City CIOs urged to lay the foundations for generative AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Sarah Wray: “The London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) has produced a collection of guides to support local authorities in using generative artificial intelligence (genAI) tools such as ChatGPT, Bard, Midjourney and Dall-E.

The resources include a guide for local authority leaders and another aimed at all staff, as well as a guide designed specifically for council Chief Information Officers (CIOs), which was developed with AI software company Faculty.

Sam Nutt, Researcher and Data Ethicist at LOTI, a membership organisation for over 20 boroughs and the Greater London Authority, told Cities Today: “Generative AI won’t solve every problem for local governments, but it could be a catalyst to transform so many processes for how we work.

“On the one hand, personal assistants integrated into programmes like Word, Excel or Powerpoint could massively improve officer productivity. On another level there is a chance to reimagine services and government entirely, thinking about how gen AI models can do so many tasks with data that we couldn’t do before, and allow officers to completely change how they spend their time.

“There are both opportunities and challenges, but the key message on both is that local governments should be ambitious in using this ‘AI moment’ to reimagine and redesign our ways of working to be better at delivering services now and in the future for our residents.”

As an initial step, local governments are advised to provide training and guidelines for staff. Some have begun to implement these steps, including US cities such as Boston, Seattle and San Jose.

Nutt stressed that generative AI policies are useful but not a silver bullet for governance and that they will need to be revisited and updated regularly as technology and regulations evolve…(More)”.

AI often mangles African languages. Local scientists and volunteers are taking it back to school

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Sandeep Ravindran: “Imagine joyfully announcing to your Facebook friends that your wife gave birth, and having Facebook automatically translate your words to “my prostitute gave birth.” Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Porto, says that’s what happened to a friend when Facebook’s English translation mangled the nativity news he shared in his native language, Hausa.

Such errors in artificial intelligence (AI) translation are common with African languages. AI may be increasingly ubiquitous, but if you’re from the Global South, it probably doesn’t speak your language.

That means Google Translate isn’t much help, and speech recognition tools such as Siri or Alexa can’t understand you. All of these services rely on a field of AI known as natural language processing (NLP), which allows AI to “understand” a language. The overwhelming majority of the world’s 7000 or so languages lack data, tools, or techniques for NLP, making them “low-resourced,” in contrast with a handful of “high-resourced” languages such as English, French, German, Spanish, and Chinese.

Hausa is the second most spoken African language, with an estimated 60 million to 80 million speakers, and it’s just one of more than 2000 African languages that are mostly absent from AI research and products. The few products available don’t work as well as those for English, notes Graham Neubig, an NLP researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s not the people who speak the languages making the technology.” More often the technology simply doesn’t exist. “For example, now you cannot talk to Siri in Hausa, because there is no data set to train Siri,” Muhammad says.

He is trying to fill that gap with a project he co-founded called HausaNLP, one of several launched within the past few years to develop AI tools for African languages…(More)”.

Wastewater monitoring: ‘the James Webb Telescope for population health’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Exemplars News: “When the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a lockdown across Bangladesh and her research on environmental exposure to heavy metals became impossible to continue, Dr. Rehnuma Haque began a search for some way she could contribute to the pandemic response.

“I knew I had to do something during COVID,” said Dr. Haque, a research scientist at the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b). “I couldn’t just sit at home.”

Then she stumbled upon articles on early wastewater monitoring efforts for COVID in Australia, the Netherlands, Italy, and the United States. “When I read those papers, I was so excited,” said Dr. Haque. “I emailed my supervisor, Dr. Mahbubur Rahman, and said, ‘Can we do this?’”

Two months later, in June 2020, Dr. Haque and her colleagues had launched one of the most robust and earliest national wastewater surveillance programs for COVID in a low- or middle-income country (LMIC).

The initiative, which has now been expanded to monitor for cholera, salmonella, and rotavirus and may soon be expanded further to monitor for norovirus and antibiotic resistance, demonstrates the power and potential of wastewater surveillance to serve as a low-cost tool for obtaining real-time meaningful health data at scale to identify emerging risks and guide public health responses.

“It is improving public health outcomes,” said Dr. Haque. “We can see everything going on in the community through wastewater surveillance. You can find everything you are looking for and then prepare a response.”

A single wastewater sample can yield representative data about an entire ward, town, or county and allow LMICs to monitor for emerging pathogens. Compared with clinical monitoring, wastewater monitoring is easier and cheaper to collect, can capture infections that are asymptomatic or before symptoms arise, raises fewer ethical concerns, can be more inclusive and not as prone to sampling biases, can generate a broader range of data, and is unrivaled at quickly generating population-level data…(More)” – See also: The #Data4Covid19 Review

The planet is too important to be left to activists: The guiding philosophy of the Climate Majority Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jadzia Tedeschi and Rupert Read: “Increasing numbers of people around the world are convinced that human civilisation is teetering on the brink, but that our political “leaders” aren’t levelling with us about just how dire the climate outlook is. Quite a few of us are beginning to imagine collapse. And yet, for the most part, the responses available to individuals who want to take action seem to be limited to either consumer choices (minimising the amount of plastics we buy, using reusable coffee cups, recycling, and so on) or radical protests (such as gluing oneself to roads at busy intersections, disrupting sports matches, splashing soup on priceless art works, and risking imprisonment).

