Bring American cities into the 21st century by funding urban innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Dan Doctoroff and Richard Florida: “The U.S. is on the verge of the fourth revolution in urban technology. Where railroads, the electric grid, and the automobile defined previous eras, today, new strategies that integrate new technologies in our cities can unlock striking possibilities.

Our buildings can be dramatically more sustainable, adaptable, and affordable. Energy systems and physical infrastructure can fulfill the promise of “climate-positive” development. Secure digital infrastructure can connect people and improve services while safeguarding privacy. We can deploy mobility solutions that regulate the flow of people and vehicles in real time, ease traffic, and cut carbon emissions. Innovative social infrastructure can enable new service models to build truly inclusive communities. 

Congress and the administration are currently negotiating a reconciliation package that is intended to put the U.S. on a path to a sustainable and equitable future. However, this mission will not succeed without meaningful investments in technical solutions that recognize the frontline role of cities and urban counties in so many national priorities.

U.S. cities are still built, connected, powered, heated, and run much as they have been for the past 75 years. Cities continue to generally rely on “dumb” infrastructure, such as the classic traffic light, which can direct traffic and do little else. 

When Detroit deployed the first red-yellow-green automatic traffic light in the 1920s, it pioneered state-of-the art traffic management. Soon, there was a traffic light at every major intersection in America, and it has remained an icon of urban technology ever since. Relying on 100-year-old technology isn’t all that unusual in our cities. If you look closely at any American city, you will see it’s rather the rule. While our policy needs and technical capabilities have changed dramatically, the urban systems U.S. cities rely on have remained essentially frozen in time since the Second World War.  

We must leverage today’s technology and use artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, connected infrastructure, cloud computing, and automation to run our cities. That is why we have come together to help forge a new initiative, the Coalition for Urban Innovation, to reimagine urban infrastructure for the future. Consisting of leading urban thinkers, businesses, and nonprofits, the coalition is calling on Congress and the administration to seize this generational opportunity to finally unlock the potential of cities as powerful levers for tackling climate change, promoting inclusion, and otherwise addressing our thorniest challenges…(More)”.

Americans Need a Bill of Rights for an AI-Powered World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Eric Lander and Alondra Nelson: “…Soon after ratifying our Constitution, Americans adopted a Bill of Rights to guard against the powerful government we had just created—enumerating guarantees such as freedom of expression and assembly, rights to due process and fair trials, and protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Throughout our history we have had to reinterpret, reaffirm, and periodically expand these rights. In the 21st century, we need a “bill of rights” to guard against the powerful technologies we have created.

Our country should clarify the rights and freedoms we expect data-driven technologies to respect. What exactly those are will require discussion, but here are some possibilities: your right to know when and how AI is influencing a decision that affects your civil rights and civil liberties; your freedom from being subjected to AI that hasn’t been carefully audited to ensure that it’s accurate, unbiased, and has been trained on sufficiently representative data sets; your freedom from pervasive or discriminatory surveillance and monitoring in your home, community, and workplace; and your right to meaningful recourse if the use of an algorithm harms you. 

Of course, enumerating the rights is just a first step. What might we do to protect them? Possibilities include the federal government refusing to buy software or technology products that fail to respect these rights, requiring federal contractors to use technologies that adhere to this “bill of rights,” or adopting new laws and regulations to fill gaps. States might choose to adopt similar practices….(More)”.

Using location data responsibly in cities and local government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ben Hawes: “City and local governments increasingly recognise the power of location data to help them deliver more and better services, exactly where and when they are needed. The use of this data is going to grow, with more pressure to manage resources and emerging challenges including responding to extreme weather events and other climate impacts.

But using location data to target and manage local services comes with risks to the equitable delivery of services, privacy and accountability. To make the best use of these growing data resources, city leaders and their teams need to understand those risks and address them, and to be able to explain their uses of data to citizens.

The Locus Charter, launched earlier this year, is a set of common principles to promote responsible practice when using location data. The Charter could be very valuable to local governments, to help them navigate the challenges and realise the rewards offered by data about the places they manage….

Compared to private companies, local public bodies already have special responsibilities to ensure transparency and fairness. New sources of data can help, but can also generate new questions. Local governments have generally been able to improve services as they learned more about the people they served. Now they must manage the risks of knowing too much about people, and acting intrusively. They can also risk distorting service provision because their data about people in places is uneven or unrepresentative.

Many city and local governments fully recognise that data-driven delivery comes with risks, and are developing specific local data ethics frameworks to guide their work. Some of these, like Kansas City’s, are specifically aimed at managing data privacy. Others cover broader uses of data, like Greater Manchester’s Declaration for Intelligent and Responsible Data Practice (DTPR). DTPR is an open source communication standard that helps people understand how data is being used in public places.

