Report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “Emerging real-time data sources, together with innovative data science techniques and methods – including artificial intelligence and machine learning – can help inform upstream suicide prevention efforts. Select social media platforms have proactively deployed these methods to identify individual platform users at high risk for suicide, and in some cases may activate local law enforcement, if needed, to prevent imminent suicide. To explore the current scope of activities, benefits, and risks of leveraging innovative data science techniques to help inform upstream suicide prevention at the individual and population level, the Forum on Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened a virtual workshop series consisting of three webinars held on April 28, May 12, and June 30, 2022. This Proceedings highlights presentations and discussions from the workshop…(More)”
Cross-border Data Flows: Taking Stock of Key Policies and Initiatives
OECD Report: “As data become an important resource for the global economy, it is important to strengthen trust to facilitate data sharing domestically and across borders. Significant momentum for related policies in the G7, and G20, has gone hand in hand with a wide range of – often complementary – national and international initiatives and the development of technological and organisational measures. Advancing a common understanding and dialogue among G7 countries and beyond is crucial to support coordinated and coherent progress in policy and regulatory approaches that leverage the full potential of data for global economic and social prosperity. This report takes stock of key policies and initiatives on cross-border data flows to inform and support G7 countries’ engagement on this policy agenda…(More)”.
CNSTAT Report Emphasizes the Need for a National Data Infrastructure
Article by Molly Gahagen: “Having credible and accessible data is essential for various sectors of society to function. In the recent report, “Toward a 21st Century National Data Infrastructure: Mobilizing Information for the Common Good,” by the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the importance of national data infrastructure is emphasized…
Emphasizing the need for reliable statistics for national, state and local government officials, as well as businesses and citizens, the report cites the need for a modern national data infrastructure incorporating data from multiple federal agencies. Initial recommendations and potential outcomes of such a system are contained in the report.
Recommendations include practices to incorporate data from many sources, safeguard privacy, freely share statistics with the public, ensure transparency and create a modern system that would allow for easy access and enhanced security.
Potential outcomes of this infrastructure highlighted by the authors of the report include increased evidence-based policymaking on several levels of government, uniform regulations for data reporting and users accessing the data and increased security. The report describes how this would tie into increased initiatives to promote research and evidence-based policymaking, including through the passing of the Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 in Congress.
CNSTAT’s future reports seek to address blending multiple data sources, data equity, technology and tools, among other topics…(More)”.
Collective Intelligence in Action – Using Machine Data and Insights to Improve UNDP Sensemaking
UNDP Report: “At its heart, sensemaking is a strategic process designed to extract insights from current projects to generate actionable intelligence for UNDP Country Offices (CO) and other stakeholders. Also, the approach has the potential to increase coherency amongst portfolios of projects, surface common patterns, identify connections, gaps and future perspectives, and determine strategic actions to accelerate the impact of their work.
By adopting a data-driven approach and looking into structured and semi-structured data from https://open.undp.org/ as well as unstructured data from Open UNDP, project documents and annual progress reports of selected projects, this endeavor aims to extract useful insights for the CO colleagues to better understand where their portfolio is working and identify entry points for breaking silos between teams and spurring collaboration. It is designed to help improve Sensemaking, support better strategy and improve management decisions…(More)”.
New Horizons in Digital Anthropology
Report by UNESCO and the LiiV Center: “Digitisation, social networks, artificial intelligence, and the metaverse are changing what it means to be human. Humans and technology are now in a dynamic and reciprocal relationship. However, while society has invested trillions in building and tracking digital platforms and personal data, we’ve invested a shockingly small amount in understanding the values, social dynamics, identities, and biases of digital communities.
We can’t address transformations in one without understanding the impacts on the other. Handling growing global challenges such as the spread of misinformation, the rise of social and political polarisation, the mental health crisis, the expansion of digital surveillance, and growing digital inequalities depends on our ability to gain deeper insights into the relationship between people and digital technologies, and to see and understand people, cultures and communities online. The world depends heavily on economics and data science when it comes to understanding digital impacts, but these sciences alone don’t tell the whole story. Economic models are built for scale but struggle with depth. Furthermore, experience shows us that over-reliance on one-dimensional approaches magnifies social biases and ethical blind spots.
Digital Anthropology focuses on this intersection between technology and humans, examining the quantitative and qualitative, using big data and thick data, the virtual and real. While innovation in digital anthropology has started, the field needs more investment and global awareness of its unique and untapped potential to humanise decision-making for leaders across the public and private sectors.
This publication, developed in partnership between UNESCO and the LiiV Center, maps the landscape of innovation in digital anthropology as an approach to ensure a better understanding of how human communities and societies interact and are shaped by technologies and, knowing this, how policies can be rendered more ethical and inclusive.
Briefly, the research found that innovation in digital anthropology is in a state of transition and is perceived differently across sectors and regions. In the span of just a couple of decades, innovation has come from doing anthropology digitally and doing the digital anthropologically, two movements that give life to space where creation happens within the blurry lines among disciplines, fuelled by increasingly fluid movement between academia and the private sector.
