanding how these collectively intelligent groups work, we can learn how to harness their genius to achieve our human goals….(More)”.

Help NASA create the world’s largest landslide database

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

EarthSky: “Landslides cause thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in property damage each year. Surprisingly, very few centralized global landslide databases exist, especially those that are publicly available.

Now NASA scientists are working to fill the gap—and they want your help collecting information. In March 2018, NASA scientist Dalia Kirschbaum and several colleagues launched a citizen science project that will make it possible to report landslides you have witnessed, heard about in the news, or found on an online database. All you need to do is log into the Landslide Reporter portal and report the time, location, and date of the landslide – as well as your source of information. You are also encouraged to submit additional details, such as the size of the landslide and what triggered it. And if you have photos, you can upload them.

Kirschbaum’s team will review each entry and submit credible reports to the Cooperative Open Online Landslide Repository (COOLR) — which they hope will eventually be the largest global online landslide catalog available.

Landslide Reporter is designed to improve the quantity and quality of data in COOLR. Currently, COOLR contains NASA’s Global Landslide Catalog, which includes more than 11,000 reports on landslides, debris flows, and rock avalanches. Since the current catalog is based mainly on information from English-language news reports and journalists tend to cover only large and deadly landslides in densely populated areas, many landslides never make it into the database….(More)”.

Everyone can now patrol this city’s streets for crime. ACLU says that’s a bad idea

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

NJ.com: “All eyes are on the city of Newark, literally.  The city recently revealed its new “Citizen Virtual Patrol” program, which places 60 cameras around the city’s intersections, putting the city’s streets, and those who venture out on them, on display seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

That isn’t startling, as cameras have been up in the city for the past dozen years, says Anthony Ambrose, the city’s public safety director.

What is new, and not found in other cities, is that police officers won’t be the only ones trolling for criminals. Now, anyone who’s willing to submit their email address and upload an app onto their home computer or phone, can watch those cameras.

Citizens can then alert police when they see suspicious activity and remain anonymous.  “Right now, in this era of society, it’s impossible to be outside without being recorded,” said Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. “We need to be able to use that technology to allow the police to do their job more efficiently and more cost effective.”

Those extra eyes, however, come at a cost. The cameras could also provide stalkers with their victim’s whereabouts, show intimate scenes and even when residents leave their homes vacant as they head out on vacation.

The American Civil Liberties Association of New Jersey is asking Newark to end the program, saying it’s a violation of privacy and the Fourth Amendment.

“Newark is crowdsourcing it’s responsibility to the public instead of engaging in policing,” said ACLU-NJ Executive Director Amol Sinha.

“There’s a fundamental difference between a civilian using their phone to record a certain area than government having cameras where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy,” Sinha said….

The city also plans to launch a campaign informing residents about the cameras.

“It’s about transparency,” Ambrose said. “We’re not saying we put cameras out there and you don’t know where they are at, we’re telling you.” …(More)”.

Crowdsourcing & Data Analytics: The New Settlement Tools

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Paper by Chao, Bernard and Robertson, Christopher T. and Yokum, David V: “In the jury trial rights, the State and Federal Constitutions recognize the fundamental value of having laypersons resolve civil and criminal disputes. Nonetheless, settlement allows parties to avoid the risks and cost of trials, and settlements help clear court dockets efficiently. But achieving settlement can be a challenge. Parties naturally view their cases from different perspectives, and these perspectives often cause both sides to be overly optimistic. This article describes a novel method of providing parties more accurate information about the value of their case by incorporating layperson perspectives. Specifically, we suggest that working with mediators or settlement judges, the parties should create mini-trials and then recruit hundreds of online mock jurors to render decisions. By applying modern statistical techniques to these results, the mediators can show the parties the likelihood of possible outcomes and also collect qualitative information about strengths and weaknesses for each side. These data will counter the parties’ unrealistic views and thereby facilitate settlement….(More)”.

Citizen Representation in City Government-Driven Crowdsourcing

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Benjamin Y. Clark and Jeffrey L. Brudney in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): “This article examines the citizen representativeness of crowdsourcing achieved through 311 systems—the non-emergency and quality of life service request reporting systems used by local governments. Based on surveys of San Francisco residents conducted in 2011, 2013, and 2015, our findings suggest that no systematic biases exist in participation rates across a range of socio-economic indicators. In addition, the findings provide evidence that participation may be responding positively to the city’s responsiveness, thus creating a self-reinforcing process that benefits an increasingly diverse and representative body of users. This inquiry builds on earlier studies of Boston and San Francisco that show that 311 systems did not bias response to traditionally disadvantaged groups (lower socioeconomic status or racial/ethnic minorities) at the demand level nor from high-volume users….(More)”.

Open Social Innovation: Why and How Seekers Use Crowdsourcing for Societal Benefits

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Paper by Krithika Randhawa, Ralf Wilden Macquarie and Joel West: “Despite the increased research attention on crowdsourcing, we know little about why and how seeker organizations use this open innovation mechanism. Furthermore, previous studies have focused on profit-seeking firms, despite the use of open innovation practices by public sector organizations to achieve societal benefits. In this study, we investigate the organizational and project level choices of government (seekers) that crowdsource from citizens (solvers) to drive open social innovation, and thus develop new ways to address societal problems, a process referred to as “citizensourcing”.

Using a dataset of 18 local government seekers that use the same intermediary to conduct more than 2,000 crowdsourcing projects, we develop a model of seeker crowdsourcing implementation that links a previously-unstudied variance in seeker intent and engagement strategies, at the organizational level, to differences in project team motivation and capabilities, in turn leading to varying online engagement behaviors and ultimately project outcomes. Comparing and contrasting governmental with the more familiar corporate context, we further find that the non-pecuniary orientation of both seekers and solvers means that the motives of government crowdsourcing differ fundamentally from corporate crowdsourcing, but that the process more closely resembles a corporate-sponsored community rather than government-sponsored contests. More broadly, we offer insights on how seeker organizational factors and choices shape project-level implementation and success of crowdsourcing efforts, as well as suggest implications for open innovation activities of other smaller, geographicallybound organizations….(More)”.