Open Data Under Attack: How to Find Data and Why It Is More Important Than Ever

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jessica Hilburn: “This land was made for you and me, and so was the data collected with our taxpayer dollars. Open data is data that is accessible, shareable, and able to be used by anyone. While any person, company, or organization can create and publish open data, the federal and state governments are by far the largest providers of open data.

President Barack Obama codified the importance of government-created open data in his May 9, 2013, executive order as a part of the Open Government Initiative. This initiative was meant to “ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration” in furtherance of strengthening democracy and increasing efficiency. The initiative also launched Project Open Data (since replaced by the Resources.data.gov platform), which documented best practices and offered tools so government agencies in every sector could open their data and contribute to the collective public good. As has been made readily apparent, the era of public good through open data is now under attack.

Immediately after his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders, many of which targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) for removal in federal government operations. Unsurprisingly, a large number of federal datasets include information dealing with diverse populations, equitable services, and inclusion of marginalized groups. Other datasets deal with information on topics targeted by those with nefarious agendas—vaccination rates, HIV/AIDS, and global warming, just to name a few. In the wake of these executive orders, datasets and website pages with blacklisted topics, tags, or keywords suddenly disappeared—more than 8,000 of them. In addition, President Trump fired the National Archivist, and top National Archives and Records Administration officials are being ousted, putting the future of our collective history at enormous risk.

While it is common practice to archive websites and information in the transition between administrations, it is unprecedented for the incoming administration to cull data altogether. In response, unaffiliated organizations are ramping up efforts to separately archive data and information for future preservation and access. Web scrapers are being used to grab as much data as possible, but since this method is automated, data requiring a login or bot challenger (like a captcha) is left behind. The future information gap that researchers will be left to grapple with could be catastrophic for progress in crucial areas, including weather, natural disasters, and public health. Though there are efforts to put out the fire, such as the federal order to restore certain resources, the people’s library is burning. The losses will be permanently felt…Data is a weapon, whether we like it or not. Free and open access to information—about democracy, history, our communities, and even ourselves—is the foundation of library service. It is time for anyone who continues to claim that libraries are not political to wake up before it is too late. Are libraries still not political when the Pentagon barred library access for tens of thousands of American children attending Pentagon schools on military bases while they examined and removed supposed “radical indoctrination” books? Are libraries still not political when more than 1,000 unique titles are being targeted for censorship annually, and soft censorship through preemptive restriction to avoid controversy is surely occurring and impossible to track? It is time for librarians and library workers to embrace being political.

In a country where the federal government now denies that certain people even exist, claims that children are being indoctrinated because they are being taught the good and bad of our nation’s history, and rescinds support for the arts, humanities, museums, and libraries, there is no such thing as neutrality. When compassion and inclusion are labeled the enemy and the diversity created by our great American experiment is lambasted as a social ill, claiming that libraries are neutral or apolitical is not only incorrect, it’s complicit. To update the quote, information is the weapon in the war of ideas. Librarians are the stewards of information. We don’t want to be the Americans who protested in 1933 at the first Nazi book burnings and then, despite seeing the early warning signs of catastrophe, retreated into the isolation of their own concerns. The people’s library is on fire. We must react before all that is left of our profession is ash…(More)”.

Combine AI with citizen science to fight poverty

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nature Editorial: “Of the myriad applications of artificial intelligence (AI), its use in humanitarian assistance is underappreciated. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Togo’s government used AI tools to identify tens of thousands of households that needed money to buy food, as Nature reports in a News Feature this week. Typically, potential recipients of such payments would be identified when they apply for welfare schemes, or through household surveys of income and expenditure. But such surveys were not possible during the pandemic, and the authorities needed to find alternative means to help those in need. Researchers used machine learning to comb through satellite imagery of low-income areas and combined that knowledge with data from mobile-phone networks to find eligible recipients, who then received a regular payment through their phones. Using AI tools in this way was a game-changer for the country.Can AI help beat poverty? Researchers test ways to aid the poorest people

Now, with the pandemic over, researchers and policymakers are continuing to see how AI methods can be used in poverty alleviation. This needs comprehensive and accurate data on the state of poverty in households. For example, to be able to help individual families, authorities need to know about the quality of their housing, their children’s diets, their education and whether families’ basic health and medical needs are being met. This information is typically obtained from in-person surveys. However, researchers have seen a fall in response rates when collecting these data.