The innovation space in-between these trends seem to be where the most exciting and forward-thinking digital innovations are occurring, like novel blended algorithms or computational and techno-anthropology, and opens opportunities to educate a new breed of digitally and anthropologically skilled professionals…(More)”.
Investment Case: Multiplying Progress Through Data Ecosystems
Report by Dalberg: “Data and data ecosystems enable decision makers to improve lives and livelihoods by better understanding the world around them and acting in more effective and targeted ways. In a time of growing crises and shrinking budgets, it is imperative that every dollar is spent in the most efficient and equitable way. Data ecosystems provide decision makers with the information needed to assess and predict challenges, identify and customize solutions, and monitor and evaluate real-time progress. Together, this enables decisions that are more collaborative, effective, efficient, equitable, timely, and transparent. And this is only getting easier—ongoing advances in our ability to harness and apply data are creating opportunities to better target resources and create even more transformative impact…(More)”.
Inclusive Imaginaries: Catalysing Forward-looking Policy Making through Civic Imagination
UNDP Report: “Today’s complex challenges- including climate change, global health, and international security, among others – are pushing development actors to re-think and re-imagine traditional ways of working and decision-making. Transforming traditional approaches to navigating complexity would support what development thinker Sam Pitroda’s calls a ‘third vision’ demands a mindset rooted in creativity, innovation, and courage in order to one transcend national interests and takes into account global issues.
Inclusive Imaginaries is an approach that utilises collective reflection and imagination to engage with citizens, towards building more just, equitable and inclusive futures. It seeks to infuse imagination as a key process to support gathering of community perspectives rooted in lived experience and local culture, towards developing more contextual visions for policy and programme development…(More)”.
The European Union-U.S. Data Privacy Framework
White House Fact Sheet: “Today, President Biden signed an Executive Order on Enhancing Safeguards for United States Signals Intelligence Activities (E.O.) directing the steps that the United States will take to implement the U.S. commitments under the European Union-U.S. Data Privacy Framework (EU-U.S. DPF) announced by President Biden and European Commission President von der Leyen in March of 2022.
Transatlantic data flows are critical to enabling the $7.1 trillion EU-U.S. economic relationship. The EU-U.S. DPF will restore an important legal basis for transatlantic data flows by addressing concerns that the Court of Justice of the European Union raised in striking down the prior EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework as a valid data transfer mechanism under EU law.
The Executive Order bolsters an already rigorous array of privacy and civil liberties safeguards for U.S. signals intelligence activities. It also creates an independent and binding mechanism enabling individuals in qualifying states and regional economic integration organizations, as designated under the E.O., to seek redress if they believe their personal data was collected through U.S. signals intelligence in a manner that violated applicable U.S. law.
U.S. and EU companies large and small across all sectors of the economy rely upon cross-border data flows to participate in the digital economy and expand economic opportunities. The EU-U.S. DPF represents the culmination of a joint effort by the United States and the European Commission to restore trust and stability to transatlantic data flows and reflects the strength of the enduring EU-U.S. relationship based on our shared values…(More)”.
Governing the Environment-Related Data Space
Stefaan G. Verhulst, Anthony Zacharzewski and Christian Hudson at Data & Policy: “Today, The GovLab and The Democratic Society published their report, “Governing the Environment-Related Data Space”, written by Jörn Fritzenkötter, Laura Hohoff, Paola Pierri, Stefaan G. Verhulst, Andrew Young, and Anthony Zacharzewski . The report captures the findings of their joint research centered on the responsible and effective reuse of environment-related data to achieve greater social and environmental impact.
Environment-related data (ERD) encompasses numerous kinds of data across a wide range of sectors. It can best be defined as data related to any element of the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) Framework. If leveraged effectively, this wealth of data could help society establish a sustainable economy, take action against climate change, and support environmental justice — as recognized recently by French President Emmanuel Macron and UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy for Climate Ambition and Solutions Michael R. Bloomberg when establishing the Climate Data Steering Committee.
While several actors are working to improve access to, as well as promote the (re)use of, ERD data, two key challenges that hamper progress on this front are data asymmetries and data enclosures. Data asymmetries occur due to the ever-increasing amounts of ERD scattered across diverse actors, with larger and more powerful stakeholders often maintaining unequal access. Asymmetries lead to problems with accessibility and findability (data enclosures), leading to limited sharing and collaboration, and stunting the ability to use data and maximize its potential to address public ills.
The risks and costs of data enclosure and data asymmetries are high. Information bottlenecks cause resources to be misallocated, slow scientific progress, and limit our understanding of the environment.
A fit-for-purpose governance framework could offer a solution to these barriers by creating space for more systematic, sustainable, and responsible data sharing and collaboration. Better data sharing can in turn ease information flows, mitigate asymmetries, and minimize data enclosures.
And there are some clear criteria for an effective governance framework…(More)”
AI & Cities: Risks, Applications and Governance
Report by UN Habitat: “Artificial intelligence is manifesting at an unprecedented rate in urban centers, often with significant risks and little oversight. Using AI technologies without the appropriate governance mechanisms and without adequate consideration of how they affect people’s human rights can have negative, even catastrophic, effects.
This report is part of UN-Habitat’s strategy for guiding local authorities in realizing a people-centered digital transformation process in their cities and settlements…(More)”.