magazine article

How this mental health care app is using generative AI to improve its chatbot

Curated on June 2, 2024June 6, 2024 by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview by Daniela Dib: “Andrea Campos struggled with depression for years before founding Yana, a mental health care app, in 2017. The app’s chatbot provides users emotional companionship in Spanish. Although she was reluctant at first, Campos began using generative artificial intelligence for the Yana chatbot after ChatGPT launched in 2022. Yana, which recently launched its English-language version, has 15 million users, and is available in Latin America and the U.S.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

How has your product evolved since you introduced generative AI to it?

At first, we didn’t use generative AI because we believed it was far from ready for mental health support. We designed and guardrailed our chatbot’s responses with decision trees. But when ChatGPT launched and we saw what it could do, it wasn’t a question of whether to use generative AI or not, but how soon — we’d fall behind otherwise. It’s been a challenge because everyone quickly began developing with generative AI, but our advantage was that, having operated our chatbot for a while, we had gathered over 2 billion data points that have been invaluable for our app’s fine-tuning. One thing is clear: It’s crucial to have a model tailored to the specific needs of our product…(More)”.

Little Communes Everywhere

Curated on June 2, 2024June 6, 2024 by Stefaan Verhulst

Review by Jay Caspian Kang: “…I was thinking about all this while I read “The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life,” a forthcoming book by the comparative-literature professor Kristin Ross. Ross—who has previously written about the Paris Commune of 1871 and France’s student uprising of May, 1968—focusses particularly on the ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes, a thousand-acre commune created by French farmers and their allies in the late two-thousands, in an effort to block the construction of a new airport, which would have kicked many people off their own land. (The French government had designated the land a zone d’aménagement différé, or a “deferred development area”; the farmers kept the acronym but used it to mean zone à défendre, or “zone to defend.”) For a commune to work, Ross argues, one must have both a physical space to defend against an antagonist and an articulated vision for an alternative organization of human relationships and economy. The “commune form,” as she defines it, is a “political movement that is also the collective elaboration of a desired way of life—the means becoming the end.” Theory, in other words, needs to be put into practice, in an intimate and earnest setting, so that people can test out their ideas about living within the context of an actual place among actual people.

Ross identifies one of the motivating forces behind the creation of the ZAD as alienation, which was “less the loss of some human essence than it was the loss of possibilities: the sense of blockages and impasses brought on by the destruction and fragmentation of the social tissue by capitalism.” Drawing upon the work of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, Ross refers to “the colonization of everyday life,” each part of our day becoming dominated by economic reasoning. This, she writes, dispossesses us of “our dignity, our social life, our time, the sense of mastery over our lives, the beauty and health of our lived environment, and of the very possibility of working together to invent our future collectively.” Under such conditions, the commune becomes the only alternative…

Physical spaces, whether pools or parks, can be reclaimed through collective action, in much the way that admissions policies at exclusive magnet schools can be protected by a small group of dedicated parents. Small, everyday victories are the only real cure for alienation. What else would work?…(More)”

Japan’s push to make all research open access is taking shape

Curated on June 2, 2024June 6, 2024 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Dalmeet Singh Chawla: “The Japanese government is pushing ahead with a plan to make Japan’s publicly funded research output free to read. In June, the science ministry will assign funding to universities to build the infrastructure needed to make research papers free to read on a national scale. The move follows the ministry’s announcement in February that researchers who receive government funding will be required to make their papers freely available to read on the institutional repositories from April 2025.

The Japanese plan “is expected to enhance the long-term traceability of research information, facilitate secondary research and promote collaboration”, says Kazuki Ide, a health-sciences and public-policy scholar at Osaka University in Suita, Japan, who has written about open access in Japan.

The nation is one of the first Asian countries to make notable advances towards making more research open access (OA) and among the first countries in the world to forge a nationwide plan for OA.

The plan follows in the footsteps of the influential Plan S, introduced six years ago by a group of research funders in the United States and Europe known as cOAlition S, to accelerate the move to OA publishing. The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely available from 2026…(More)”.

21st Century technology can boost Africa’s contribution to global biodiversity data

Curated on June 1, 2024June 1, 2024 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Wiida Fourie-Basson: “In spring in the Southern hemisphere, the natural world is on full throttle: “Flowers are blooming, insects are emerging, birds are singing, and reptiles are coming out of their winter hibernation,” wrote Pete Crowcroft, known as @possumpete on the citizen science app, iNaturalist.

