magazine article

How data analysis helped Mozambique stem a cholera outbreak

Curated on June 3, 2020June 3, 2020 by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Jack at the Financial Times: “When Mozambique was hit by two cyclones in rapid succession last year — causing death and destruction from a natural disaster on a scale not seen in Africa for a generation — government officials added an unusual recruit to their relief efforts. Apart from the usual humanitarian and health agencies, the National Health Institute also turned to Zenysis, a Silicon Valley start-up.

As the UN and non-governmental organisations helped to rebuild lives and tackle outbreaks of disease including cholera, Zenysis began gathering and analysing large volumes of disparate data. “When we arrived, there were 400 new cases of cholera a day and they were doubling every 24 hours,” says Jonathan Stambolis, the company’s chief executive. “None of the data was shared [between agencies]. Our software harmonised and integrated fragmented sources to produce a coherent picture of the outbreak, the health system’s ability to respond and the resources available.

“Three and a half weeks later, they were able to get infections down to zero in most affected provinces,” he adds. The government attributed that achievement to the availability of high-quality data to brief the public and international partners.

“They co-ordinated the response in a way that drove infections down,” he says. Zenysis formed part of a “virtual control room”, integrating information to help decision makers understand what was happening in the worst hit areas, identify sources of water contamination and where to prioritise cholera vaccinations.

It supported an “mAlert system”, which integrated health surveillance data into a single platform for analysis. The output was daily reports distilled from data issued by health facilities and accommodation centres in affected areas, disease monitoring and surveillance from laboratory testing….(More)”.

Dynamic Networks Improve Remote Decision-Making

Curated on June 2, 2020June 3, 2020 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Abdullah Almaatouq and Alex “Sandy” Pentland: “The idea of collective intelligence is not new. Research has long shown that in a wide range of settings, groups of people working together outperform individuals toiling alone. But how do drastic shifts in circumstances, such as people working mostly at a distance during the COVID-19 pandemic, affect the quality of collective decision-making? After all, public health decisions can be a matter of life and death, and business decisions in crisis periods can have lasting effects on the economy.

During a crisis, it’s crucial to manage the flow of ideas deliberatively and strategically so that communication pathways and decision-making are optimized. Our recently published research shows that optimal communication networks can emerge from within an organization when decision makers interact dynamically and receive frequent performance feedback. The results have practical implications for effective decision-making in times of dramatic change….

Our experiments illustrate the importance of dynamically configuring network structures and enabling decision makers to obtain useful, recurring feedback. But how do you apply such findings to real-world decision-making, whether remote or face to face, when constrained by a worldwide pandemic? In such an environment, connections among individuals, teams, and networks of teams must be continually reorganized in response to shifting circumstances and challenges. No single network structure is optimal for every decision, a fact that is clear in a variety of organizational contexts.

Public sector. Consider the teams of advisers working with governments in creating guidelines to flatten the curve and help restart national economies. The teams are frequently reconfigured to leverage pertinent expertise and integrate data from many domains. They get timely feedback on how decisions affect daily realities (rates of infection, hospitalization, death) — and then adjust recommended public health protocols accordingly. Some team members move between levels, perhaps being part of a state-level team for a while, then federal, and then back to state. This flexibility ensures that people making big-picture decisions have input from those closer to the front lines.

Witness how Germany considered putting a brake on some of its reopening measures in response to a substantial, unexpected uptick in COVID-19 infections. Such time-sensitive decisions are not made effectively without a dynamic exchange of ideas and data. Decision makers must quickly adapt to facts reported by subject-area experts and regional officials who have the relevant information and analyses at a given moment….(More)“.

Google searches are no substitute for systematic reviews when it comes to policymaking

Curated on May 28, 2020May 28, 2020 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Peter Bragge: “With all public attention on the COVID-19 pandemic, it is easy to forget that Australia suffered traumatic bushfires last summer, and that a royal commission is investigating the fires and will report in August. According to its Terms of Reference, the commission will examine how Australia’s national and state governments can improve the ‘preparedness for, response to, resilience to and recovery from, natural disasters.’

Many would assume that the commission will identify and use all best-available research knowledge from around the world. But this is highly unlikely because royal commissions are not designed in a way that is fit-for-purpose in the 21^st century. Specifically, their terms of reference do not mandate the inclusion of knowledge from world-leading research, even though such research has never been more accessible. This design failure provides critical lessons not only for future royal commissions and public inquiries but for public servants developing policy, including for the COVID-19 crisis, and for academics, journalists, and all researchers who want to keep up with the best global thinking in their field.

