Report by the World Economic Forum: “When a new technology is introduced in healthcare, especially one based on AI, it invites meticulous scrutiny. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of chatbots in healthcare applications and as a result, careful consideration is required to promote their responsible use. To address these governance challenges, the World Economic Forum has assembled a multistakeholder community, which has co-created Chatbots RESET, a framework for governing the responsible use of chatbots in healthcare. The framework outlined in this paper offers an actionable guide for stakeholders to promote the responsible use of chatbots in healthcare applications…(More)”.
Data Readiness: Lessons from an Emergency
The DELVE Initiative: “Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic has required rapid decision-making in changing circumstances. Those decisions and their effects on the health and wealth of the nation can be better informed with data. Today, technologies that can acquire data are pervasive. Data is continually produced by devices like mobile phones, payment points and road traffic sensors. This creates opportunities for nowcasting of important metrics such as GDP, population movements and disease prevalence, which can be used to design policy interventions that are targeted to the needs of specific sectors or localities. The data collected as a by-product of daily activities is different to epidemiological or other population research data that might be used to drive the decisions of state. These new forms of data are happenstance, in that they are not originally collected with a particular research or policy question in mind but are created through the normal course of events in our digital lives, and our interactions with digital systems and services.
This happenstance data pertains to individual citizens and their daily activities. To be useful it needs to be anonymized, aggregated and statistically calibrated to provide meaningful metrics for robust decision making while managing concerns about individual privacy or business value. This process necessitates particular technical and domain expertise that is often found in academia, but it must be conducted in partnership with the industries, and public sector organisations, that collect or generate the data and government authorities that take action based on those insights. Such collaborations require governance mechanisms that can respond rapidly to emerging areas of need, a common language between partners about how data is used and how it is being protected, and careful stewardship to ensure appropriate balancing of data subjects’ rights and the benefit of using this data. This is the landscape of data readiness; the availability and quality of the UK nation’s data dictates our ability to respond in an agile manner to evolving events….(More)”.
Fixing financial data to assess systemic risk
Report by Greg Feldberg: “The COVID-19 market disruption again highlighted the flaws in the data that the public and the authorities use to assess risks in the financial system. We don’t have the right data, we can’t analyze the data we do have, and there are all sorts of holes. Amidst extreme uncertainty in times like this, market participants need better data to manage their risks, just as policymakers need better data to calibrate their crisis interventions. This paper argues that the new administration should make it a priority to fix financial regulatory data, starting during the transition.
The incoming administration should, first, emphasize data when vetting candidates for top financial regulatory positions. Every agency head should recognize the problem and the roles they must play in the solution. They should recognize how the Evidence Act of 2018 and other recent legislation help define those roles. And every agency head should recognize the role of the Office of Financial Research (OFR) within the regulatory community. Only the OFR has the mandate and experience to provide the necessary leadership to address these problems.
The incoming administration should empower the OFR to do its job and coordinate a systemwide financial data strategy, working with the regulators. That strategy should set a path for identifying key data gaps that impede risk analysis; setting data standards; sharing data securely, among authorities and with the public; and embracing new technologies that make it possible to manage data far more efficiently and securely than ever before. These are ambitious goals, but the administration may be able to accomplish them with vision and leadership…(More)”.
Open Data Inventory 2020
Report by the Open Data Watch: “The 2020/21 Open Data Inventory (ODIN) is the fifth edition of the index compiled by Open Data Watch. ODIN 2020/21 provides an assessment of the coverage and openness of official statistics in 187 countries, an increase of 9 countries compared to ODIN 2018/19. The year 2020 was a challenging year for the world as countries grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, and despite the pandemic’s negative impact on the capacity of statistics producers, 2020 saw great progress in open data.
However, the news on data this year isn’t all good. Countries in every region still struggle to publish gender data and many of the same countries are unable to provide sex-disaggregated data on the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, low-income countries continue to need more support with capacity building and financial resources to overcome the barriers to publishing open data.
ODIN is an evaluation of the coverage and openness of data provided on the websites maintained by national statistical offices (NSOs) and any official government website that is accessible from the NSO site. The overall ODIN score is an indicator of how complete and open an NSO’s data offerings are. It is comprised of both a coverage and openness subscore. Openness is measured against standards set by the Open Definition and Open Data Charter. ODIN 2020/21 includes 22 data categories, grouped under social, economic and financial, and environmental statistics. ODIN scores are represented on a range between 0 and 100, with 100 representing the best performance on open data… The full report will be released in February 2021….(More)”.
UK response to pandemic hampered by poor data practices
Report for the Royal Society: “The UK is well behind other countries in making use of data to have a real time understanding of the spread and economic impact of the pandemic according to Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics (DELVE), a multi-disciplinary group convened by the Royal Society.
The report, Data Readiness: Lessons from an Emergency, highlights how data such as aggregated and anonymised mobility and payment transaction data, already gathered by companies, could be used to give a more accurate picture of the pandemic at national and local levels. That could in turn lead to improvements in evaluation and better targeting of interventions.
Maximising the value of big data at a time of crisis requires careful cooperation across the private sector, that is already gathering these data, the public sector, which can provide a base for aggregating and overseeing the correct use of the data and researchers who have the skills to analyse it for the public good. This work needs to be developed in accordance with data protection legislation and respect people’s concerns about data security and privacy.
The report calls on the Government to extend the powers of the Office for National Statistics to enable them to support trustworthy access to ‘happenstance’ data – data that are already gathered but not for a specific public health purpose – and for the Government to fund pathfinder projects that focus on specific policy questions such as how we nowcast economic metrics and how we better understand population movements.
Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, Senior AI Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute and an author of the report, said: “The UK has talked about making better use of data for the public good, but we have had statements of good intent, rather than action. We need to plan better for national emergencies. We need to look at the National Risk Register through the lens of what data would help us to respond more effectively. We have to learn our lessons from experiences in this pandemic and be better prepared for future crises. That means doing the work now to ensure that companies, the public sector and researchers have pathfinder projects up and running to share and analyse data and help the government to make better informed decisions.”
During the pandemic, counts of the daily flow of people from one place to another between more than 3000 districts in Spain have been available at the click of a button, allowing policy makers to more effectively understand how the movement of people contributes to the spread of the virus. This was based on a collaboration between the country’s three main mobile phone operators. In France, measuring the impact of the pandemic on consumer spending on a daily and weekly scale was possible as a result of coordinated cooperation between the country’s national interbank network.
Professor Lawrence added: “Mobile phone companies might provide a huge amount of anonymised and aggregated data that would allow us a much greater understanding of how people move around, potentially spreading the virus as they go. And there is a wealth of other data, such as from transport systems. The more we understand about this pandemic, the better we can tackle it. We should be able to work together, the private and the public sectors, to harness big data for massive positive social good and do that safely and responsibly.”…(More)”
Climate TRACE
About: “We exist to make meaningful climate action faster and easier by mobilizing the global tech community—harnessing satellites, artificial intelligence, and collective expertise—to track human-caused emissions to specific sources in real time—independently and publicly.
Climate TRACE aims to drive stronger decision-making on environmental policy, investment, corporate sustainability strategy, and more.
WHAT WE DO
01 Monitor human-caused GHG emissions using cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and satellite image processing.
02 Collaborate with data scientists and emission experts from an array of industries to bring unprecedented transparency to global pollution monitoring.
03 Partner with leaders from the private and public sectors to share valuable insights in order to drive stronger climate policy and strategy.
04 Provide the necessary tools for anyone anywhere to make better decisions to mitigate and adapt to the impacts from climate change… (More)”
Tackling Societal Challenges with Open Innovation
Introduction to Special Issue of California Management Review by Anita M. McGahan, Marcel L. A. M. Bogers, Henry Chesbrough, and Marcus Holgersson: “Open innovation includes external knowledge sources and paths to market as complements to internal innovation processes. Open innovation has to date been driven largely by business objectives, but the imperative of social challenges has turned attention to the broader set of goals to which open innovation is relevant. This introduction discusses how open innovation can be deployed to address societal challenges—as well as the trade-offs and tensions that arise as a result. Against this background we introduce the articles published in this Special Section, which were originally presented at the sixth Annual World Open Innovation Conference….(More)”.
Enslaved.org
About: “As of December 2020, we have built a robust, open-source architecture to discover and explore nearly a half million people records and 5 million data points. From archival fragments and spreadsheet entries, we see the lives of the enslaved in richer detail. Yet there’s much more work to do, and with the help of scholars, educators, and family historians, Enslaved.org will be rapidly expanding in 2021. We are just getting started….
In recent years, a growing number of archives, databases, and collections that organize and make sense of records of enslavement have become freely and readily accessible for scholarly and public consumption. This proliferation of projects and databases presents a number of challenges:
- Disambiguating and merging individuals across multiple datasets is nearly impossible given their current, siloed nature;
- Searching, browsing, and quantitative analysis across projects is extremely difficult;
- It is often difficult to find projects and databases;
- There are no best practices for digital data creation;
- Many projects and datasets are in danger of going offline and disappearing.
In response to these challenges, Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University (MSU), in partnership with the MSU Department of History, University of Maryland, and scholars at multiple institutions, developed Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade. Enslaved.org’s primary focus is people—individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in slave trading….(More)”.
Review into bias in algorithmic decision-making
Report by the Center for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) (UK): “Unfair biases, whether conscious or unconscious, can be a problem in many decision-making processes. This review considers the impact that an increasing use of algorithmic tools is having on bias in decision-making, the steps that are required to manage risks, and the opportunities that better use of data offers to enhance fairness. We have focused on the use of
algorithms in significant decisions about individuals, looking across four sectors (recruitment, financial services, policing and local government), and making cross-cutting recommendations that aim to help build the right systems so that algorithms improve, rather than worsen, decision-making…(More)”.
OECD Digital Economy Outlook
OECD: “…we released the third and latest edition of the OECD Digital Economy Outlook, our comprehensive analysis of emerging trends, opportunities and challenges in the digital economy….
Below are four key findings from this year’s Outlook. Find out more in our full publication and watch our virtual launch event here.
- Widespread connectivity has allowed many to adapt to the crisis
Our report finds that connectivity has continued to improve over time. Mobile broadband subscriptions nearly tripled between 2009 and June 2019, rising from 32 to nearly 113 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants, while average mobile data usage quadrupled over the course of four years, reaching 4.6 GB in 2018. Although fibre connections have increased at a slower rate, by June 2019 they accounted for 27% of all fixed broadband connections in the OECD and no less than 50% in nine OECD countries.
- But there are still significant divides in access, use and skills…
- Governments are increasingly putting the digital transformation front and centre
By mid-2020, 34 OECD countries had put in place a national digital strategy co-ordinated at the highest levels of government, and they are devoting more attention to emerging digital technologies such as AI, blockchain and 5G infrastructure. By mid-2020, 60 countries had established a national AI strategy, and several OECD countries – Australia, Austria, Colombia, France, Germany, Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States – have issued national 5G strategies. Several countries – Australia, People’s Republic of China, Germany, India and Switzerland – have issued a blockchain strategy, while others (France and Italy) are currently developing one.
- But more needs to be done to ensure an inclusive digital transformation…(More)”.