Yet, despite this annual bursting forth of life, a 2023 preprint puts the continent’s contribution to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility at a dismal 2.69%, with huge disparities between African countries…

Since its formation in 2008 as part of a graduate project at the University of California, the iNaturalist platform has evolved into one of the world’s most popular biodiversity observation platforms. Anyone, anywhere in the world, with a smartphone can download the app and start posting images and descriptions of their observations, and a large community of identifiers helps to confirm the species’ observation and label it as “research grade”.

Rebelo says iNaturalist is now used on a massive scale: “During the 2023 City Nature Challenge almost 67,000 people made nearly two million observations over four days – that is, five observations each second. Another 22,000 specialists identified 60 thousand species of animals, plants, and fungi. Few citizen science platforms are as powerful and efficient.”..

Andra Waagmeester, data scientist at Micelio in Belgium and a Wikimentor, believes the dearth of biodiversity data from Africa can be solved by combining the iNaturalist and Wikipedia communities: “They are independent communities, but there is substantial overlap between them. By overlaying the two data sets and leveraging the semantic web, we have the means to deal with the challenge.”

The need for biodiversity-related knowledge from Africa was first acknowledged by the Wiki-community during the 2018 Wikimania conference in Cape Town. The Wiki Biodiversity Project has since grown into an active global community that leverages crowd-sourced knowledge from platforms like iNaturalist…(More)”.

AI Chatbot Credited With Preventing Suicide. Should It Be?

Curated on May 29, 2024May 29, 2024 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Samantha Cole: “A recent Stanford study lauds AI companion app Replika for “halting suicidal ideation” for several people who said they felt suicidal. But the study glosses over years of reporting that Replika has also been blamed for throwing users into mental health crises, to the point that its community of users needed to share suicide prevention resources with each other.

The researchers sent a survey of 13 open-response questions to 1006 Replika users who were 18 years or older and students, and who’d been using the app for at least one month. The survey asked about their lives, their beliefs about Replika and their connections to the chatbot, and how they felt about what Replika does for them. Participants were recruited “randomly via email from a list of app users,” according to the study. On Reddit, a Replika user posted a notice they received directly from Replika itself, with an invitation to take part in “an amazing study about humans and artificial intelligence.”

Almost all of the participants reported being lonely, and nearly half were severely lonely. “It is not clear whether this increased loneliness was the cause of their initial interest in Replika,” the researchers wrote.

The surveys revealed that 30 people credited Replika with saving them from acting on suicidal ideation: “Thirty participants, without solicitation, stated that Replika stopped them from attempting suicide,” the paper said. One participant wrote in their survey: “My Replika has almost certainly on at least one if not more occasions been solely responsible for me not taking my own life.” …(More)”.

Toward a Polycentric or Distributed Approach to Artificial Intelligence & Science

Curated on May 22, 2024May 22, 2024 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stefaan Verhulst: “Even as enthusiasm grows over the potential of artificial intelligence (AI), concerns have arisen in equal measure about a possible domination of the field by Big Tech. Such an outcome would replicate many of the mistakes of preceding decades, when a handful of companies accumulated unprecedented market power and often acted as de facto regulators in the global digital ecosystem. In response, the European Group of Chief Scientific Advisors has recently proposed establishing a “state-of-the-art facility for academic research,” to be called the European Distributed Institute for AI in Science (EDIRAS). According to the Group, the facility would be modeled on Geneva’s high-energy physics lab, CERN, with the goal of creating a “CERN for AI” to counterbalance the growing AI prowess of the US and China.

While the comparison to CERN is flawed in some respects–see below–the overall emphasis on a distributed, decentralized approach to AI is highly commendable. In what follows, we outline three key areas where such an approach can help advance the field. These areas–access to computational resources, access to high quality data, and access to purposeful modeling–represent three current pain points (“friction”) in the AI ecosystem. Addressing them through a distributed approach can not only help address the immediate challenges, but more generally advance the cause of open science and ensure that AI and data serve the broader public interest…(More)”.

Sorting the Self

Curated on May 21, 2024May 24, 2024 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Christopher Yates: “We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers…and there is good reason for this. We have never looked for ourselves—so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves?” Much has changed since the late nineteenth century, when Nietzsche wrote those words. We now look obsessively for ourselves, and we find ourselves in myriad ways. Then we find more ways of finding ourselves. One involves a tool, around which grew a science, from which bloomed a faith, and from which fell the fruits of dogma. That tool is the questionnaire. The science is psychometrics. And the faith is a devotion to self-codification, of which the revelation of personality is the fruit.