The risk of not employing research knowledge that could shape policy and practice could be significantly reduced if the royal commission drew upon what are known as systematic reviews. These are a type of literature review that identify, evaluate and summarise the findings and quality of all known research studies on a particular topic. Systematic reviews provide an overall picture of an entire body of research, rather than one that is skewed by accessing only one or two studies in an area. They are the most thorough form of inquiry, because they control for the ‘outlier’ effect of one or two studies that do not align with the weight of the identified research.

Systematic reviews are known as the ‘peak of peaks’ of research knowledge

They became mainstream in the 1990s through the Cochrane Collaboration – an independent organisation originating in Britain but now worldwide — which has published thousands of systematic reviews across all areas of medicine. These and other medical systematic reviews have been critical in driving best practice healthcare around the world. The approach has expanded to business and management, the law, international development, education, environmental conservation, health service delivery and how to tackle the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

There are now tens of thousands of systematic reviews spanning all these areas. Researchers who use them can spend much less time navigating the vastly larger volume of up to 80 million individual research studies published since 1665.

Sadly, they are not. Few policymakers, decision-makers and media are using systematic reviews to respond to complex challenges. Instead, they are searching Google, and hoping that something useful will turn up amongst an estimated 6.19 billion web pages.

The vastness of the open web is an understandable temptation for the time poor, and a great way to find a good local eatery. But it’s a terrible way to try and access relevant, credible knowledge, and an enormous risk for those seeking to address hugely difficult problems, such as responding to Australia’s bushfires.

The deep expertise of specialist professionals and academics is critical to solving complex societal challenges. Yet the standard royal commission approach of using a few experts as a proxy for the world’s knowledge is selling short both their expertise and the commission process. If experts called before the bushfire royal commission could be asked to contribute not just their own expertise, but a response to the applicability of systematic review research to Australia, the commission’s thinking could benefit hugely from harnessing the knowledge both of the reviews and of the experts…(More)”.

The next Big Data battlefield: Server Geography

Curated on May 23, 2020May 27, 2020 by Stefaan Verhulst

Maroosha Muzaffar at OZY: “At the G-20 summit last June, when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe introduced a resolution endorsing the free flow of data across borders, India, South Africa and Indonesia refused to sign it. India’s then foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale described data as a “new form of wealth” to explain the country’s reluctance to part with it.

It wasn’t an isolated standoff. President Donald Trump’s trade war with China and tariff battles with India and Europe dominated the global financial discourse in the months before the coronavirus crisis. But the next trade conflict after the pandemic eases is already brewing, and it won’t involve only tariffs on products. It’ll be focused on territorial control of data.

A growing number of emerging economies with giant populations, like China, India, Nigeria, Indonesia and South Africa, are leveraging the markets they offer to demand that foreign firms keep the data they gather from these countries within their borders, and not on servers in the West. That’s leading to rising tensions over “data localization,” especially with the U.S., which has an overall global trade deficit but enjoys a massive trade surplus in digital services — in good measure because of its control over global data, say experts.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi dangled his country’s 1.3 billion-strong market during a visit to the U.S. last September, calling data the “new gold.” China has 13 data localization laws that span all sectors of life — all data on Chinese nationals and infrastructure must be stored within the country. Nigeria has a similar requirement. An Indian government panel has meanwhile recommended that New Delhi do the same…(More)”.

Unlock the Hidden Value of Your Data

Curated on May 21, 2020May 21, 2020 by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan G. Verhulst at the Harvard Business Review: “Twenty years ago, Kevin Rivette and David Kline wrote a book about the hidden value contained within companies’ underutilized patents. These patents, Rivette and Kline argued, represented “Rembrandts in the Attic” (the title of their book). Patents, the authors suggested, shouldn’t be seen merely as passive properties, but as strategic assets — a “new currency” that could be deployed in the quest for competition, brand reputation, and advances in research and development.

We are still living in the knowledge economy, and organizations are still trying to figure out how to unlock under-utilized assets. But the currency has changed: Today’s Rembrandts in the attic are data.

