This Startup Is Challenging Google Maps—and It Needs You

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Aarian Marshall at Wired: “A whole lifetime in New York City, and Christiana Ting didn’t realize just how many urgent care facilities there were until the app told her to start looking for them. “They were giving extra points for medical offices, and I found them, I think, on every block,” she says. “I’m not sure what that says about the neighborhood where I work.”

Ting was one of 761 New Yorkers who downloaded, played with, and occasionally became obsessed with an app called MapNYC this fall, vying for their share of an 8-bitcoin prize (worth about $50,000 at the time). The month-long contest, run by a new mapping startup called StreetCred, was really an experiment. StreetCred’s main research question: How do you convince regular people to build and verify mappingdata?

It turns out that the maps that guide you to the nearest Arby’s, or help your Lyft driver find your house, don’t just materialize. “I took mapping for granted until I started the competition,” Ting says, even though she pulls up Google Maps at least twice a day. “But it’s such an inconvenience if the info on the map is wrong, especially in a place like New York, that’s changing all the time.”

For regular folk, detailed, reliable mapping info is helpful. For businesses, it can be crucial. Some want to be found when a map user searches for the nearest sandwich shop. Others use products that rely on base maps—think Uber, the Weather Channel, your car’s navigation system—and require up-to-date location data. “One of the huge challenges to any geographic database is its currency,” says Renee Sieber, a geographer who studies participatory mapping at McGill University. That is to say, yesterday’s map is no good to anybody doing business today.

StreetCred sees that as an opportunity. “There’s a lot of companies, none of whom I can name, who have location data, and that data needs improvement,” says Randy Meech, CEO of the small startup. (Meech’s last open-source mapping company, a Samsung subsidiary called Mapzen, shut down in January.) Maybe a client found a data set online or purchased one from another company. Either way, it’s static, and that means it’s only a matter of time before it fails to represent reality.

Google Maps, the giant in this space, has created its extensive database through years of web scraping, Streetview roaming, purchasing and collecting satellite data, and both paying and asking volunteers to verify that the businesses it identifies are still in the same place. But the company doesn’t provide all of its specific location or “point of interest” data to developers—where that Thai restaurant is, or where the hiking trail starts, or where the hospital parking lot is located. When it and other mapping services like HERE Technologies, TomTom, and Foursquare do offer that intel, it can be pricey. StreetCred wants to make that info free for customers who don’t need that much data and cheaper for those that do….(More)”.

Data Was Supposed to Fix the U.S. Education System. Here’s Why It Hasn’t.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Simon Rodberg at Harvard Business School: “For too long, the American education system failed too many kids, including far too many poor kids and kids of color, without enough public notice or accountability. To combat this, leaders of all political persuasions championed the use of testing to measure progress and drive better results. Measurement has become so common that in school districts from coast to coast you can now find calendars marked “Data Days,” when teachers are expected to spend time not on teaching, but on analyzing data like end-of-year and mid-year exams, interim assessments, science and social studies and teacher-created and computer-adaptive tests, surveys, attendance and behavior notes. It’s been this way for more than 30 years, and it’s time to try a different approach.

The big numbers are necessary, but the more they proliferate, the less value they add. Data-based answers lead to further data-based questions, testing, and analysis; and the psychology of leaders and policymakers means that the hunt for data gets in the way of actual learning. The drive for data responded to a real problem in education, but bad thinking about testing and data use has made the data cure worse than the disease….

The leadership decision at stake is how much data to collect. I’ve heard variations on “In God we trust; all others bring data” at any number of conferences and beginning-of-school-year speeches. But the mantra “we believe in data” is actually only shorthand for “we believe our actions should be informed by the best available data.” In education, that mostly means testing. In other fields, the kind of process is different, but the issue is the same. The key question is not, “will the data be useful?” (of course it can be) or, “will the data be interesting?” (Yes, again.) The proper question for leaders to ask is: will the data help us make better-enough decisions to be worth the cost of getting and using it? So far, the answer is “no.”

Nationwide data suggests that the growth of data-driven schooling hasn’t worked even by its own lights. Harvard professor Daniel Koretz says “The best estimate is that test-based accountability may have produced modest gains in elementary-school mathematics but no appreciable gains in either reading or high-school mathematics — even though reading and mathematics have been its primary focus.”

We wanted data to help us get past the problem of too many students learning too little, but it turns out that data is an insufficient, even misleading answer. It’s possible that all we’ve learned from our hyper-focus on data is that better instruction won’t come from more detailed information, but from changing what people do. That’s what data-driven reform is meant for, of course: convincing teachers of the need to change and focusing where they need to change….(More)”.

