Towards Human-Centric Algorithmic Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Zeynep Engin: “It is no longer news to say that the capabilities afforded by Data Science, AI and their associated technologies (such as Digital Twins, Smart Cities, Ledger Systems and other platforms) are poised to revolutionise governance, radically transforming the way democratic processes work, citizen services are provided, and justice is delivered. Emerging applications range from the way election campaigns are run and how crises at population level are managed (e.g. pandemics) to everyday operations like simple parking enforcement and traffic management, and to decisions at critical individual junctures, such as hiring or sentencing decisions. What it means to be a ‘human’ is also a hot topic for both scholarly and everyday discussions, since our societal interactions and values are also shifting fast in an increasingly digital and data-driven world.

As a millennial who grew up in a ‘developing’ economy in the ’90s and later established a cross-sector career in a ‘developed’ economy in the fields of data for policy and algorithmic governance, I believe I can credibly claim a pertinent, hands-on experience of the transformation from a fully analogue world into a largely digital one. I started off trying hard to find sufficient printed information to refer to in my term papers at secondary school, gradually adapting to trying hard to extract useful information amongst practically unlimited resources available online today. The world has become a lot more connected: communities are formed online, goods and services customised to individual tastes and preferences, work and education are increasingly hybrid, reducing dependency on physical environment, geography and time zones. Despite all these developments in nearly every aspect of our lives, one thing that has persisted in the face of this change is the nature of collective decision-making, particularly at the civic/governmental level. It still comprises the same election cycles with more or less similar political incentives and working practices, and the same type of politicians, bureaucracies, hierarchies and networks making and executing important (and often suboptimal) decisions on behalf of the public. Unelected private sector stakeholders in the meantime are quick to fill the growing gap — they increasingly make policies that affect large populations and define the public discourse, to primarily maximise their profit behind their IP protection walls…(More)”.

Civic Life of Cities’ Puts Civil Society Organizations in Their Place

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Christof Brandtner and Walter W. Powell: “One of the ironies of social science publishing is that, despite frequent references to “American exceptionalism,” there is rarely a need to justify the United States as a setting in many leading journals. As sociologists and organization scholars, we know that many concepts devised in the US either differ in meaning (e.g., what is scholarly impact) or might not be applicable (e.g., the central role of philanthropy in developing public policies) outside the United States. In fact, there is significant pressure for scholars of such regions as Latin America, East Asia, or Africa to justify their setting and how it generalizes to other areas of interest to scholars of the Global North and West. This summer, we published a series of articles from a co-produced multi-place research project in six cities worldwide in the journal Global Perspectives to bring a new angle to this problem.

Comparative work has been among the most fruitful for testing different social science theories. In the field of civil society research, for instance, scholars have often examined government failure theory—the idea that nonprofits are more plentiful where authorities are unable to serve the full spectrum of needs—by comparing states and nations. The arguably most impactful research project for defining nonprofit organizations was a comparative study of national nonprofit sectors led by Helmut Anheier and Lester Salamon in the 1990s. Closer to the ground, the comparative case method has also been generative for understanding persistent performance differences among seemingly similar organizations. Work comparing hospitals by Kate Kellogg, and neighborhoods by Robert Sampson or Eric Klinenberg, provide illuminating examples of the power of comparing sites.

Comparing the civic life of cities

In this spirit, we designed a research project meant to provide a reality check on some now-common understandings of organizational and social dynamics developed in the Global North. In our introductory essay to the special collection titled “Capturing the Civic Life of Cities,” we ask: “In a wired world, how do social interactions among organizations and people continue to define civil society?” Our work investigates the civic life of cities, which has seen significant transformations with digitalization and globalization since the 1990s heyday of “big theories” of civil society. These transformations have seriously called into question whether the dynamics of civil society organizations—often developed in the US context—still apply. During our data collection over the past three years, civil society was further shocked by both political upheavals and a global pandemic. Nonetheless, in light of the many examples where civil society organizations have stepped up to meet pressing new needs, we conclude that:

“Civil society organizations are rooted in place through their people, practices, and partnerships. During the storm of the pandemic, these roots may have grown deeper and found new ways of invigorating cities.”…Courtesy of the University of California Press, the special collection of Global Perspectives is openly accessible until the end of July 2022.…(More)”.

Modularity for International Internet Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Chris Riley and Susan Ness: “The modern-day “global” internet faces a dubious future. On the battle lines of internet freedom, Russia’s increasing authoritarian control aspires to China’s great firewall levels, while the annual Freedom on the Net report for 2021 found a global decline in internet freedom for the 11th straight year. The same report also noted that at least 48 separate countries explored increasing governmental oversight over the tech sector. 