It is widely accepted now that the vast amounts of data that companies generate represents a tremendous repository of potential value. This value is monetary, and also social; it contains terrific potential to impact the public good. But do organizations — and do we as a society — know how to unlock this value? Do we know how to find the insights hidden in our digital attics and use them to improve society and peoples’ lives?

In what follows, I outline four steps that could help organizations maximize their data assets for public good. If there is an overarching theme, it is about the value of re-using data. Recent years have seen a growing open data movement, in which previously siloed government datasets have been made accessible to outside groups. Despite occasional trepidation on the part of data holders, research has consistently shown that such initiatives can be value-enhancing for both data holders and society. The same is true for private sector data assets. Better and more transparent reuse of data is arguably the single most important measure we can take to unleash this dual potential.

To help maximize data for the public good, we need to:

Develop methodologies to measure the value of data...
Develop structures to incentivize collaboration. ….
Encourage data collaboratives. …
Identify and nurture data stewards. …(More)”

Removing the pump handle: Stewarding data at times of public health emergency

Curated on May 21, 2020May 21, 2020 by Stefaan Verhulst

Reema Patel at Significance: “There is a saying, incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain, that states: “History never repeat itself but it rhymes”. Seeking to understand the implications of the current crisis for the effective use of data, I’ve drawn on the nineteenth-century cholera outbreak in London’s Soho to identify some “rhyming patterns” that might inform our approaches to data use and governance at this time of public health crisis.

Where better to begin than with the work of Victorian pioneer John Snow? In 1854, Snow’s use of a dot map to illustrate clusters of cholera cases around public water pumps, and of statistics to establish the connection between the quality of water sources and cholera outbreaks, led to a breakthrough in public health interventions – and, famously, the removal of the handle of a water pump in Broad Street.

Data is vital

We owe a lot to Snow, especially now. His examples teaches us that data has a central role to play in saving lives, and that the effective use of (and access to) data is critical for enabling timely responses to public health emergencies.

Take, for instance, transport app CityMapper’s rapid redeployment of its aggregated transport data. In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, this formed part of an analysis of compliance with social distancing restrictions across a range of European cities. There is also the US-based health weather map, which uses anonymised and aggregated data to visualise fever, specifically influenza-like illnesses. This data helped model early indications of where, and how quickly, Covid-19 was spreading….

Ethics and human rights still matter

As the current crisis evolves, many have expressed concern that the pandemic will be used to justify the rapid roll out of surveillance technologies that do not meet ethical and human rights standards, and that this will be done in the name of the “public good”. Examples of these technologies include symptom- and contact-tracing applications. Privacy experts are also increasingly concerned that governments will be trading off more personal data than is necessary or proportionate to respond to the public health crisis.

Many ethical and human rights considerations (including those listed at the bottom of this piece) are at risk of being overlooked at this time of emergency, and governments would be wise not to press ahead regardless, ignoring legitimate concerns about rights and standards. Instead, policymakers should begin to address these concerns by asking how we can prepare (now and in future) to establish clear and trusted boundaries for the use of data (personal and non-personal) in such crises.

Democratic states in Europe and the US have not, in recent memory, prioritised infrastructures and systems for a crisis of this scale – and this has contributed to our current predicament. Contrast this with Singapore, which suffered outbreaks of SARS and H1N1, and channelled this experience into implementing pandemic preparedness measures.

We cannot undo the past, but we can begin planning and preparing constructively for the future, and that means strengthening global coordination and finding mechanisms to share learning internationally. Getting the right data infrastructure in place has a central role to play in addressing ethical and human rights concerns around the use of data….(More)”.

Governing Simulations: Intro to Necroeconomics

Curated on May 20, 2020May 20, 2020 by Stefaan Verhulst

Bryan Wolff, Yevheniia Berchul, Yu Gong, Andrey Shevlyakov at Strelka Mag: “French philosopher Michel Foucault defined biopower as the power over bodies, or the social and political techniques to control people’s lives. Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe continued this line of thinking to arrive at necropolitics, the politics of death, or as he phrases it: “contemporary forms of subjugation of life, to the power of death.” COVID-19 has put these powers in sharp relief. Most world-changing events of the twenty-first century have been internalized with the question “where were you?” For example, “where were you when the planes hit?” But the pandemic knows no single universal moment to refer to. It’s become as much a question of when, as of where. “When did you take the pandemic seriously?” Most likely, your answer stands in direct relation to your proximity to death. Whether a critical mass or a specific loss, fatality defined COVID-19’s reality.