Missing data

Gathering survey-based data can be especially challenging in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In-person surveys are costly to do and often miss some of the most vulnerable, such as refugees, people living in informal housing or those who earn a living in the cash economy. Some people are reluctant to participate out of fear that there could be harmful consequences — deportation in the case of undocumented migrants, for instance. But unless their needs are identified, it is difficult to help them.Leveraging the collaborative power of AI and citizen science for sustainable development

Could AI offer a solution? The short answer is, yes, although with caveats. The Togo example shows how AI-informed approaches helped communities by combining knowledge of geographical areas of need with more-individual data from mobile phones. It’s a good example of how AI tools work well with granular, household-level data. Researchers are now homing in on a relatively untapped source for such information: data collected by citizen scientists, also known as community scientists. This idea deserves more attention and more funding.

Thanks to technologies such as smartphones, Wi-Fi and 4G, there has been an explosion of people in cities, towns and villages collecting, storing and analysing their own social and environmental data. In Ghana, for example, volunteer researchers are collecting data on marine litter along the coastline and contributing this knowledge to their country’s official statistics…(More)”.

Farmers Sue Over Deletion of Climate Data From Government Websites

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Karen Zraick: “Organic farmers and environmental groups sued the Agriculture Department on Monday over its scrubbing of references to climate change from its website.

The department had ordered staff to take down pages focused on climate change on Jan. 30, according to the suit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Within hours, it said, information started disappearing.

That included websites containing data sets, interactive tools and funding information that farmers and researchers relied on for planning and adaptation projects, according to the lawsuit.

At the same time, the department also froze funding that had been promised to businesses and nonprofits through conservation and climate programs. The purge then “removed critical information about these programs from the public record, denying farmers access to resources they need to advocate for funds they are owed,” it said.

The Agriculture Department referred questions about the lawsuit to the Justice Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The suit was filed by lawyers from Earthjustice, based in San Francisco, and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, on behalf of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York, based in Binghamton; the Natural Resources Defense Council, based in New York; and the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington. The latter two groups relied on the department website for their research and advocacy, the lawsuit said.

Peter Lehner, a lawyer for Earthjustice, said the pages being purged were crucial for farmers facing risks linked to climate change, including heat waves, droughts, floods, extreme weather and wildfires. The websites had contained information about how to mitigate dangers and adopt new agricultural techniques and strategies. Long-term weather data and trends are valuable in the agriculture industry for planning, research and business strategy.

“You can purge a website of the words climate change, but that doesn’t mean climate change goes away,” Mr. Lehner said…(More)”.

A.I. Is Prompting an Evolution, Not an Extinction, for Coders

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Steve Lohr: “John Giorgi uses artificial intelligence to make artificial intelligence.

The 29-year-old computer scientist creates software for a health care start-up that records and summarizes patient visits for doctors, freeing them from hours spent typing up clinical notes.

To do so, Mr. Giorgi has his own timesaving helper: an A.I. coding assistant. He taps a few keys and the software tool suggests the rest of the line of code. It can also recommend changes, fetch data, identify bugs and run basic tests. Even though the A.I. makes some mistakes, it saves him up to an hour many days.

“I can’t imagine working without it now,” Mr. Giorgi said.

That sentiment is increasingly common among software developers, who are at the forefront of adopting A.I. agents, assistant programs tailored to help employees do their jobs in fields including customer service and manufacturing. The rapid improvement of the technology has been accompanied by dire warnings that A.I. could soon automate away millions of jobs — and software developers have been singled out as prime targets.

But the outlook for software developers is more likely evolution than extinction, according to experienced software engineers, industry analysts and academics. For decades, better tools have automated some coding tasks, but the demand for software and the people who make it has only increased.

A.I., they say, will accelerate that trend and level up the art and craft of software design.

“The skills software developers need will change significantly, but A.I. will not eliminate the need for them,” said Arnal Dayaratna, an analyst at IDC, a technology research firm. “Not anytime soon anyway.”

The outlook for software engineers offers a window into the impact that generative A.I. — the kind behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT — is likely to have on knowledge workers across the economy, from doctors and lawyers to marketing managers and financial analysts. Predictions about the technology’s consequences vary widely, from wiping out whole swaths of the work force to hyper-charging productivity as an elixir for economic growth…(More)”.