The Internet of Bodies: A Convenient—and, Yes, Creepy—New Platform for Data Discovery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Horrigan at ALM: “In the Era of the Internet of Things, we’ve become (at least somewhat) comfortable with our refrigerators knowing more about us than we know about ourselves and our Apple watches transmitting our every movement. The Internet of Things has even made it into the courtroom in cases such as the hot tub saga of Amazon Echo’s Alexa in State v. Bates and an unfortunate wife’s Fitbit in State v. Dabate.

But the Internet of Bodies?…

The Internet of Bodies refers to the legal and policy implications of using the human body as a technology platform,” said Northeastern University law professor Andrea Matwyshyn, who works also as co-director of Northeastern’s Center for Law, Innovation, and Creativity (CLIC).

“In brief, the Internet of Things (IoT) is moving onto and inside the human body, becoming the Internet of Bodies (IoB),” Matwyshyn added….


The Internet of Bodies is not merely a theoretical discussion of what might happen in the future. It’s happening already.

Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney revealed in 2013 that his physicians ordered the wireless capabilities of his heart implant disabled out of concern for potential assassin hackers, and in 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recalled almost half a million pacemakers over security issues requiring a firmware update.

It’s not just former vice presidents and heart patients becoming part of the Internet of Bodies. Northeastern’s Matwyshyn notes that so-called “smart pills” with sensors can report back health data from your stomach to smartphones, and a self-tuning brain implant is being tested to treat Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

So, what’s not to like?

Better with Bacon?

“We are attaching everything to the Internet whether we need to or not,” Matwyshyn said, calling it the “Better with Bacon” problem, noting that—as bacon has become a popular condiment in restaurants—chefs are putting it on everything from drinks to cupcakes.

“It’s great if you love bacon, but not if you’re a vegetarian or if you just don’t like bacon. It’s not a bonus,” Matwyshyn added.

Matwyshyn’s bacon analogy raises interesting questions: Do we really need to connect everything to the Internet? Do the data privacy and data protection risks outweigh the benefits?

The Northeastern Law professor divides these IoB devices into three generations: 1) “body external” devices, such as Fitbits and Apple watches, 2) “body internal” devices, including Internet-connected pacemakers, cochlear implants, and digital pills, and 3) “body embedded” devices, hardwired technology where the human brain and external devices meld, where a human body has a real time connection to a remote machine with live updates.

Chip Party for Chipped Employees

A Wisconsin company, Three Square Market, made headlines in 2017—including an appearance on The Today Show—when the company microchipped its employees, not unlike what veterinarians do with the family pet. Not surprisingly, the company touted the benefits of implanting microchips under the skin of employees, including being able to wave one’s hand at a door instead of having to carry a badge or use a password….(More)”.

China will now officially try to extend its Great Firewall to blockchains

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mike Orcutt at Technology Review: “China’s crackdown on blockchain technology has taken another step: the country’s internet censorship agency has just approved new regulations aimed at blockchain companies. 

Hand over the data: The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) will require any “entities or nodes” that provide “blockchain information services” to collect users’ real names and national ID or telephone numbers, and allow government officials to access that data.

It will ban companies from using blockchain technology to “produce, duplicate, publish, or disseminate” any content that Chinese law prohibits. Last year, internet users evaded censors by recording the content of two banned articles on the Ethereum blockchain. The rules, first proposed in October, will go into effect next month.

Defeating the purpose? For more than a year, China has been cracking down on cryptocurrency trading and its surrounding industry while also singing the praises of blockchain. It appears its goal is to take advantage of the resiliency and tamper-proof nature of blockchains while canceling out their most most radical attribute: censorship resistance….(More)”.

IBM aims to use crowdsourced sensor data to improve local weather forecasting globally

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Larry Dignan at ZDN: “IBM is hoping that mobile barometric sensors from individuals opting in, supercomputing ,and the Internet of Things can make weather forecasting more local globally.

Big Blue, which owns The Weather Company, will outline the IBM Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting System (GRAF). GRAF incorporates IoT data in its weather models via crowdsourcing.

While hyper local weather forecasts are available in the US, Japan, and some parts of Western Europe, many regions in the world lack an accurate picture of weather.

Mary Glackin, senior vice president of The Weather Company, said the company is “trying to fill in the blanks.” She added, “In a place like India, weather stations are kilometers away. We think this can be as significant as bringing satellite data into models.”

For instance, the developing world gets forecasts based on global data that are updated every 6 hours and resolutions at 10km to 15km. By using GRAF, IBM said it can offer forecasts for the day ahead that are updated hourly on average and have a 3km resolution….(More)”.

Los Angeles Accuses Weather Channel App of Covertly Mining User Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Natasha Singer in The New York Times: “The Weather Channel app deceptively collected, shared and profited from the location information of millions of American consumers, the city attorney of Los Angeles said in a lawsuit filed on Thursday.

