What do we learn from Machine Learning?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Giovanni Buttarelli: “…There are few authorities monitoring the impact of new technologies on fundamental rights so closely and intensively as data protection and privacy commissioners. At the International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, the 40th ICDPPC (which the EDPS had the honour to host), they continued the discussion on AI which began in Marrakesh two years ago with a reflection paper prepared by EDPS experts. In the meantime, many national data protection authorities have invested considerable efforts and provided important contributions to the discussion. To name only a few, the data protection authorities from Norway, France, the UK and Schleswig-Holstein have published research and reflections on AI, ethics and fundamental rights. We all see that some applications of AI raise immediate concerns about data protection and privacy; but it also seems generally accepted that there are far wider-reaching ethical implications, as a group of AI researchers also recently concluded. Data protection and privacy commissioners have now made a forceful intervention by adopting a declaration on ethics and data protection in artificial intelligence which spells out six principles for the future development and use of AI – fairness, accountability, transparency, privacy by design, empowerment and non-discrimination – and demands concerted international efforts  to implement such governance principles. Conference members will contribute to these efforts, including through a new permanent working group on Ethics and Data Protection in Artificial Intelligence.

The ICDPPC was also chosen by an alliance of NGOs and individuals, The Public Voice, as the moment to launch its own Universal Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence (UGAI). The twelve principles laid down in these guidelines extend and complement those of the ICDPPC declaration.

We are only at the beginning of this debate. More voices will be heard: think tanks such as CIPL are coming forward with their suggestions, and so will many other organisations.

At international level, the Council of Europe has invested efforts in assessing the impact of AI, and has announced a report and guidelines to be published soon. The European Commission has appointed an expert group which will, among other tasks, give recommendations on future-related policy development and on ethical, legal and societal issues related to AI, including socio-economic challenges.

As I already pointed out in an earlier blogpost, it is our responsibility to ensure that the technologies which will determine the way we and future generations communicate, work and live together, are developed in such a way that the respect for fundamental rights and the rule of law are supported and not undermined….(More)”.

It’s time to let citizens tackle the wickedest public problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gabriella Capone at apolitical (a winner of the 2018 Apolitical Young Thought Leaders competition): “Rain ravaged Gdańsk in 2016, taking the lives of two residents and causing millions of euros in damage. Despite its 700-year history of flooding the city was overwhelmed by these especially devastating floods. Also, Gdańsk is one of the European coasts most exposed to rising sea levels. It needed a new approach to avoid similar outcomes for the next, inevitable encounter with this worsening problem.

Bringing in citizens to tackle such a difficult issue was not the obvious course of action. Yet this was the proposal of Dr. Marcin Gerwin, an advocate from a neighbouring town who paved the way for Poland’s first participatory budgeting experience.

Mayor Adamowicz of Gdańsk agreed and, within a year, they welcomed about 60 people to the first Citizens Assembly on flood mitigation. Implemented by Dr. Gerwin and a team of coordinators, the Assembly convened over four Saturdays, heard expert testimony, and devised solutions.

The Assembly was not only deliberative and educational, it was action-oriented. Mayor Adamowicz committed to implement proposals on which 80% or more of participants agreed. The final 16 proposals included the investment of nearly $40 million USD in monitoring systems and infrastructure, subsidies to incentivise individuals to improve water management on their property, and an educational “Do Not Flood” campaign to highlight emergency resources.

It may seem risky to outsource the solving of difficult issues to citizens. Yet, when properly designed, public problem-solving can produce creative resolutions to formidable challenges. Beyond Poland, public problem-solving initiatives in Mexico and the United States are making headway on pervasive issues, from flooding to air pollution, to technology in public spaces.

The GovLab, with support from the Tinker Foundation, is analysing what makes for more successful public problem-solving as part of its City Challenges program. Below, I provide a glimpse into the types of design choices that can amplify the impact of public problem-solving….(More)

You can’t characterize human nature if studies overlook 85 percent of people on Earth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel Hruschka at the Conversation: “Over the last century, behavioral researchers have revealed the biases and prejudices that shape how people see the world and the carrots and sticks that influence our daily actions. Their discoveries have filled psychology textbooks and inspired generations of students. They’ve also informed how businesses manage their employees, how educators develop new curricula and how political campaigns persuade and motivate voters.