In the midst of increasing global division lies, perhaps, a core of unity: a worldwide interest among democracies in changing the status quo of internet governance to improve the baseline of responsibility and accountability for digital platforms. And for this problem, at least, there is hope—perhaps distant hope—for the possibility of increasing alignment. We propose that modularity can be a useful and tractable approach to improve digital platform accountability through harmonized policies and practices among nations embracing the rule of law.

Modularity is a form of multistakeholder, co-regulatory governance, in which modules—discrete mechanisms, protocols, and codes—are developed through processes that include a range of perspectives. Modularity produces, to the extent possible, internationally aligned corporate technical and business practices through shared mechanisms that achieve compliance with multiple legal jurisdictions, without the need for a new international treaty.

Think of modularity as a five-step process. First, problem identification: One or more governments—working together or separately—identify an open challenge. For example, vetting researchers as part of a digital platform data access mandate. Second, module formation: A group of experts (which may or may not include government representatives) collaborates to develop a module that includes both standards and processes for addressing the problem, and is designed for use across multiple jurisdictions. Third, validation: Individual governments evaluate and approve the module by indicating that its output—such as a decision that individual research projects should be cleared to receive platform data—can be used to satisfy requirement(s) set out in their respective underlying legislation. Fourth, execution: Systems created through the module apply the module’s protocols to individual circumstances. (In this instance, vetting research projects applying for clearance.) Finally, enforcement and analysis: Each government uses its national policies and procedures to ensure digital platform compliance, and periodically assesses the module process to ensure it remains fit-for-purpose. 

Modularity offers many advantages for digital platform governance. It helps norms and expectations evolve along with rapidly evolving technology, while maintaining the force of law, without the obstacles and delays inherent in separately amending each of the underlying laws. And it helps close substantive gaps present in many platform legislative frameworks being developed today. But making it a reality will require governments to be willing to embrace an aligned path forward through disparate legal and political systems…(More)”

In India, your payment data could become evidence of dissent

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Nilesh Christopher: “Indian payments firm Razorpay is under fire for seemingly breaching customer privacy. Some have gone on to call the company a “sell out” for sharing users’ payment data with authorities without their consent. But is faulting Razorpay for complying with a legal request fair?

On June 19, Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of fact-checking outlet Alt News, was arrested for hurting religious sentiments over a tweet he posted in 2018. Investigating authorities, through legal diktats, have now gained access to payment data of donors supporting Alt News from payments processor Razorpay. (Police are now probing Alt News for accepting foreign donations. Alt News has denied the charge.) 

The data sharing has had a chilling effect. Civil society organization Internet Freedom Foundation, which uses Razorpay for donations, is exploring “additional payment platforms to offer choice and comfort to donors.” Many donors are worried that they might now become targets on account of their contributions. 

This has created a new faultline in the discourse around weaponizing payment data by a state that has gained notoriety for cracking down on critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Faulting Razorpay for complying with a legal request is misguided. “I think Razorpay played it by the book,” said Dharmendra Chatur, partner at the law firm Poovayya & Co. “They sort of did what any reasonable person would do in this situation.” 

Under Section 91 of India’s Criminal Procedure Code, police authorities have the power to seek information or documents on the apprehension that a crime has been committed during the course of an inquiry, inspection, or trial. “You either challenge it or you comply. There’s no other option available [for Razorpay]. And who would want to just unnecessarily initiate litigation?” Chatur said…(More)”.

14 tech-based innovations tackle youth mental health challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Elisha London and Anna Huber: “Depression, anxiety and behavioural conditions are the leading cause of illness for young people and suicide is the fourth most prevalent cause of death amongst 15- to 19-year-olds. Meanwhile, around 50 per cent of mental health conditions begin by the age 14 and 75 per cent by age 24. So, if youth mental health challenges and their environmental factors aren’t addressed, they extend into adulthood. Conversely, having good mental health means being better able to cope, connect and function, leading to more fulfilling and productive lives…

The Uplink Youth Mental Health Challenge by the World Economic Forum sought to identify some of the leading innovations around the world working to address these transformational needs, especially those led by young people themselves….

Here are the top 14 innovators selected:

1. Attensi and Dr. Raknes have developed the learning simulation Helping Hand, with the aim of preventing mental health disorders in adolescents. The game takes players through a series of life-like scenarios to reinforce positive decision-making, facilitate talking about feelings and thoughts, helping others master challenges and asking for help when needed.