One of the most popular online weather services in the United States, the Weather Channel app has been downloaded more than 100 million times and has 45 million active users monthly.

The government said the Weather Company, the business behind the app, unfairly manipulated users into turning on location tracking by implying that the information would be used only to localize weather reports. Yet the company, which is owned by IBM, also used the data for unrelated commercial purposes, like targeted marketing and analysis for hedge funds, according to the lawsuit…

In the complaint, the city attorney excoriated the Weather Company, saying it unfairly took advantage of its app’s popularity and the fact that consumers were likely to give their location data to get local weather alerts. The city said that the company failed to sufficiently disclose its data practices when it got users’ permission to track their location and that it obscured other tracking details in its privacy policy.

“These issues certainly aren’t limited to our state,” Mr. Feuer said. “Ideally this litigation will be the catalyst for other action — either litigation or legislative activity — to protect consumers’ ability to assure their private information remains just that, unless they speak clearly in advance.”…(More)”.

Can a set of equations keep U.S. census data private?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeffrey Mervis at Science: “The U.S. Census Bureau is making waves among social scientists with what it calls a “sea change” in how it plans to safeguard the confidentiality of data it releases from the decennial census.

The agency announced in September 2018 that it will apply a mathematical concept called differential privacy to its release of 2020 census data after conducting experiments that suggest current approaches can’t assure confidentiality. But critics of the new policy believe the Census Bureau is moving too quickly to fix a system that isn’t broken. They also fear the changes will degrade the quality of the information used by thousands of researchers, businesses, and government agencies.

The move has implications that extend far beyond the research community. Proponents of differential privacy say a fierce, ongoing legal battle over plans to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census has only underscored the need to assure people that the government will protect their privacy....

Differential privacy, first described in 2006, isn’t a substitute for swapping and other ways to perturb the data. Rather, it allows someone—in this case, the Census Bureau—to measure the likelihood that enough information will “leak” from a public data set to open the door to reconstruction.

“Any time you release a statistic, you’re leaking something,” explains Jerry Reiter, a professor of statistics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who has worked on differential privacy as a consultant with the Census Bureau. “The only way to absolutely ensure confidentiality is to release no data. So the question is, how much risk is OK? Differential privacy allows you to put a boundary” on that risk....

In the case of census data, however, the agency has already decided what information it will release, and the number of queries is unlimited. So its challenge is to calculate how much the data must be perturbed to prevent reconstruction....

A professor of labor economics at Cornell University, Abowd first learned that traditional procedures to limit disclosure were vulnerable—and that algorithms existed to quantify the risk—at a 2005 conference on privacy attended mainly by cryptographers and computer scientists. “We were speaking different languages, and there was no Rosetta Stone,” he says.

He took on the challenge of finding common ground. In 2008, building on a long relationship with the Census Bureau, he and a team at Cornell created the first application of differential privacy to a census product. It is a web-based tool, called OnTheMap, that shows where people work and live….

The three-step process required substantial computing power. First, the researchers reconstructed records for individuals—say, a 55-year-old Hispanic woman—by mining the aggregated census tables. Then, they tried to match the reconstructed individuals to even more detailed census block records (that still lacked names or addresses); they found “putative matches” about half the time.

Finally, they compared the putative matches to commercially available credit databases in hopes of attaching a name to a particular record. Even if they could, however, the team didn’t know whether they had actually found the right person.

Abowd won’t say what proportion of the putative matches appeared to be correct. (He says a forthcoming paper will contain the ratio, which he calls “the amount of uncertainty an attacker would have once they claim to have reidentified a person from the public data.”) Although one of Abowd’s recent papers notes that “the risk of re-identification is small,” he believes the experiment proved reidentification “can be done.” And that, he says, “is a strong motivation for moving to differential privacy.”…

Such arguments haven’t convinced Ruggles and other social scientists opposed to applying differential privacy on the 2020 census. They are circulating manuscripts that question the significance of the census reconstruction exercise and that call on the agency to delay and change its plan....

Ruggles, meanwhile, has spent a lot of time thinking about the kinds of problems differential privacy might create. His Minnesota institute, for instance, disseminates data from the Census Bureau and 105 other national statistical agencies to 176,000 users. And he fears differential privacy will put a serious crimp in that flow of information…

There are also questions of capacity and accessibility. The centers require users to do all their work onsite, so researchers would have to travel, and the centers offer fewer than 300 workstations in total....

Abowd has said, “The deployment of differential privacy within the Census Bureau marks a sea change for the way that official statistics are produced and published.” And Ruggles agrees. But he says the agency hasn’t done enough to equip researchers with the maps and tools needed to navigate the uncharted waters….(More)”.