But a growing body of research has raised concerns that many of these discoveries suffer from severe biases of their own. Specifically, the vast majority of what we know about human psychology and behavior comes from studies conducted with a narrow slice of humanity – college students, middle-class respondents living near universities and highly educated residents of wealthy, industrialized and democratic nations.

Blue countries represent the locations of 93 percent of studies published in Psychological Science in 2017. Dark blue is U.S., blue is Anglophone colonies with a European descent majority, light blue is western Europe. Regions sized by population.

To illustrate the extent of this bias, consider that more than 90 percent of studies recently published in psychological science’s flagship journal come from countries representing less than 15 percent of the world’s population.

If people thought and behaved in basically the same ways worldwide, selective attention to these typical participants would not be a problem. Unfortunately, in those rare cases where researchers have reached out to a broader range of humanity, they frequently find that the “usual suspects” most often included as participants in psychology studies are actually outliers. They stand apart from the vast majority of humanity in things like how they divvy up windfalls with strangers, how they reason about moral dilemmas and how they perceive optical illusions.

Given that these typical participants are often outliers, many scholars now describe them and the findings associated with them using the acronym WEIRD, for Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic.

WEIRD isn’t universal

Because so little research has been conducted outside this narrow set of typical participants, anthropologists like me cannot be sure how pervasive or consequential the problem is. A growing body of case studies suggests, though, that assuming such typical participants are the norm worldwide is not only scientifically suspect but can also have practical consequences….(More)”.

Building Better Cities with Civic Technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mapping by Kate Gasporro: “…The field of civic technology is relatively new. There are limited strategies to measure effectiveness of these tools. Scholars and practitioners are eager to communicate benefits, including improved efficiency and transparency. But, platforms and cities are having difficulty measuring the impacts of civic technology on infrastructure delivery. Even though civic technology platforms write case studies and provide anecdotal information to market their tools, this information does not communicate the challenges and failures that local governments face when implementing these new technologies. At the same time, the nascency of such tools means local governments are still trying to understand how to leverage and protect the enormous amount of data that civic technology tools acquire.

By mapping the landscape of civic technology, we can see more clearly how eParticipation is being used to address public service challenges, including infrastructure delivery. Although many scholars and practitioners have created independent categories for eParticipation, these categorization frameworks follow a similar pattern. At one end of the spectrum, eParticipation efforts provide public service information and relevant updates to citizens or allowing citizens to contact their officials in a unidirectional flow of information. At the other end, eParticipation efforts allow for deliberate democracy where citizens share decision-making with local government officials. Of the dozen categorization frameworks we found, we selected the most comprehensive one accepted by practitioners. This framework draws from public participation practices and identifies five categories:

  • eInforming: One-way communication providing online information to citizens (in the form of a website) or to government (via ePetitions)
  • eConsulting: Limited two-way communication where citizens can voice their opinions and provide feedback
  • eInvolving: Two-way communication where citizens go through an online process to capture public concerns
  • eCollaborating: Enhanced two-way communication that allows citizens to develop alternative solutions and identify the preferred solution, but decision making remains the government’s responsibility
  • eEmpowerment: Advanced two-way communication that allows citizens to influence and make decisions as co-producers of policies…

After surveying the civic technology space, we found 24 tools that use eParticipation for infrastructure delivery. We map these technologies according to their intended use phase in infrastructure delivery and type of eParticipation. The horizontal axis divides the space into the different infrastructure delivery phases and the vertical axis shows the five eParticipation categories. Together, we can see how civic technology is attempting to include citizens throughout infrastructure delivery. The majority of the civic technologies available operate as eInforming and eConsulting tools, allowing citizens to provide information to local governments about infrastructure issues. This information is then channeled into the project selection and prioritization process that occurs during the planning phase. A few technologies span multiple infrastructure phases because of their abilities to aggregate many eParticipation technologies to address the functions of each infrastructure phase. Based on this cursory map, we see that there are spaces in the infrastructure delivery process where there are only a few civic technologies. This is often because there are fewer opportunities to influence decision making during the later phases….