2. Neolth Inc. offers a range of activities to help teens build coping skills and learn about mental health. Upon sign up, its proprietary algorithm matches teens with content personalized for their health needs, such as educational videos by clinicians and stigma-reducing content about lived experiences by teens.

3. Onkout connects a culturally relevant and unique trauma-informed, collective mental health peer support program to a virtual business training program, and the financial tools to improve young people’s lives. It supports young people in conflict-affected countries to be able to access services that are currently not available

4. Opa Mind has developed a “Voice Driven” support platform for people who struggle with emotional & mental health pressures. Opa Mind’s voice input system can listen and display various emotional based metrics, vocal biomarkers and supports, enabling individuals to undertake actionable follow-up steps in order to improve health and wellbeing.

5. OPTT, together with Curatio, offer an online psychotherapy tool to provide a technology-embedded, peer-to-peer social network for improved health outcomes. They allow mental wellness content producers, mental health teams, local health providers, and communities to work together to offer solutions proactively to their community members.

6. Renewal International Trust developed Positive Konnections (PK), a mobile application with a mental health intervention for young people with HIV that is designed to counter effects of stigma and help them access services privately or anonymously. The PK model uses creative narrative therapy techniques delivered on an accessible, youth-friendly platform…(More)”

See Plastic in a National Park? Log It on This Website for Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Angely Mercado: “You’re hiking through glorious nature when you see it—a dirty, squished plastic water bottle along the trail. Instead of picking it up and impotently cursing the litterer, you can now take another small helpful step—you can report the trash to a new data project that aims to inspire policy change. Environmental nonprofit 5 Gyres is asking national park visitors in the U.S. to log trash they see through a new site called TrashBlitz.

The organization, which is dedicated to reducing plastic pollution, created TrashBlitz to gather data on how much, and what kind, of plastic and other litter is clogging our parks. They want to encourage realistic plastic pollution reduction plans for all 63 national parks.

Once registered on the TrashBlitz website, park visitors can specify the types of trash that they’ve spotted, such as if the discarded item was used for food packaging. According to 5 Gyres, the data will contribute to a report to be published this fall on the top items discarded, the materials, and the brands that have created the most waste across national parks…(More)”.

How Three False Starts Stifle Open Social Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Patrick Dunleavy: “Open social science is new, and like any beginner is still finding its way. However, to a large extent we are still operating in the shadow of open science (OS) in the Science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine, or STEMM, disciplines. Nearly a decade ago an influential Royal Society report argued:

‘Open science is often effective in stimulating scientific discovery, [and] it may also help to deter, detect and stamp out bad science. Openness facilitates a systemic integrity that is conducive to early identification of error, malpractice and fraud, and therefore deters them. But this kind of transparency only works when openness meets standards of intelligibility and assessability – where there is intelligent openness’.

More recently, the Turing Way project defined open science far more broadly as a range of measures encouraging reproducibility, replication, robustness, and the generalisability of research. Alongside CIVICA researchers we have put forward an agenda for progressing open social science in line with these ambitions. Yet for open social science to take root it must develop an ‘intelligent’ concept of openness, one that is adapted to the wide range of concerns that our discipline group addresses, and is appropriate for the sharply varying conditions in which social research must be carried out.

This task has been made more difficult by a number of premature and partial efforts to ‘graft’ an ‘open science’ concept from STEMM disciplines onto the social sciences. Three false starts have already been made and have created misconceptions about open social science. Below, I want to show how each of the strategies may actually work to obstruct the wider development of open social science.

Bricolage – Reading across directly from STEMM

This approach sees open social science as just about picking up (not quite at random) the best-known or most discussed individual components of open science in STEMM disciplines  – focusing on specific things like open access publishing, the FAIR principles for data management, replication studies, or the pre-registration of hypotheses…(More)”.

How Does the Public Sector Identify Problems It Tries to Solve with AI?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Maia Levy Daniel: “A correct analysis of the implementation of AI in a particular field or process needs to start by identifying if there actually is a problem to be solved. For instance, in the case of job matching, the problem would be related to the levels of unemployment in the country, and presumably addressing imbalances in specific fields. Then, would AI be the best way to address this specific problem? Are there any alternatives? Is there any evidence that shows that AI would be a better tool? Building AI systems is expensive and the funds being used by the public sector come from taxpayers. Are there any alternatives that could be less expensive? 

Moreover, governments must understand from the outset that these systems could involve potential risks for civil and human rights. Thus, it should be justified in detail why the government might be choosing a more expensive or riskier option. A potential guide to follow is the one developed by the UK’s Office for Artificial Intelligence on how to use AI in the public sector. This guide includes a section specifically devoted to how to assess whether AI is the right solution to a problem.