London is engaging citizens on an Emerging Technology Charter, to explore new and ethically charged questions around data. Govlab supports an AI Localism repository of actions taken by local decision-makers to address the use of AI within a city or community. The EU Sherpa programme (Shaping the Ethical Dimensions of Smart Information Systems) includes a smart cities strand, and has published a case-study on the Ethics of Using Smart City AI and Big Data.

Smart city applications make it potentially possible to collect data in many ways, for many purposes, but the technologies cannot answer questions about what is appropriate. In The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future (2019), author Ben Green describes examples when some cities have failed and others succeeded in judging what smart applications should be used.

Attention to what constitutes ethical practice with location data can give additional help to leaders making that kind of judgement….(More)”

Licensure as Data Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Frank Pasquale: “…A licensure regime for data and the AI it powers would enable citizens to democratically shape data’s scope and proper use, rather than resigning ourselves to being increasingly influenced and shaped by forces beyond our control.To ground the case for more ex ante regulation, Part I describes the expanding scope of data collection, analysis, and use, and the threats that that scope poses to data subjects. Part II critiques consent-based models of data protection, while Part III examines the substantive foundation of licensure models. Part IV addresses a key challenge to my approach: the free expression concerns raised by the licensure of large-scale personal data collection, analysis, and use. Part V concludes with reflections on the opportunities created by data licensure frameworks and potential limitations upon them….(More)”.

Global citizens’ assembly to be chosen for UN climate talks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Fiona Harvey: “One hundred people from around the world are to take part in a citizens’ assembly to discuss the climate crisis over the next month, before presenting their findings at the UN Cop26 climate summit.

The Global Citizens’ Assembly will be representative of the world’s population, and will invite people chosen by lottery to take part in online discussions that will culminate in November, during the fortnight-long climate talks that open in Glasgow on 31 October.

Funded with nearly $1m, from sources including the Scottish government and the European Climate Foundation, the assembly is supported by the UN and UK and run by a coalition of more than 100 organisations…

A team of international scientists and other experts will explain details of the climate crisis and potential solutions, and members of the assembly will discuss how these might work in practice, seeking to answer the question: “How can humanity address the climate and ecological crisis in a fair and effective way?”. The key messages from their discussions will be presented at Cop26 and a report will be published in March.

Alok Sharma, the UK cabinet minister who will act as president of the Cop26 summit, said: “The Global Assembly is a fantastic initiative and was selected for representation in the green zone [of the Cop26 presentation hall] because we recognise just how important its work is and also because we are committed to bringing the voice of global citizens into the heart of Cop26. It creates that vital link between local conversation and a global conference.”…(More)”.

Pandora Papers & Data Journalism: how investigative journalists use tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article at Moonshot: “The Pandora Papers’s 11.9 million records arrived from 14 different offshore services firms; a 2.94 terabyte data trove exposes the offshore secrets of wealthy elites from more than 200 countries and territories.

It contains data for 330 politicians and public officials, from more than 90 countries and territories, including 35 current and former country leaders, as well as celebrities, fraudsters, drug dealers, royal family members and leaders of religious groups around the world.

It involved more than 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countries.

It took ICIJ more than a year to structure, research and analyze the data, which will be incorporated into the Offshore Leaks database: The task involved three main elements: journalists, technology and time….(More)”

Volunteers Sped Up Alzheimer’s Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by SciStarter: “Across the United States, 5.7 million people are living with Alzheimer’s disease, the seventh leading cause of death in America. But there is still no treatment or cure. Alzheimer’s hits close to home for many of us who have seen loved ones suffer and who feel hopeless in the face of this disease. With Stall Catchers, an online citizen science project, joining the fight against Alzheimer’s is as easy as playing an online computer game…

Scientists at Cornell University found a link between “stalled” blood vessels in the brain and the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. These stalled vessels limit blood flow to the brain by up to 30 percent. In experiments with laboratory mice, when the blood cells causing the stalls were removed, the mice performed better on memory tests.about:blankabout:blank

The researchers are working to develop Alzheimer’s treatments that remove the stalls in mice in the hope they can apply these methods to humans. But analyzing the brain images to find the stalled capillaries is hard and time consuming. It could take a trained laboratory technician six to 12 months to analyze each week’s worth of data collection.

So, Cornell researchers created Stall Catchers to make finding the stalled blood vessels into a game that anyone can play. The game relies on the power of the crowd — multiple confirmed answers — before determining whether a vessel is stalled or flowing…

Since its inception is 2016, he project has grown steadily, addressing various datasets and uncovering new insights about Alzheimer’s disease. Citizen scientists who play the game identify blood vessels as “flowing” or “stalled,” earning points for their classifications.