eParticipation chart

The field of civic technology is relatively new. There are limited strategies to measure effectiveness of these tools. Scholars and practitioners are eager to communicate benefits, including improved efficiency and transparency. But, platforms and cities are having difficulty measuring the impacts of civic technology on infrastructure delivery. Even though civic technology platforms write case studies and provide anecdotal information to market their tools, this information does not communicate the challenges and failures that local governments face when implementing these new technologies. At the same time, the nascency of such tools means local governments are still trying to understand how to leverage and protect the enormous amount of data that civic technology tools acquire…..(More)”

Getting Serious About Evidence-Based Public Management

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Philip Joyce at Governing: “In a column in this space in 2015, the late Paul L. Posner, who was one of the most thoughtful observers of public management and intergovernmental relations of the last half-century, decried the disappearance of report cards of government management. In particular, he issued an appeal for someone to move into the space that had been occupied by the Government Performance Project, the decade-long effort funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts to assess the management of states and large local governments.

If anything, what Posner advocated is needed even more today. In an era in which the call for evidence-based decision-making is ubiquitous in government, we have been lacking any real analysis, or even description, of what states and local governments are doing. A couple of recent notable efforts, however, have moved to partially fill this void at the state level.

First, a 2017 report by Pew and the MacArthur Foundation looked across the states at ways in which evidence-based policymaking was used in human services. The study looked at six types of actions that could be undertaken by states and identified states that were engaging, in some way, across four specific policy areas (behavioral health, child welfare, criminal justice and juvenile justice): defining levels of evidence (40 states); inventorying existing programs (50); comparing costs and benefits at a program level (17); reporting outcomes in the budget (42); targeting funds to evidence-based programs (50); and requiring action through state law (34)….

The second notable effort is an ongoing study of the use of data and evidence in the states that was launched recently by the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO). Previously, no one had attempted to summarize and categorize all of the initiatives – including those with their impetus in both laws and executive orders — underway across the 50 states. NASBO’s inventory of “Statewide Initiatives to Advance the Use of Data & Evidence for Decision-Making” is part of a set of resources aimed at providing state officials and other interested parties with a summary demonstrating the breadth of these initiatives.

The resulting “living” inventory, which is updated as additional practices are discovered, categorizes these state efforts into five types, listing a total of 90 as of this writing: data analytics (13 initiatives in 9 states), evidence-based policymaking (12 initiatives in 10 states), performance budgeting (18 initiatives in 16 states), performance management (27 initiatives in 24 states) and process improvement (20 initiatives in 19 states).

NASBO acknowledges that it is difficult to draw a bright line between these categories and classifies the initiatives according to the one that appears to be the most dominant. Nevertheless, this inventory provides a very useful catalogue of what states report they are doing, with links to further resources that make it a valuable resource for those considering launching similar initiatives….(More)”.

Crowd-mapping gender equality – a powerful tool for shaping a better city launches in Melbourne

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicole Kalms at The Conversation: “Inequity in cities has a long history. The importance of social and community planning to meet the challenge of creating people-centred cities looms large. While planners, government and designers have long understood the problem, uncovering the many important marginalised stories is an enormous task.

ion: “Inequity in cities has a long history. The importance of social and community planning to meet the challenge of creating people-centred cities looms large. While planners, government and designers have long understood the problem, uncovering the many important marginalised stories is an enormous task.

Technology – so often bemoaned – has provided an unexpected and powerful primary tool for designers and makers of cities. Crowd-mapping asks the community to anonymously engage and map their experiences using their smartphones and via a web app. The focus of the new Gender Equality Map launched today in two pilot locations in Melbourne is on equality or inequality in their neighbourhood.

How does it work?