For many governments, it wasn’t the absolute count of death, but rather its simulations that made them take action. The United States was one of the last countries holding out on a lockdown until the Imperial College report projected the possibility of two million to four million fatalities in the US alone (if no measures were taken). And these weren’t the only simulations being run. A week into the lockdown, it was wondered aloud whether this was all worth the cost. It was a unique public reveal of the deadly economics—or necroeconomics—that we’re usually insulated from, whether through specialist language games or simply because they’re too grim to face. But ignoring the financialization of our demise doesn’t make it go away. If we are to ever reconsider the systems meant to keep us alive, we’d better get familiar. What better place to start than to see the current crisis through the eyes of one of the most widely used models of death: the one that puts a price on life. It’s called the “Value of a Statistical Life” or VSL..(More)”.

The Big Failure of Small Government

Curated on May 19, 2020May 19, 2020 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mariana Mazzucato and Giulio Quaggiotto at Project Syndicate: “Decades of privatization, outsourcing, and budget cuts in the name of “efficiency” have significantly hampered many governments’ responses to the COVID-19 crisis. At the same time, successful responses by other governments have shown that investments in core public-sector capabilities make all the difference in times of emergency. The countries that have handled the crisis well are those where the state maintains a productive relationship with value creators in society, by investing in critical capacities and designing private-sector contracts to serve the public interest.

From the United States and the United Kingdom to Europe, Japan, and South Africa, governments are investing billions – and, in some cases, trillions – of dollars to shore up national economies. Yet, if there is one thing we learned from the 2008 financial crisis, it is that quality matters at least as much as quantity. If the money falls on empty, weak, or poorly managed structures, it will have little effect, and may simply be sucked into the financial sector. Too many lives are at stake to repeat past errors.

Unfortunately, for the last half-century, the prevailing political message in many countries has been that governments cannot – and therefore should not – actually govern. Politicians, business leaders, and pundits have long relied on a management creed that focuses obsessively on static measures of efficiency to justify spending cuts, privatization, and outsourcing.

As a result, governments now have fewer options for responding to the crisis, which may be why some are now desperately clinging to the unrealistic hope of technological panaceas such as artificial intelligence or contact-tracing apps. With less investment in public capacity has come a loss of institutional memory (as the UK’s government has discovered) and increased dependence on private consulting firms, which have raked in billions. Not surprisingly, morale among public-sector employees has plunged in recent years.

Consider two core government responsibilities during the COVID-19 crisis: public health and the digital realm. In 2018 alone, the UK government outsourced health contracts worth £9.2 billion ($11.2 billion), putting 84% of beds in care homes in the hands of private-sector operators (including private equity firms). Making matters worse, since 2015, the UK’s National Health Service has endured £1 billion in budget cuts.

Outsourcing by itself is not the problem. But the outsourcing of critical state capacities clearly is, especially when the resulting public-private “partnerships” are not designed to serve the public interest. Ironically, some governments have outsourced so eagerly that they have undermined their own ability to structure outsourcing contracts. After a 12-year effort to spur the private sector to develop low-cost ventilators, the US government is now learning that outsourcing is not a reliable way to ensure emergency access to medical equipment….(More)”.

How to run the world remotely

Curated on May 14, 2020May 14, 2020 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jen Kirby at Vox: “The green benches in the United Kingdom’s House of Commons were mostly empty, just Prime Minister Boris Johnson and a few members of Parliament, sitting spread out.

Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, wearing black robes, still commanded the room. But when it was time for a member of Parliament to ask a question, Hoyle glanced upward at a television screen mounted on the wood-paneled walls of the chamber.

On that screen appeared a member of Parliament — maybe with headphones, maybe just a tad too close to the camera, maybe framed with carefully curated bookshelf — ready to speak.

This is the so-called “Zoom” Parliament, which the UK first convened on April 22, turning the centuries-old democratic process into something that can be done, at least partially, from home.

The coronavirus pandemic has upended normalcy, and that includes the day-to-day functions of government. The social distancing measures and stay-at-home orders required to manage the virus’s spread has forced some governments to abruptly adopt new technologies and ways of working that would have been unimaginable just a few months ago.