The New Control Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Jon Askonas: “Let me tell you two stories about the Internet. The first story is so familiar it hardly warrants retelling. It goes like this. The Internet is breaking the old powers of the state, the media, the church, and every other institution. It is even breaking society itself. By subjecting their helpless users to ever more potent algorithms to boost engagement, powerful platforms distort reality and disrupt our politics. YouTube radicalizes young men into misogynists. TikTok turns moderate progressives into Hamas supporters. Facebook boosts election denialism; or it censors stories doubting the safety of mRNA vaccines. On the world stage, the fate of nations hinges on whether Twitter promotes color revolutions, WeChat censors Hong Kong protesters, and Facebook ads boost the Brexit campaign. The platforms are producing a fractured society: diversity of opinion is running amok, consensus is dead.

The second story is very different. In the 2023 essay “The age of average,” Alex Murrell recounts a project undertaken in the 1990s by Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. The artists commissioned a public affairs firm to poll over a thousand Americans on their ideal painting: the colors they liked, the subjects they gravitated toward, and so forth. Using the aggregate data, the artists created a painting, and they repeated this procedure in a number of other countries, exhibiting the final collection as an art exhibition called The People’s Choice. What they found, by and large, was not individual and national difference but the opposite: shocking uniformity — landscapes with a few animals and human figures with trees and a blue-hued color palette..(more)”.

In Online Democracy, Fun Is Imperative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Joe Mathews: “Governments around the world, especially those at the subnational and local levels, find themselves stuck in a vise. Planetary problems like climate change, disease, and technological disruption are not being addressed adequately by national governments. Everyday people, whose lives have been disrupted by those planetary problems, press the governments closer to them to step up and protect them. But those governments lack the technical capacity and popular trust to act effectively against bigger problems.

To build trust and capacity, many governments are moving governance into the digital world and asking their residents to do more of the work of government themselves. Some cities, provinces, and political institutions have tried to build digital platforms and robust digital environments where residents can improve service delivery and make government policy themselves.

However, most of these experiments have been failures. The trouble is that most of these platforms cannot keep the attention of the people who are supposed to use them. Too few of the platforms are designed to make online engagement compelling. So, figuring out how to make online engagement in government fun is actually a serious question for governments seeking to work more closely with their people.

What does fun look like in this sphere? I first witnessed a truly fun and engaging digital tool for citizen governance in Rome in 2018. While running a democracy conference with Mayor Virginia Raggi and her team, they were always on their phones, and not just to answer emails or texts. They were constantly on a digital environment called Rousseau.

Rousseau was named after Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century philosopher and author of The Social Contract. In that 1762 book, Rousseau argued that city-states (like his hometown of Geneva) were more naturally suited to democracy than nation-states (especially big nations like France). He also wrote that the people themselves, not elected representatives, were the best rulers through what we today call direct democracy…(More)”.

California Governor Launches New Digital Democracy Tool

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Phil Willon: “California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday announced a new digital democracy initiative that will attempt to connect residents directly with government officials in times of disaster and allow them to express their concerns about matters affecting their day-to-day lives.

The web-based initiative, called Engaged California, will go live with a focus on aiding victims of the deadly wildfires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena who are struggling to recover. For example, comments shared via the online forum could potentially prompt government action regarding insurance coverage, building standards or efforts to require utilities to bury power lines underground.

In a written statement, Newsom described the pilot program as “a town hall for the modern era — where Californians share their perspectives, concerns, and ideas geared toward finding real solutions.”


“We’re starting this effort by more directly involving Californians in the LA firestorm response and recovery,” he added. “As we recover, reimagine, and rebuild Los Angeles, we will do it together.”

The Democrat’s administration has ambitious plans for the effort that go far beyond the wildfires. Engaged California is modeled after a program in Taiwan that became an essential bridge between the public and the government at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Taiwanese government has relied on it to combat online political disinformation as well…(More)”.

Gather, Share, Build

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Nithya Ramanathan & Jim Fruchterman: “Recent milestones in generative AI have sent nonprofits, social enterprises, and funders alike scrambling to understand how these innovations can be harnessed for global good. Along with this enthusiasm, there is also warranted concern that AI will greatly increase the digital divide and fail to improve the lives of 90 percent of the people on our planet. The current focus on funding AI intelligently and strategically in the social sector is critical, and it will help ensure that money has the largest impact.