Perhaps, whether on account of psychological evaluation and therapy, compulsory corporate assessments, spiritual direction endeavors, or just a sporting interest, you have had some experience of this phenomenon. Perhaps it has served you well. Or maybe you have puzzled over the strange avidity with which we enable standardized tests and the technicians or portals that administer them to gauge the meaning of our very being. Maybe you have been relieved to discover that, according to the 16 Personality Types assessments, you are an ISFP; or, according to the Enneagram, you are a 3 with a 2 or 4 wing. Or maybe you have been somewhat troubled by how this peculiar term personality, derived as it is from the Latin persona (meaning the masks once worn by players on stage), has become a repository of so many adjectives—one that violates Aristotle’s cardinal metaphysical rule against reducing a substance to its properties.

Either way, the self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today, thanks to the century-long ascendence of behavioral analysis and scientific psychology, sociometry, taxonomic personology, and personality theory. Add to these the assorted psychodiagnostic instruments drawing on refinements of multiple regression analysis, and multivariate and circumplex modeling, trait determination and battery-based assessments, and the ebbs and flows of psychoanalytic theory. Not to be overlooked, of course, is the popularizing power of evidence-based objective and predictive personality profiling inside and outside the laboratory and therapy chambers since Katherine Briggs began envisioning what would become the fabled person-sorting Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in 1919. A handful of phone calls, psychological referrals, job applications, and free or modestly priced hyperlinked platforms will place before you (and the eighty million or more other Americans who take these tests annually) more than two thousand personality assessments promising to crack your code. Their efficacy has become an object of our collective speculation. And by many accounts, their revelations make us not only known but also more empowered to live healthy and fulfilling lives. Nietzsche had many things, but he did not have PersonalityMax.com or PersonalityAssessor.com…(More)”.

How Open-Source Software Empowers Nonprofits And The Global Communities They Serve

Curated on May 20, 2024May 22, 2024 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Steve Francis: “One particular area where this challenge is evident is climate. Thousands of nonprofits strive to address the effects of a changing climate and its impact on communities worldwide. Headlines often go to big organizations doing high-profile work (planting trees, for instance) in well-known places. Money goes to large-scale commercial agriculture or new technologies — because that’s where profits are most easily made. But thousands of other communities of small farmers that aren’t as visible or profitable need help too. These communities come together to tackle a number of interrelated problems: climate, soil health and productivity, biodiversity and human health and welfare. They envision a more sustainable future.

The reality is that software is crafted to meet market needs, but these communities don’t represent a profitable market. Every major industry has its own software applications and a network of consultants to tune that software for optimal performance. A farm cooperative in less developed parts of the world seeking to maximize value for sustainably harvested produce faces very different challenges than do any of these business users. Often they need to collect and manipulate data in the field, on whatever mobile device they have, with little or no connectivity. Modern software systems are rarely designed to operate in such an environment; they assume the latest devices and continuous connectivity…(More)”.

Data Stewardship: The Way Forward in the New Digital Data Landscape

Curated on May 15, 2024May 15, 2024 by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Courtney Cameron: “…It is absolutely critical that Statistics Canada, as a national statistical office (NSO) and public service organization, along with other government agencies and services, adapt to the new data ecosystem and digital landscape. Canada is falling behind in adjusting to rapid digitalization, exploding data volumes, the ever-increasing digital market monopolization by private companies, foreign data harvesting, and in managing the risks associated with data sharing or reuse. If Statistics Canada and the federal public service are to keep up with private companies or foreign powers in this digital data context, and to continue to provide useful insights and services for Canadians, concerns of data digitalization, data interoperability and data security must be addressed through effective data stewardship.

However, it is not sufficient to have data stewards responsible for data: as data governance expert David Plotkin argues in Data Stewardship: An Actionable Guide to Effective Data Management and Data Governance, government departments must also consult these stewards on decisions about the data that they steward, if they are to ensure that decisions are made in the best interests of those who get value from the information. Frameworks, policies and procedures are needed to ensure this, as is having a steward involved in the processes as they occur. Plotkin also writes that data stewardship involvement needs to be integrated into enterprise processes, such as in project management and systems development methodologies. Data stewardship and data governance principles must be accepted as a part of the corporate culture, and stewardship leaders need to advise, drive and support this shift.

Finally, stewardship goes beyond sound data management and standards: it is important to be mindful of the role of an NSO. Public acceptability and trust are of vital importance. Social licence, or acceptability, and public engagement are necessary for NSOs to be able to perform their duties. These are achieved through practising data stewardship and adhering to the principles of open data, as well as by ensuring transparent processes, confidentiality and security, and by communicating the value of citizens’ sharing their data…With the rapidly accelerating proliferation of data and the increasing demand for, and potential of, data sharing and collaboration, NSOs and public governance organizations alike need to reimagine data stewardship as a function and role encompassing a wider range of purposes and responsibilities…(More)”. See also: Data Stewards — Drafting the Job Specs for A Re-imagined Data Stewardship Role