From Brazil to Canada to the European Union, legislatures and parliaments have adopted some form of virtual government, whether for hearings and other official business, or even for voting. Several US states have also shifted to doing legislative work remotely, from New Jersey to Kentucky. And with the coronavirus making travel risky, diplomacy has also gone online, with everyone from the United Nations to the leaders of the G-7 meeting via computer screen.

Not every country or legislature has followed suit, most notably the US Congress, although advocates and some lawmakers are pushing to change this now. Even the US Supreme Court, long resistant to change, began hearing oral arguments this week via conference call, and livestreamed the audio with just a few, er, glitches.

This rapid shift to remote governance has largely done what it’s supposed to do: keep parliaments working during a crisis.In the UK, there have been a few technical difficulties, but it’s mostly succeeding.

“I think it does really well,” Chi Onwurah, a Labour MP and shadow minister for digital, science, and technology, who advocated for this move, told me. “Obviously, sometimes the technology doesn’t work or the audio is not very good or the broadband goes down.

“But, by and large,” she said, “we have MPs across the country putting questions to government and making democracy visible again.”

Governments may be Zooming or Google Hanging right now out of necessity, but once they get used to doing things this way (and get the mute button figured out), some elements of remote governance could end up outlasting this crisis. It won’t be a replacement for the real thing, and it probably shouldn’t be. But legislatures could certainly adopt at least some of these tools more permanently to help make democracy more accessible and transparent.

The holding-government-officials-accountable type of transparency, that is. Not the politician-accidentally-appearing-at-a-virtual-city-council-meeting, dusting-their-bookshelves-in-their-undies kind….

On Wednesday, Brazil’s Senate voted remotely again, approving an emergency transfer of resources to states to fight the coronavirus. It underscores a bizarre split in Brazil: Its Congress is using technology to try to govern aggressively during the pandemic. Its president, when asked last week about the country’s rising coronavirus death toll, replied, “So what? I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”….

Beth Simone Noveck, director of New York University’s Governance Lab, told me that Brazil, along with some other countries, is ahead of the curve on this because it’s considered remote voting before.

But legislatures don’t necessarily need fancy apps to make this work. “Other places are doing voting in a very simple way — you’re on a Zoom, they turn on the camera and you put up your hand and you say ‘aye’ or ‘nay,’” Noveck said.

Brazil isn’t the only Latin American country that has quickly adapted to the constraints of the pandemic. On Tuesday, Argentina’s legislature held its first remote session. The Chamber of Deputies was transformed, with panels installed around the chamber to broadcast the faces of the 220 members of Congress, all dialing in from home….(More)”.

How AI can help us harness our ‘collective intelligence’

Curated on May 14, 2020May 14, 2020 by Stefaan Verhulst

Edd Gent at the BBC: “…There are already promising examples of how AI can help us better pool our unique capabilities. San Francisco start-up Unanimous AI has built an online platform that helps guide group decisions. They’ve looked to an unlikely place to guide their AI: the way honeybees make collective decisions.

“We went back to basics and said, ‘How does nature amplify the intelligence of groups?’,” says CEO Louis Rosenberg. “What nature does is form real-time systems, where the groups are interacting all at once together with feedback loops. So, they’re pushing and pulling on each other as a system, and converging on the best possible combination of their knowledge, wisdom, insight and intuition.”

Their Swarm AI platform presents groups with a question and places potential answers in different corners of their screen. Users control a virtual magnet with their mouse and engage in a tug of war to drag an ice hockey puck to the answer they think is correct. The system’s algorithm analyses how each user interacts with the puck – for instance, how much conviction they drag it with or how quickly they waver when they’re in the minority – and uses this information to determine where the puck moves. That creates feedback loops in which each user is influenced by the choice and conviction of the others allowing the puck to end up at the answer best reflecting the collective wisdom of the group.

Several academic papers and high-profile clients who use the product back up the effectiveness of the Swarm AI platform. In one recent study, a group of traders were asked to forecast the weekly movement of several key stock market indices by trying to drag the puck to one of four answers — up or down by more than 4%, or up and down by less than 4%. With the tool, they boosted their accuracy by 36%.

Credit Suisse has used the platform to help investors forecast the performance of Asian markets; Disney has used it to predict the success of TV shows; and Unanimous has even partnered with Stanford Medical School to boost doctors’ ability to diagnose pneumonia from chest X-rays by 33%….(More)”