So how can the social sector meet the current moment?

AI is already good at a lot of things. Plenty of social impact organizations are using AI right now, with positive results. Great resources exist for developing a useful understanding of the current landscape and how existing AI tech can serve your mission, including this report from Stanford HAI and Project Evident and this AI Treasure Map for Nonprofits from Tech Matters.

While some tech-for-good companies are creating AI and thriving—Digital Green, Khan Academy, and Jacaranda Health, among many—most social sector companies are not ready to build AI solutions. But even organizations that don’t have AI on their radar need to be thinking about how to address one of the biggest challenges to harnessing AI to solve social sector problems: insufficient data…(More)”.

Why these scientists devote time to editing and updating Wikipedia

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Christine Ro: “…A 2018 survey of more than 4,000 Wikipedians (as the site’s editors are called) found that 12% had a doctorate. Scientists made up one-third of the Wikimedia Foundation’s 16 trustees, according to Doronina.

Although Wikipedia is the best-known project under the Wikimedia umbrella, there are other ways for scientists to contribute besides editing Wikipedia pages. For example, an entomologist could upload photos of little-known insect species to Wikimedia Commons, a collection of images and other media. A computer scientist could add a self-published book to the digital textbook site Wikibooks. Or a linguist could explain etymology on the collaborative dictionary Wiktionary. All of these are open access, a key part of Wikimedia’s mission.

Although Wikipedia’s structure might seem daunting for new editors, there are parallels with academic documents.

For instance, Jess Wade, a physicist at Imperial College London, who focuses on creating and improving biographies of female scientists and scientists from low- and middle-income countries, says that the talk page, which is the behind-the-scenes portion of a Wikipedia page on which editors discuss how to improve it, is almost like the peer-review file of an academic paper…However, scientists have their own biases about aspects such as how to classify certain topics. This matters, Harrison says, because “Wikipedia is intended to be a general-purpose encyclopaedia instead of a scientific encyclopaedia.”

One example is a long-standing battle over Wikipedia pages on cryptids and folklore creatures such as Bigfoot. Labels such as ‘pseudoscience’ have angered cryptid enthusiasts and raised questions about different types of knowledge. One suggestion is for the pages to feature a disclaimer that says that a topic is not accepted by mainstream science.

Wade raises a point about resourcing, saying it’s especially difficult for the platform to retain academics who might be enthusiastic about editing Wikipedia initially, but then drop off. One reason is time. For full-time researchers, Wikipedia editing could be an activity best left to evenings, weekends and holidays…(More)”.

AI Upgrades the Internet of Things

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by R. Colin Johnson: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is renovating the fast-growing Internet of Things (IoT) by migrating AI innovations, including deep neural networks, Generative AI, and large language models (LLMs) from power-hungry datacenters to the low-power Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT). Located at the network’s edge, there are already billions of connected devices today, plus a predicted trillion more connected devices by 2035 (according to Arm, which licenses many of their processors).

The emerging details of this AIoT development period got a boost from ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, which recently accepted for publication “Artificial Intelligence of Things: A Survey,” a paper authored by Mi Zhang of Ohio State University and collaborators at Michigan State University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Los Angeles. The survey is an in-depth reference to the latest AIoT research…

The survey addresses the subject of AIoT with AI-empowered sensing modalities including motion, wireless, vision, acoustic, multi-modal, ear-bud, and GenAI-assisted sensing. The computing section covers on-device inference engines, on-device learning, methods of training by partitioning workloads among heterogeneous accelerators, offloading privacy functions, federated learning that distributes workloads while preserving anonymity, integration with LLMs, and AI-empowered agents. Connection technologies discussed include Internet over Wi-Fi and over cellular/mobile networks, visible light communication systems, LoRa (long-range chirp spread-spectrum connections), and wide-area networks.

A sampling of domain-specific AIoTs reviewed in the survey include AIoT systems for healthcare and well-being, for smart speakers, for video streaming, for video analytics, for autonomous driving, for drones, for satellites, for agriculture, for biology, and for artificial reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality…(More)”.

Figure for AIoT article