Blog by Darrel Ronald: “The definition for urban digital twins is too vague — so it is important to create a clearer picture of the types of urban digital twins that are available. Not all digital twins are the same and each one comes with features and capabilities, strengths and weakness, as well as appropriate and inappropriate use cases….
As shown in my proposed Urban Digital Twin Taxonomy above, I propose that we classify these products first based on their Main Functionality (the Use Case), then based on their Technology Platform. I highlight some of main products within the different categories and their product scope. Next, I detail the different types of twins and offer some brief strengths and weaknesses for each type. This taxonomy could apply to other industries such as architecture or manufacturing, but it is specifically applied to cities and urban development projects.
Article by Stefaan G. Verhulst and Artur Kluz: “Technology has always played a crucial role in human history, both in winning wars and building peace. Even Leonardo da Vinci, the genius of the Renaissance time, in his 1482 letter to Ludovico Il Moro Sforza, Duke of Milan promised to invent new technological warfare for attack or defense. While serving top military and political leaders, he was working on technological advancements that could potentially have a significant impact on geopolitics.
(Picture from @iwpg_la)
Today, we are living in exceptional times, where disruptive technologies such as AI, space-based technologies, quantum computing, and many others are leading to the reimagination of everything around us and transforming our lives, state interactions in the global arena, and wars. The next great industrial revolution may well be occurring over 250 miles above us in outer space and putting our world into a new perspective. This is not just a technological transformation; this is a social and human transformation.
Perhaps to a greater extent than ever since World War II, recent news has been dominated by talk of war, as well as the destructive power of AI for human existence. The headlines are of missiles and offensives in Ukraine, of possible — and catastrophic — conflict over Taiwan, and of AI as humanity’s biggest existential threat.
A critical difference between this era and earlier times of conflict is the potential role of technology for peace. Along with traditional weaponry and armaments, it is clear that new space, data, and various other information and communication technologies will play an increasingly prominent role in 21st-century conflicts, especially when combined.
Much of the discussion today focuses on the potential offensive capabilities of technology. In a recent report titled “Seven Critical Technologies for Winning the Next War”, CSIS highlighted that “the next war will be fought on a high-tech battlefield….The consequences of failure on any of these technologies are tremendous — they could make the difference between victory and defeat.”
However, in the following discussion, we shift our focus to a distinctly different aspect of technology — its potential to cultivate peace and prevent conflicts. We present seven forms of PeaceTech, which encompass technologies that can actively avert or alleviate conflicts. These technologies are part of a broader range of innovations that contribute to the greater good of society and foster the overall well-being of humanity.
The application of frontier technologies has speedy, broad, and impactful effects in building peace. From preventing military conflicts and disinformation, connecting people, facilitating dialogue, drone delivery of humanitarian aid, and solving water access conflicts, to satellite imagery to monitor human rights violations and monitor peacekeeping efforts; technology has demonstrated its strong footprint in building peace.
One important caveat is in order: readers may note the absence of data in the list below. We have chosen to include data as a cross-cutting category that applies across the seven technologies. This points to the ubiquity of data in today’s digital ecology. In an era of rapid datafication, data can no longer be classified as a single technology, but rather as an asset or toolembedded within virtually every other technology. (See our writings on the role of data for peace here)…(More)”.
Blog by Bloomberg Cities Network: “Data is more central than ever to improving service delivery, managing performance, and identifying opportunities that better serve residents. That’s why a growing number of cities are adding a new tool to their arsenal—the citywide data strategy—to provide teams with a holistic view of data efforts and then lay out a roadmap for scaling successful approaches throughout city hall.
These comprehensive strategies are increasingly “critical to help mayors reach their visions,” according to Amy Edward Holmes, executive director The Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence at John Hopkins University, which is helping dozens of cities across the Americas up their data games as part of the Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance (CDA).
Bloomberg Cities spoke with experts in the field and leaders in pioneering cities to learn more about the importance of citywide data strategies and how they can help:
Turn “pockets of promise” into citywide strengths;
Build upon and consolidate other citywide strategic efforts;
Improve performance management and service delivery;
Align staff data capabilities with city needs;
Drive lasting cultural change through leadership commitment…(More)”.
Blog by Ville Aula: “Evidence-based policymaking is a popular approach to policy that has received widespread public attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as in the fight against climate change. It argues that policy choices based on rigorous, preferably scientific evidence should be given priority over choices based on other types of justification. However, delegating policymaking solely to researchers goes against the idea that policies are determined democratically.
In my recent article published in Policy & Politics: Evidence-based policymaking in the legislatures we explored the tension between politics and evidence in the national legislatures. While evidence-based policymaking has been extensively studied within governments, the legislative arena has received much less attention. The focus of the study was on understanding how legislators, legislative committees, and political parties together shape the use of evidence. We also wanted to explore how the interviewees understand timeliness and relevance of evidence, because lack of time is a key challenge within legislatures. The study is based on 39 interviews with legislators, party employees, and civil servants in Eduskunta, the national Parliament of Finland.