AI is such a buzzword that it has become appealing for governments to use as a solution to any public problem, without even starting to look for available alternatives. Although automation could accelerate decision-making processes, speed should not be prioritized over quality or over human rights protection. As Daniel Susser argues in his recent paper, the speed at which automated decisions are reached has normative implications. By incorporating digital technologies in decision-making processes, temporal norms and values that govern them are impacted, disrupting prior norms, re-calibrating balanced trade-offs, or displacing automation’s costs. As Susser suggests, speed is not necessarily bad; however, “using computational tools to speed up (or slow down) certain decisions is not a ‘neutral’ adjustment without further explanations.” 

So, conducting a thorough diagnosis including the identification of the specific problem to address and the best way to address it is key to protecting citizens’ rights. And this is why transparency must be mandatory. As citizens, we have a right to know how these processes are being conceived and designed, the reasons governments choose to implement technologies, as well as the risks involved.

In addition, maybe a good way to ultimately approach the systemic problem and change the structure of incentives is to stop using the pretentious terms “artificial intelligence”, “AI”, and “machine learning”, as Emily Tucker, the Executive Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law Center announced the Center would do. As Tucker explained, these terms are confusing for the average person, and the way they are typically employed makes us think it’s a machine rather than human beings making the decisions. By removing marketing terms from the equation and giving more visibility to the humans involved, these technologies may not ultimately seem so exotic…(More)”.

Mapping Urban Trees Across North America with the Auto Arborist Dataset

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Google Blog: “Over four billion people live in cities around the globe, and while most people interact daily with others — at the grocery store, on public transit, at work — they may take for granted their frequent interactions with the diverse plants and animals that comprise fragile urban ecosystems. Trees in cities, called urban forests, provide critical benefits for public health and wellbeing and will prove integral to urban climate adaptation. They filter air and water, capture stormwater runoff, sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide, and limit erosion and drought. Shade from urban trees reduces energy-expensive cooling costs and mitigates urban heat islands. In the US alone, urban forests cover 127M acres and produce ecosystem services valued at $18 billion. But as the climate changes these ecosystems are increasingly under threat.

Urban forest monitoring — measuring the size, health, and species distribution of trees in cities over time — allows researchers and policymakers to (1) quantify ecosystem services, including air quality improvement, carbon sequestration, and benefits to public health; (2) track damage from extreme weather events; and (3) target planting to improve robustness to climate change, disease and infestation.

However, many cities lack even basic data about the location and species of their trees. …

Today we introduce the Auto Arborist Dataset, a multiview urban tree classification dataset that, at ~2.6 million trees and >320 genera, is two orders of magnitude larger than those in prior work. To build the dataset, we pulled from public tree censuses from 23 North American cities (shown above) and merged these records with Street View and overhead RGB imagery. As the first urban forest dataset to cover multiple cities, we analyze in detail how forest models can generalize with respect to geographic distribution shifts, crucial to building systems that scale. We are releasing all 2.6M tree records publicly, along with aerial and ground-level imagery for 1M trees…(More)”

Police Violence In Puerto Rico: Flooded With Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Christine Grillo: “For María Mari-Narváez, a recent decision by the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico was both a victory and a moment of reckoning. The Court granted Kilómetro Cero, a citizen-led police accountability project in Puerto Rico, full access to every use-of-force report filed by the Puerto Rico Police Department since 2014. The decision will make it possible for advocates such as Mari to get a clear picture of how state police officers are using force, and when that use of force crosses the line into abuse. But the court victory flooded her small organization with data.

“We won, finally, and then I realized I was going to be receiving thousands of documents that I had zero capacity to process,” says Mari.

“One of the things that’s important to me when analyzing data is to find out where the gaps are, why those gaps exist, and what those gaps represent.” —Tarak Shah, data scientist

The Court made its decision in April 2021, and the police department started handing over PDF files in July. By the end, there could be up to 10,000 documents that get turned in. In addition to incident reports, the police had to provide their use-of-force database. Combined, the victory provides a complicated mixture of quantitative and qualitative data that can be analyzed to answer questions about what the state police are doing to its citizens during police interventions. In particular, Kilómetro Cero, which Mari founded, wants to find out if some Puerto Ricans are more likely to be victims of police violence than others.

“We’re looking for bias,” says Mari. “Bias against poor people, or people who live in a certain neighborhood. Gender bias. Language bias. Bias against drug users, sex workers, immigrants, people who don’t have a house. We’re trying to analyze the language of vulnerability.”…(More)”.