Press Release: “To better prepare and protect the world from global disease threats, H.E. German Federal Chancellor Dr Angela Merkel and Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, World Health Organization Director-General, will today inaugurate the new WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, based in Berlin. “The world needs to be able to detect new events with pandemic potential and to monitor disease control measures on a real-time basis to create effective pandemic and epidemic risk management,” said Dr Tedros. “This Hub will be key to that effort, leveraging innovations in data science for public health surveillance and response, and creating... (More >)
Alliance formed to create new professional standards for data science
Press Release: “A new alliance has been formed to create industry-wide professional standards for data science. ‘The Alliance for Data Science Professionals’ is defining the standards needed to ensure an ethical and well-governed approach so the public, organisations and governments can have confidence in how their data is being used. While the skills of data scientists are increasingly in demand, there is currently no professional framework for those working in the field. These new industry-wide standards, which will be finalised by the autumn, look to address current issues, such as data breaches, the misuse of data in modelling and... (More >)
Leveraging Digitalisation for a Resilient, Strong, Sustainable and Inclusive Recovery
G20 Declaration: “…We recognise the importance of data-driven innovation and the growing demand of data across society. Coherent and responsible data governance frameworks that guide the reuse and sharing of data should ensure confidence and security, privacy, personal data protection and the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights, taking into account differences in national legal systems. This could be accompanied by policies that foster investments in data infrastructure and architecture that have positive spillovers across industries and society. Increased, open and accessible government data could help encourage innovation, in particular among MSMEs…. We call for close coordination to... (More >)
New Study Uses Crowdsourcing to Strengthen American Democracy
Press Release: “Americans have always disagreed about politics, but now levels of anti-democratic attitudes, support for partisan violence, and partisan animosity have reached concerning levels. While there are many ideas for tackling these problems, they have never been gathered, tested, and evaluated in a unified effort. To address this gap, the Stanford Polarization and Social Change Lab is launching a major new initiative. The Strengthening Democracy Challenge will collect and rigorously test up to 25 interventions to reduce anti-democratic attitudes, support for partisan violence, and partisan animosity in one massive online experiment with up to 30,000 participants. Interventions can... (More >)
Commission proposes measures to boost data sharing and support European data spaces
Press Release: “To better exploit the potential of ever-growing data in a trustworthy European framework, the Commission today proposes new rules on data governance. The Regulation will facilitate data sharing across the EU and between sectors to create wealth for society, increase control and trust of both citizens and companies regarding their data, and offer an alternative European model to data handling practice of major tech platforms. The amount of data generated by public bodies, businesses and citizens is constantly growing. It is expected to multiply by five between 2018 and 2025. These new rules will allow this data... (More >)
European Health Data Space
European Commission Press Release: “The set-up of the European Health Data Space will be an integral part of building a European Health Union, a process launched by the Commission today with a first set of proposals to reinforce preparedness and response during health crisis. This is also a direct follow up of the Data strategy adopted by the Commission in February this year, where the Commission had already stressed the importance of creating European data spaces, including on health…. In this perspective, as part of the implementation of the Data strategy, a data governance act is set to be... (More >)
NIH Releases New Policy for Data Management and Sharing
NIH Blogpost by Carrie Wolinetz: “Today, nearly twenty years after the publication of the Final NIH Statement on Sharing Research Data in 2003, we have released a Final NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing. This represents the agency’s continued commitment to share and make broadly available the results of publicly funded biomedical research. We hope it will be a critical step in moving towards a culture change, in which data management and sharing is seen as integral to the conduct of research. Responsible data management and sharing is good for science; it maximizes availability of data to the... (More >)
New mathematical idea reins in AI bias towards making unethical and costly commercial choices
The University of Warwick: “Researchers from the University of Warwick, Imperial College London, EPFL (Lausanne) and Sciteb Ltd have found a mathematical means of helping regulators and business manage and police Artificial Intelligence systems’ biases towards making unethical, and potentially very costly and damaging commercial choices—an ethical eye on AI. Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly deployed in commercial situations. Consider for example using AI to set prices of insurance products to be sold to a particular customer. There are legitimate reasons for setting different prices for different people, but it may also be profitable to ‘game’ their psychology or... (More >)
Techlash? America’s Growing Concern with Major Technology Companies
Press Release: “Just a few years ago, Americans were overwhelmingly optimistic about the power of new technologies to foster an informed and engaged society. More recently, however, that confidence has been challenged by emerging concerns over the role that internet and technology companies — especially social media — now play in our democracy. A new Knight Foundation and Gallup study explores how much the landscape has shifted. This wide-ranging study confirms that, for Americans, the techlash is real, widespread, and bipartisan. From concerns about the spread of misinformation to election interference and data privacy, we’ve documented the deep pessimism... (More >)
New privacy-protected Facebook data for independent research on social media’s impact on democracy
Chaya Nayak at Facebook: “In 2018, Facebook began an initiative to support independent academic research on social media’s role in elections and democracy. This first-of-its-kind project seeks to provide researchers access to privacy-preserving data sets in order to support research on these important topics. Today, we are announcing that we have substantially increased the amount of data we’re providing to 60 academic researchers across 17 labs and 30 universities around the world. This release delivers on the commitment we made in July 2018 to share a data set that enables researchers to study information and misinformation on Facebook, while... (More >)