Our findings show that, in Finland, political parties play a key role in collecting, processing, and brokering evidence within legislatures. Finnish political parties maintain detailed policy programmes that guide their work in the legislature. The programmes are often based on extensive consultations with expert networks of the party and evidence collection from key stakeholders. Political parties are not ready to review these programmes every time new evidence is offered to them. This reluctance can give the appearance that parties do not want to follow evidence. Nevertheless, reluctance is oftens necessary for political parties to maintain stable policy platforms while navigating uncertainty amidst competing sources of evidence. Party positions can be based on extensive evidence and expertise even if some other sources of evidence contradict them.
Partisan expert networks and policy experts employed by political parties in particular appear to be crucial in formulating the evidence-base of policy programmes. The findings suggest that these groups should be a new target audience for evidence brokering. Yet political parties, their employees, and their networks have rarely been considered in research on evidence-based policymaking.
Turning to the question of timeliness we found, as expected, that use of evidence in the Parliament of Finland is driven by short-term reactiveness. However, in our study, we also found that short-term reactiveness and the notion of timeliness can refer to time windows ranging from months to weeks and, sometimes, merely days. The common recommendation by policy scholars to boost uptake of evidence by making it timely and relevant is therefore far from simple…(More)”.
Article by Ina Fried and Scott Rosenberg: “Scott RosenbergThe internet is beginning to fill up with more and more content generated by artificial intelligence rather than human beings, posing weird new dangers both to human society and to the AI programs themselves.
What’s happening: Experts estimate that AI-generated content could account for as much as 90% of information on the internet in a few years’ time, as ChatGPT, Dall-E and similar programs spill torrents of verbiage and images into online spaces.
That’s happening in a world that hasn’t yet figured out how to reliably label AI-generated output and differentiate it from human-created content.
The danger to human society is the now-familiar problem of information overload and degradation.
AI turbocharges the ability to create mountains of new content while it undermines the ability to check that material for reliability and recycles biases and errors in the data that was used to train it.
There’s also widespread fear that AI could undermine the jobs of people who create content today, from artists and performers to journalists, editors and publishers. The current strike by Hollywood actors and writers underlines this risk.
The danger to AI itself is newer and stranger. A raft of recent research papers have introduced a novel lexicon of potential AI disorders that are just coming into view as the technology is more widely deployed and used.
“Model collapse” is researchers’ name for what happens to generative AI models, like OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4, when they’re trained using data produced by other AIs rather than human beings.
Feed a model enough of this “synthetic” data, and the quality of the AI’s answers can rapidly deteriorate, as the systems lock in on the most probable word choices and discard the “tail” choices that keep their output interesting.
“Model Autophagy Disorder,“ or MAD, is how one set of researchers at Rice and Stanford universities dubbed the result of AI consuming its own products.
“Habsburg AI” is what another researcher earlier this year labeled the phenomenon, likening it to inbreeding: “A system that is so heavily trained on the outputs of other generative AIs that it becomes an inbred mutant, likely with exaggerated, grotesque features.”…(More)”.
Blog by Randeep Sudan, Craig Hammer, and Yaroslav Eferin: “Developing countries face a data conundrum. Despite more data being available than ever in the world, low- and middle-income countries often lack adequate access to valuable data and struggle to fully use the data they have.
This seemingly paradoxical situation represents a data divide. The terms “digital divide” and “data divide” are often used interchangeably but differ. The digital divide is the gap between those with access to digital technologies and those without access. On the other hand, the data divide is the gap between those who have access to high-quality data and those who do not. The data divide can negatively skew development across countries and therefore is a serious issue that needs to be addressed…
The effects of the data divide are alarming, with low- and middle-income countries getting left behind. McKinsey estimates that 75% of the value that could be created through Generative AI (such as ChatGPT) would be in four areas of economic activity: customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and research and development. They further estimate that Generative AI could add between $2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion in value in these four areas.
Blog by Geoff Mulgan: “…So what about governments being entrepreneurial as opposed to creative and innovative? Here things get even trickier. The classic commentary on the subject was written by the great Jane Jacobs (in her book ‘Systems of Survival’). She pointed out the differences between what she called the ‘guardian syndrome’ and the ‘trader syndrome’. The first is common in governments, the second in business. She argued that all societies have to find a balance between these very different views of the world. The first is concerned with looking after things and protection, originally of land, and can be found in governments, ecological movements as well as aristocracies. The second is concerned with exchange and profit, and is the world of commerce and trade.
These each see the world in very different ways. But in practice they complement each other – indeed their complementarity is what helps societies to function.
In her view, however, fusions of the two tended to be malign pathologies, for example when businesses became like governments, running large areas of territory, or when governments start thinking like traders. Donald Trump was a classic example – who saw the government machine rather as an entrepreneur would see his own business. Silvio Berlusconi was another – a remarkable proportion of his initiatives were essentially designed to promote his businesses, or protect him from prosecution.