But there must be a space for action between these two alternatives. While the radical tactics of the Extinction Rebellion movement (XR) did succeed in nudging the public conversation concerning the climate and biodiversity crisis toward a new degree of seriousness, these same tactics also alienated people who would otherwise be sympathetic to XR’s cause and managed to give “climate activists” a bad name in the process. To put it simply, the radical tactics of XR could never achieve the kind of broad-based consensus that is needed to meaningfully respond to the current crisis.

We need a coordinated, collective effort at scale, which entails collaborating across social boundaries and political battlelines. If we are to prevent irrecoverable civilisational collapse, we need to demonstrate that taking care of the natural world is in everybody’s interest.

The Climate Majority Project works to inspire, fund, connect, coordinate, and scale citizen-led initiatives in workplaces, local communities, and strategic professional networks to reach beyond the boundaries of activism-as-usual. It is our endeavour to instantiate the kind of ambitious, moderate flank to XR that Rupert Read has previously called for. The plan is to prove the concept in the UK and then go global — albeit at a slower pace; after all, moderation is rarely adorned with fireworks…(More)”.

The danger of building strong narratives on weak data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by John Burn-Murdoch: “Measuring gross domestic product is extremely complicated. Around the world, national statistics offices are struggling to get the sums right the first time around.

Some struggle more than others. When Ireland first reported its estimate for GDP growth in Q1 2015, it came in at 1.4 per cent. One year later, and with some fairly unique distortions due to its location as headquarters for many US big tech and pharma companies, this was revised upwards to an eye-watering 21.4 per cent.

On average, five years after an estimate of quarterly Irish GDP growth is first published, the latest revision of that figure is two full percentage points off the original value. The equivalent for the UK is almost 10 times smaller at 0.25 percentage points, making the ONS’s initial estimates among the most accurate in the developed world, narrowly ahead of the US at 0.26 and well ahead of the likes of Japan (0.46) and Norway (0.56).

But it’s not just the size of revisions that matters, it’s the direction. Out of 24 developed countries that consistently report quarterly GDP revisions to the OECD, the UK’s initial estimates are the most pessimistic. Britain’s quarterly growth figures typically end up 0.15 percentage points higher than first thought. The Germans go up by 0.07 on average, the French by 0.04, while the Americans, ever optimistic, typically end up revising their estimates down by 0.11 percentage points.

In other words, next time you hear a set of quarterly growth figures, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to mentally add 0.15 to the UK one and subtract 0.11 from the US.

This may all sound like nerdy detail, but it matters because people graft strong narratives on to this remarkably flimsy data. Britain was the only G7 economy yet to rebound past pre-Covid levels until it wasn’t. Ireland is booming, apparently, except its actual individual consumption per capita — a much better measure of living standards than GDP — has fallen steadily from just above the western European average in 2007 to 10 per cent below last year.

And the phenomenon is not exclusive to economic data. Two years ago, progressives critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic took to calling the UK “Plague Island”, citing Britain’s reported Covid death rates, which were among the highest in the developed world. But with the benefit of hindsight, we know that Britain was simply better at counting its deaths than most countries…(More)”

Guess who’s getting the world’s first self-sovereign national digital ID?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Durga M Sengupta: “Bhutan — a small Himalayan nation with less than 800,000 people — has decided to roll out a national digital identity system for all its citizens. “National digital ID is the platform on which digitization and online services of banks to hospitals to taxation to universities, everything can come online with 100% assurance,” Ujjwal Deep Dahal, CEO of Druk Holding and Investments, the commercial and investment arm of the government which developed the system, told me over a video call from the capital city of Thimphu.

The national ID system has been built using blockchain technology, which will provide each individual a “self-sovereign” identity, meaning it can only be controlled by the citizen and no other entity, similar to how cryptocurrencies work.

The country’s 7-year-old crown prince, Jigme Namgyel Wangchuck, was the first to enroll in the new system, and it is expected to reach the rest of the population within the year, Dahal said. 

“Once I’m onboarded, the interesting part about self-sovereign identity is that only I have my verified credentials in my wallet, in my phone. Nobody has access to it thereon but me, not even the government,” he said. The onboarding process takes about 5 seconds, Dahal estimated. “In our system, you will not visit any booth to register yourself. You’ll just download an app; share your details, selfie, and national ID card; and in the back end, the AI algorithm will run and say, ‘Okay, I can give you a verified credential,’” he said. This timeline would differ for people who don’t have smartphones or require assistance.