Participants can map their experience of equality or inequality in their neighbourhood using locator pins. Author provided

Crowd-mapping generates geolocative data. This is made up of points “dropped” to a precise geographical location. The data can then be analysed and synthesised for insights, tendencies and “hotspots”.

The diversity of its applications shows the adaptability of the method. The digital, community-based method of crowd-mapping has been used across the globe. Under-represented citizens have embraced the opportunity to tell their stories as a way to engage with and change their experience of cities….(More)”

Better “nowcasting” can reveal what weather is about to hit within 500 meters

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MIT Technology Review: “Weather forecasting is impressively accurate given how changeable and chaotic Earth’s climate can be. It’s not unusual to get 10-day forecasts with a reasonable level of accuracy.

But there is still much to be done.  One challenge for meteorologists is to improve their “nowcasting,” the ability to forecast weather in the next six hours or so at a spatial resolution of a square kilometer or less.

In areas where the weather can change rapidly, that is difficult. And there is much at stake. Agricultural activity is increasingly dependent on nowcasting, and the safety of many sporting events depends on it too. Then there is the risk that sudden rainfall could lead to flash flooding, a growing problem in many areas because of climate change and urbanization. That has implications for infrastructure, such as sewage management, and for safety, since this kind of flooding can kill.

So meteorologists would dearly love to have a better way to make their nowcasts.

Enter Blandine Bianchi from EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and a few colleagues, who have developed a method for combining meteorological data from several sources to produce nowcasts with improved accuracy. Their work has the potential to change the utility of this kind of forecasting for everyone from farmers and gardeners to emergency services and sewage engineers.

Current forecasting is limited by the data and the scale on which it is gathered and processed. For example, satellite data has a spatial resolution of 50 to 100 km and allows the tracking and forecasting of large cloud cells over a time scale of six to nine hours. By contrast, radar data is updated every five minutes, with a spatial resolution of about a kilometer, and leads to predictions on the time scale of one to three hours. Another source of data is the microwave links used by telecommunications companies, which are degraded by rainfall….(More)”

The role of blockchain, cryptoeconomics, and collective intelligence in building the future of justice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Federico Ast at Thomson Reuters: “Human communities of every era have had to solve the problem of social order. For this, they developed governance and legal systems. They did it with the technologies and systems of belief of their time….

A better justice system may not come from further streamlining existing processes but from fundamentally rethinking them from a first principles perspective.

In the last decade, we have witnessed how collective intelligence could be leveraged to produce an encyclopaedia like Wikipedia, a transport system like Uber, a restaurant rating system like Yelp!, and a hotel system like Airbnb. These companies innovated by crowdsourcing value creation. Instead of having an in-house team of restaurant critics as the Michelin Guide, Yelp! crowdsourced ratings in users.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention of Bitcoin (and the underlying blockchain technology) may be seen as the next step in the rise of the collaborative economy. The Bitcoin Network proved that, given the right incentives, anonymous users could cooperate in creating and updating a distributed ledger which could act as a monetary system. A nationless system, inherently global, and native to the Internet Age.

Cryptoeconomics is a new field of study that leverages cryptography, computer science and game theory to build secure distributed systems. It is the science that underlies the incentive system of open distributed ledgers. But its potential goes well beyond cryptocurrencies.

Kleros is a dispute resolution system which relies on cryptoeconomics. It uses a system of incentives based on “focal points”, a concept developed by game theorist Thomas Schelling, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics 2005. Using a clever mechanism design, it seeks to produce a set of incentives for randomly selected users to adjudicate different types of disputes in a fast, affordable and secure way. Users who adjudicate disputes honestly will make money. Users who try to abuse the system will lose money.

Kleros does not seek to compete with governments or traditional arbitration systems, but provide a new method that will leverage the wisdom of the crowd to resolve many disputes of the global digital economy for which existing methods fall short: e-commerce, crowdfunding and many types of small claims are among the early adopters….(More)”.