Jane Jacobs’ points become very obvious in some industries, like the contemporary digital industries that have become de facto utilities on which we depend every day. It remains far from clear that companies like Meta or Google appreciate that they risk becoming pathological fusions of business and government, without the mindsets appropriate to their new-found power.
The pathologies are also very visible in many parts of the world where the state runs a lot of industry, often with the military playing a leading role. Examples include Pakistan, Myanmar, China and Russia. In these cases public servants really have become entrepreneurs. In some cases – like Huawei – great businesses have been grown. But most of the time such fusions of government and entrepreneurialism tend towards corruption, and predatory extraction of value, because when the state’s monopoly of coercion connects to the power to make money abuses are inevitable.
There may be occasional examples where states should be entrepreneurial at least in mindset – spinning off a function or using some of the ethos of a start-up, for example to create a new digital service. But in such cases very tight rules are vital to avoid abuse, so that if, for example, a part of the state is spun out it doesn’t do so with advantages or easy money or legally guaranteed monopolies or inflated salaries. Much depends on whether you use the word entrepreneurial in a precise sense (the first definition that comes up on Google is: ‘characterized by the taking of financial risks in the hope of profit’) or as a much looser synonym for being innovative or problem-solving…(More)”.
Blog by Basil Mahfouz: “Scientists worldwide published over 2.6 million papers in 2022 – Almost 5 papers per minute and more than double what they published in the year 2000. Are policy makers making the most of the wealth of available scientific knowledge? In this blog, we describe how we are applying data science methods on the bibliometric database of Elsevier’s International Centre for the Study of Research (ICSR) to analyse how scholarly research is being used by policy makers. More specifically, we will discuss how we are applying natural language processing and network dynamics to identify where there is policy action and also strong evidence; where there is policy interest but a lack of evidence; and where potential policies and strategies are not making full use of available knowledge or tools…(More)”.
Blog by Andrea Carlson and Thea Palmer Zimmerman: “…Because there can be economic and social barriers to maintaining a healthy diet, USDA promotes Food and Nutrition Security so that everyone has consistent and equitable access to healthy, safe, and affordable foods that promote optimal health and well-being. A set of data tools called the Purchase to Plate Suite (PPS) supports these goals by enabling the update of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), which estimates how much a budget-conscious family of four needs to spend on groceries to ensure a healthy diet. The TFP market basket – consisting of the specific amounts of various food categories required by the plan – forms the basis of the maximum allotment for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the “Food Stamps” program), which provided financial support towards the cost of groceries for over 41 million individuals in almost 22 million households in fiscal year 2022.
The 2018 Farm Act (Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018) requires that USDA reevaluate the TFP every five years using current food composition, consumption patterns, dietary guidance, and food prices, and using approved scientific methods. USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) was charged with estimating the current food prices using retail food scanner data (Levin et al. 2018; Muth et al. 2016) and utilized the PPS for this task. The most recent TFP update was released in August 2021 and the revised cost of the market basket was the first non-inflation adjustment increase in benefits for SNAP in over 40 years (US Department of Agriculture 2021).
The PPS combines datasets to enhance research related to the economics of food and nutrition. There are four primary components of the suite:
Purchase to Plate Crosswalk (PPC),
Purchase to Plate Price Tool (PPPT),
Purchase to Plate National Average Prices (PP-NAP) for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), and
Essay by Tyler Hinkle: “As AI tools become integrated into urban planning, a dual narrative of promise and potential pitfalls emerges. These tools offer unprecedented efficiency, creativity, and data analysis, yet if not guided by ethical considerations, they could inadvertently lead to exclusion, manipulation, and surveillance.
While AI, exemplified by tools like NovelAI, holds the potential to aggregate and synthesize public input, there’s a risk of suppressing genuine human voices in favor of algorithmic consensus. This could create a future urban landscape devoid of cultural depth and diversity, echoing historical authoritarianism.
In a potential dystopian scenario, an AI-based planning software gains access to all smart city devices, amassing data to reshape communities without consulting their residents. This data-driven transformation, devoid of human input, risks eroding the essence of community identity, autonomy, and shared decision-making. Imagine AI altering traffic flow, adjusting public transportation routes, or even redesigning public spaces based solely on data patterns, disregarding the unique needs and desires of the people who call that community home.
However, an optimistic approach guided by ethical principles can pave the way for a brighter future. Integrating AI with democratic ideals, akin to Fishkin’s deliberative democracy, can amplify citizens’ voices rather than replacing them. AI-driven deliberation can become a powerful vehicle for community engagement, transforming Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation into a true instrument of empowerment. In addition, echoing the calls for alignment to be addresses holistically for AI, there will be alignment issues with AI as it becomes integrated into urban planning. We must take the time to ensure AI is properly aligned so it is a tool to help communities and not hurt them.
By treading carefully and embedding ethical considerations at the core, we can unleash AI’s potential to construct communities that are efficient, diverse, and resilient, while ensuring that democratic values remain paramount…(More)”.