Druk Holding and Investments has been instrumental in setting up various other parallel projects, including the recently announced Bhutanverse — a metaverse that displays Bhutanese art, architecture, and motifs…(More)”. See also: Field Report: On the Emergent Use of Distributed Ledger Technologies for Identity Management

Interoperability Can Save the Open Web

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview by Michael Nolan: “In his new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, author Cory Doctorow presents a strong case for disrupting Big Tech. While the dominance of Internet platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Amazon is often taken for granted, Doctorow argues that these walled gardens are fenced in by legal structures, not feats of engineering. Doctorow proposes forcing interoperability—any given platform’s ability to interact with another—as a way to break down those walls and to make the Internet freer and more democratic….

Doctorow: At its root, it’s just the ability to use one thing with something else. Use any ink in your printer with any paper, use any socks with your shoes, anyone’s gasoline in your car, put any lightbulb in your light socket. There’s voluntary, mandatory interoperability, where a group of stakeholders get together and they say, “This is the goal we want all of our products to achieve, and we are going to design a framework so that we can make sure that every lightbulb lights up when you stick it in a light socket.” Then there’s the stuff where they’re indifferent: Car companies don’t stop you from putting a little cigarette-lighter-to-USB adapter into your car.

Companies can grow very quickly because tech has got these great network effects, but they also have, because of interoperability, really low switching costs.—Cory Doctorow

Then there’s the third kind of interop, the kind of chewy, interesting, lots-of-rich-Internet-history interop, which is adversarial interoperability, which in the book we call “comcom,” short for competitive compatibility. It’s the interop that’s done against the wishes of the original equipment manufacturer: scraping, reverse engineering, bots, all of that gnarly stuff done in the face of active hostility. This would be like Apple reverse-engineering Microsoft Office and making the iWork suite—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—so that anyone with a Mac could read any Windows-based office file without having to buy any software from Microsoft.

There are so many examples of this from technology’s history. It’s really the engine of technology…(More)”. 

Crafting the future: involving young people in urban design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Alastair Bailey: “About 60 per cent of urban populations will be under 18 years of age by 2030, according to UN Habitat, but attempts to involve young people in the design of their cities remain in their infancy. Efforts to enlist this generation have often floundered due to a range of problems — not least an unwillingness to listen to their needs.

“The actual involvement of young people in planning is negligible” says Simeon Shtebunaev, a Birmingham City University doctoral researcher in youth and town planning and researcher at urban social enterprise Social Life. However, new technologies offer a way forward. Digitisation has come to be seen as a “panacea to youth engagement” in many cities, notes Shtebunaev.

Hargeisa, the largest city of Somaliland in the Horn of Africa and home to 1.5mn people, has already been demonstrating what can be achieved by digitally engaging with young people — notably through the Minecraft video game. This enables users to design and build structures in a manner similar to expensive 3D modelling software.

Despite large-scale reconstruction, the city still bears the scars of the 1981-91 civil war, during which former Somalian dictator Said Barre sought to wipe out members of the city’s dominant Isaaq clan to enforce his own rule. Up to an estimated 200,000 Isaaq died.

In September 2019, though, “Urban Visioning Week” brought Hargeisa residents together over five days to discuss the city’s future as part of the UN’s Joint Programme on Local Governance. The aim was for residents to identify the city’s problems and what improvements they felt were needed…(More)”.

Wartime Digital Resilience

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Gulsanna Mamediieva: “Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, technology was already a growing part of the Ukrainian economy and was central to the government’s vision to reimagine the way citizens and businesses interact with the state in the digital era: paperless, cashless, and without bureaucracy. Even before the conflict, we in government believed that technology holds the promise of making government more transparent, efficient, and accountable, empower citizens, increase participation, and combat corruption.

However, technology has become even more central to helping the country defend itself and mitigate the effect of Russian attacks on civilians. As a result, Ukraine has emerged as a leading example of digital innovation and resilience in the face of challenges, particularly through its gov-tech solutions, using digital governance capacities to maintain basic governance functions in crisis situations and showing a strong case for digital public innovation to support its people. Digital government plays a central role in Ukraine’s ability to continue to fight for its very existence and respond to the aggressor…(More)”

Advancing Environmental Justice with AI

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Justina Nixon-Saintil: “Given its capacity to innovate climate solutions, the technology sector could provide the tools we need to understand, mitigate, and even reverse the damaging effects of global warming. In fact, addressing longstanding environmental injustices requires these companies to put the newest and most effective technologies into the hands of those on the front lines of the climate crisis.

Tools that harness the power of artificial intelligence, in particular, could offer unprecedented access to accurate information and prediction, enabling communities to learn from and adapt to climate challenges in real time. The IBM Sustainability Accelerator, which we launched in 2022, is at the forefront of this effort, supporting the development and scaling of projects such as the Deltares Aquality App, an AI-powered tool that helps farmers assess and improve water quality. As a result, farmers can grow crops more sustainably, prevent runoff pollution, and protect biodiversity.

Consider also the challenges that smallholder farmers face, such as rising costs, the difficulty of competing with larger producers that have better tools and technology, and, of course, the devastating effects of climate change on biodiversity and weather patterns. Accurate information, especially about soil conditions and water availability, can help them address these issues, but has historically been hard to obtain…(More)”.