In High-Tech Cities, No More Potholes, but What About Privacy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Timothy Williams in The New York Times: “Hundreds of cities, large and small, have adopted or begun planning smart cities projects. But the risks are daunting. Experts say cities frequently lack the expertise to understand privacy, security and financial implications of such arrangements. Some mayors acknowledge that they have yet to master the responsibilities that go along with collecting billions of bits of data from residents….

Supporters of “smart cities” say that the potential is enormous and that some projects could go beyond creating efficiencies and actually save lives. Among the plans under development are augmented reality programs that could help firefighters find people trapped in burning buildings and the collection of sewer samples by robots to determine opioid use so that city services could be aimed at neighborhoods most in need.

The hazards are also clear.

“Cities don’t know enough about data, privacy or security,” said Lee Tien, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on digital rights. “Local governments bear the brunt of so many duties — and in a lot of these cases, they are often too stupid or too lazy to talk to people who know.”

Cities habitually feel compelled to outdo each other, but the competition has now been intensified by lobbying from tech companies and federal inducements to modernize.

“There is incredible pressure on an unenlightened city to be a ‘smart city,’” said Ben Levine, executive director at MetroLab Network, a nonprofit organization that helps cities adapt to technology change.

That has left Washington, D.C., and dozens of other cities testing self-driving cars and Orlando trying to harness its sunshine to power electric vehicles. San Francisco has a system that tracks bicycle traffic, while Palm Beach, Fla., uses cycling data to decide where to send street sweepers. Boise, Idaho, monitors its trash dumps with drones. Arlington, Tex., is looking at creating a transit system based on data from ride-sharing apps….(More)”.

A Research Roadmap to Advance Data Collaboratives Practice as a Novel Research Direction

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Iryna Susha, Theresa A. Pardo, Marijn Janssen, Natalia Adler, Stefaan G. Verhulst and Todd Harbour in the  International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR): “An increasing number of initiatives have emerged around the world to help facilitate data sharing and collaborations to leverage different sources of data to address societal problems. They are called “data collaboratives”. Data collaboratives are seen as a novel way to match real life problems with relevant expertise and data from across the sectors. Despite its significance and growing experimentation by practitioners, there has been limited research in this field. In this article, the authors report on the outcomes of a panel discussing critical issues facing data collaboratives and develop a research and development agenda. The panel included participants from the government, academics, and practitioners and was held in June 2017 during the 18th International Conference on Digital Government Research at City University of New York (Staten Island, New York, USA). The article begins by discussing the concept of data collaboratives. Then the authors formulate research questions and topics for the research roadmap based on the panel discussions. The research roadmap poses questions across nine different topics: conceptualizing data collaboratives, value of data, matching data to problems, impact analysis, incentives, capabilities, governance, data management, and interoperability. Finally, the authors discuss how digital government research can contribute to answering some of the identified research questions….(More)”. See also: http://datacollaboratives.org/

Firm Led by Google Veterans Uses A.I. to ‘Nudge’ Workers Toward Happiness

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daisuke Wakabayashi in the New York Times: “Technology companies like to promote artificial intelligence’s potential for solving some of the world’s toughest problems, like reducing automobile deaths and helping doctors diagnose diseases. A company started by three former Google employees is pitching A.I. as the answer to a more common problem: being happier at work.

The start-up, Humu, is based in Google’s hometown, and it builds on some of the so-called people-analytics programs pioneered by the internet giant, which has studied things like the traits that define great managers and how to foster better teamwork.

Humu wants to bring similar data-driven insights to other companies. It digs through employee surveys using artificial intelligence to identify one or two behavioral changes that are likely to make the biggest impact on elevating a work force’s happiness. Then it uses emails and text messages to “nudge” individual employees into small actions that advance the larger goal.

At a company where workers feel that the way decisions are made is opaque, Humu might nudge a manager before a meeting to ask the members of her team for input and to be prepared to change her mind. Humu might ask a different employee to come up with questions involving her team that she would like to have answered.

At the heart of Humu’s efforts is the company’s “nudge engine” (yes, it’s trademarked). It is based on the economist Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize-winning research into how people often make decisions because of what is easier rather than what is in their best interest, and how a well-timed nudge can prompt them to make better choices.

Google has used this approach to coax employees into the corporate equivalent of eating their vegetables, prodding them to save more for retirement, waste less food at the cafeteria and opt for healthier snacks….

But will workers consider the nudges useful or manipulative?

Todd Haugh, an assistant professor of business law and ethics at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, said nudges could push workers into behaving in ways that benefited their employers’ interests over their own.

“The companies are the only ones who know what the purpose of the nudge is,” Professor Haugh said. “The individual who is designing the nudge is the one whose interests are going to be put in the forefront.”…(More)”.