The future’s so bright, I gotta wear blinders

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicholas Carr’s blog: “A few years ago, the technology critic Michael Sacasas introduced the term “Borg Complex” to describe the attitude and rhetoric of modern-day utopians who believe that computer technology is an unstoppable force for good and that anyone who resists or even looks critically at the expanding hegemony of the digital is a benighted fool. (The Borg is an alien race in Star Trekthat sucks up the minds of other races, telling its victims that “resistance is futile.”) Those afflicted with the complex, Sacasas observed, rely on a a set of largely specious assertions to dismiss concerns about any ill effects of technological progress. The Borgers are quick, for example, to make grandiose claims about the coming benefits of new technologies (remember MOOCs?) while dismissing past cultural achievements with contempt (“I don’t really give a shit if literary novels go away”).

To Sacasas’s list of such obfuscating rhetorical devices, I would add the assertion that we are “only at the beginning.” By perpetually refreshing the illusion that progress is just getting under way, gadget worshippers like Kelly are able to wave away the problems that progress is causing. Any ill effect can be explained, and dismissed, as just a temporary bug in the system, which will soon be fixed by our benevolent engineers. (If you look at Mark Zuckerberg’s responses to Facebook’s problems over the years, you’ll find that they are all variations on this theme.) Any attempt to put constraints on technologists and technology companies becomes, in this view, a short-sighted and possibly disastrous obstruction of technology’s march toward a brighter future for everyone — what Kelly is still calling the “long boom.” You ain’t seen nothing yet, so stay out of our way and let us work our magic.

In his books Empire and Communication (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951), the Canadian historian Harold Innis argued that all communication systems incorporate biases, which shape how people communicate and hence how they think. These biases can, in the long run, exert a profound influence over the organization of society and the course of history. “Bias,” it seems to me, is exactly the right word. The media we use to communicate push us to communicate in certain ways, reflecting, among other things, the workings of the underlying technologies and the financial and political interests of the businesses or governments that promulgate the technologies. (For a simple but important example, think of the way personal correspondence has been changed by the shift from letters delivered through the mail to emails delivered via the internet to messages delivered through smartphones.) A bias is an inclination. Its effects are not inevitable, but they can be strong. To temper them requires awareness and, yes, resistance.

For much of this year, I’ve been exploring the biases of digital media, trying to trace the pressures that the media exert on us as individuals and as a society. I’m far from done, but it’s clear to me that the biases exist and that at this point they have manifested themselves in unmistakable ways. Not only are we well beyond the beginning, but we can see where we’re heading — and where we’ll continue to head if we don’t consciously adjust our course….(More)”.

Don’t Believe the Algorithm

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hannah Fry at the Wall Street Journal: “The Notting Hill Carnival is Europe’s largest street party. A celebration of black British culture, it attracts up to two million revelers, and thousands of police. At last year’s event, the Metropolitan Police Service of London deployed a new type of detective: a facial-recognition algorithm that searched the crowd for more than 500 people wanted for arrest or barred from attending. Driving around in a van rigged with closed-circuit TVs, the police hoped to catch potentially dangerous criminals and prevent future crimes.

It didn’t go well. Of the 96 people flagged by the algorithm, only one was a correct match. Some errors were obvious, such as the young woman identified as a bald male suspect. In those cases, the police dismissed the match and the carnival-goers never knew they had been flagged. But many were stopped and questioned before being released. And the one “correct” match? At the time of the carnival, the person had already been arrested and questioned, and was no longer wanted.

Given the paltry success rate, you might expect the Metropolitan Police Service to be sheepish about its experiment. On the contrary, Cressida Dick, the highest-ranking police officer in Britain, said she was “completely comfortable” with deploying such technology, arguing that the public expects law enforcement to use cutting-edge systems. For Dick, the appeal of the algorithm overshadowed its lack of efficacy.

She’s not alone. A similar system tested in Wales was correct only 7% of the time: Of 2,470 soccer fans flagged by the algorithm, only 173 were actual matches. The Welsh police defended the technology in a blog post, saying, “Of course no facial recognition system is 100% accurate under all conditions.” Britain’s police force is expanding the use of the technology in the coming months, and other police departments are following suit. The NYPD is said to be seeking access to the full database of drivers’ licenses to assist with its facial-recognition program….(More).