One way Stall Catchers makes this research fun is by allowing volunteers to form teams and engage in friendly competition…(More)”.

Putting data at the heart of policymaking will accelerate London’s recovery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mel Hobson at Computer Weekly: “…London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, knows how important this is. His re-election manifesto committed to rebuilding the London Datastore, currently home to over 700 freely available datasets, as the central register linking data across our city. That in turn will help analysts, researchers and policymakers understand our city and develop new ideas and solutions.

To help take the next step and create a data ecosystem that can improve millions of Londoners lives, businesses across our capital are committing their expertise and insights.

At London First, we have launched the London Data Charter, expertly put together by Pinsent Masons, and setting out the guiding principles for private and public sector data collaborations, which are key to creating this ecosystem. These include a focus on protecting privacy and security of data, promoting trust and sharing learnings with others – creating scalable solutions to meet the capital’s challenges….(More)”.

World Wide Weird: Rise of the Cognitive Ecosystem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Braden R. Allenby at Issues: “Social media, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and the data economy are coming together in a way that transcends how humans understand and control our world.

In the beginning of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, an ape, after hugging a strange monolith, picks up a bone and randomly begins playing with it … and then, as Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra rings in the background, the ape realizes that the bone it is holding is, in fact, a weapon. The ape, the bone, and the landscape remain exactly the same, yet something fundamental has changed: an ape casually holding a bone is a very different system than an ape consciously wielding a weapon. The warrior ape is an emergent cognitive phenomenon, neither required nor deterministically produced by the constituent parts: a bone, and an ape, in a savannah environment.

Cognition as an emergent property of techno-human systems is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, it might be said that the ability of humans and their institutions to couple to their technologies to create such techno-human systems is the source of civilization itself. Since humans began producing artifacts, and especially since we began creating artifacts designed to capture, preserve, and transmit information—from illuminated manuscripts and Chinese oracle bones to books and computers—humans have integrated with their technologies to produce emergent cognitive results.

And these combinations have transformed the world. Think of the German peasants, newly literate, who were handed populist tracts produced on then-newfangled printing presses in 1530: the Reformation happened. Thanks to the printers, information and strategies flowed between the thinkers and the readers faster, uniting people across time and space. Eventually, the result was another fundamental shift in the cognitive structure: the Enlightenment happened.

Since humans began producing artifacts, and especially artifacts designed to capture, preserve, and transmit information, humans have integrated with their technologies to produce emergent cognitive results.

In the 1980s Edwin Hutchins found another cognitive structure when he observed a pre-GPS crew navigating on a naval vessel: technology in the form of devices, charts, and books were combined with several individuals with specialized skills and training to produce knowledge of the ship’s position (the “fix”). No single entity, human or technological, contained the entire process; rather, as Hutchins observed: “An interlocking set of partial procedures can produce the overall observed pattern without there being a representation of that overall pattern anywhere in the system.” The fix arises as an emergent cognitive product that is nowhere found in the constituent pieces, be they technology or human; indeed, Hutchins speaks of “the computational ecology of navigation tools.”

Fast forward to today. It should be no surprise that at some point techno-human cognitive systems such as social media, artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, cameras, computers, and sensors should begin to form their own ecology—significantly different in character from human cognition….(More)”

The Downside to State and Local Privacy Regulations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

GovTech: “To fight back against cyber threats, state and local governments have started to implement tighter privacy regulations. But is this trend a good thing? Or do stricter rules present more challenges than they do solutions?

According to Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, one of the main issues with stricter privacy regulations is having no centralized rules for states to follow.

“Probably the biggest problem is states setting up a set of contradictory overlapping rules across the country,” Castro said. “This creates a serious cost on organizations and businesses. They can abide by 50 state privacy laws, but there could be different regulations across local jurisdictions.”

One example of a hurdle for organizations and businesses is local jurisdictions creating specific rules for facial recognition and biometric technology.

“Let’s say a company starts selling a smart doorbell service; because of these rules, this service might not be able to be legally sold in one jurisdiction,” Castro said.

Another concern relates to the distinction between government data collection and commercial data collection, said Washington state Chief Privacy Officer Katy Ruckle. Sometimes there is a notion that one law can apply to everything, but different data types involve different types of rights for individuals.

“An example I like to use is somebody that’s been committed to a mental health institution for mental health needs,” Ruckle said. “Their data collection is very different from somebody buying a vacuum cleaner off Amazon.”

On the topic of governments collecting data, Castro emphasized the importance of knowing how data will be utilized in order to set appropriate privacy regulations….(More)”