research paper / thesis / dissertation

The Internet of Humans (IoH): Human Rights and Co-Governance to Achieve Tech Justice in the City

Curated on January 30, 2019January 30, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Christian Iaione, Elena de Nictolis and Anna Berti Suman: “Internet of Things, Internet of Everything and Internet of People are concepts suggesting that objects, devices and people will be increasingly interconnected through digital infrastructure that will generate a growing gathering of data. Parallel to this is the celebration of the smart city and sharing city as urban policy visions that by relying heavily on new technologies bear the promise of a efficient and thriving cities. Law and policy scholarship has either focused on questions related to privacy, discrimination, security or issues related to the production and use of big data, digital public services. Little or no attention in the literature has been paid to the disruptive impact of technological development on urban governance and city inhabitants’ rights of equal access, participation, management and even ownership, in order to understand whether and how technology can also enhance the protection of human rights and social justice in the city.

This article advances the proposal of complementing the technological and digital infrastructure with a legal and institutional infrastructure, the Internet of Humans, by construing and injecting in the legal and policy framework of the city the principle of Tech Justice. Building on the literature review on and from the analysis of selected case studies this article stresses the dichotomy existing between the market-based and the society-based applications of technology, the first likely to increase the digital divide and the challenges to human rights in the city, the latter bearing the promise to promote equal access to technology in the city. The main argument advanced by this paper is indeed that Tech Justice is an empirical dimension that can steer the developments of smart city and sharing city policies toward a more just and democratic city….(More)”.

Is Gamification Making Cities Smarter?

Curated on January 30, 2019January 30, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Gianluca Sgueo in Ius Publicum Network Review: Streets embedded with sensors to manage traffic congestion, public spaces monitored by high-tech command centres to detect suspicious activities, real-time and publicly accessible data on energy, transportation and waste management – in academia, there is still no generally agreed definition of ‘smart cities’. But in the collective imagination, the connotations are clear: smart cities are seen as efficient machines governed by algorithms. For decades, the combination of technology and data has been a key feature of smart urban management. Under this scheme, what branded a city as smart was the efficiency of (digital) public services. Over time, concerns have grown over this privatization of public services. Who owns the data processed by private companies? Who guarantees that data are treated ethically? How inclusive are the public services provided by increasingly privatised smart cities?

In response to such criticism, urban management has progressively shifted the focus from the efficiency of public services to citizens’ concerns. This new approach puts inclusiveness at the centre of public services design. Citizens are actively engaged in all phases of urban management, from planning to service provision. However, the quest for inclusive urban management is confronted by four challenges. The first is dimensional, the second regulatory, the third financial, and the fourth relational.

The moment we combine these four challenges together, uncertainty arises: can a smart city be inclusive at the same time? It goes beyond the scope of this article to thoroughly delve into this question. My aim is to contribute to reflections on where the quest for inclusiveness is leading smart urban management. To this end, this article focuses on one specific form of innovative urban management: a combination of technology and fun design described as ‘gamification’.

The article reviews the use of gamification at the municipal level. After describing seven case studies of gamified urban governance, it analyses three shared traits of these initiatives, namely: the structure, the design, and the purposes. It then discusses the (potential) benefits and (actual) drawbacks of gamification in urban environments. The article concludes by assessing the contribution that gamification is making to the evolution of smart cities. It is argued that gamification offers a meaningful solution to more inclusive urban decision-making. But it is also warned about three common misconceptions in discourses on the future of smart cities. The first is the myth of inclusive technology; the second consists of the illusion of the democratic potential of games; finally, the third points at the downsides of regulatory experimentalism….(More)”.

What Sustains Individuals’ Participation in Crowdsourcing Contests?

Curated on January 29, 2019January 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Xuan Wang et al: Crowdsourcing contests have become widely adopted for idea generation and problem-solving in various companies in different industries. The success of crowdsourcing depends on the sustained participation and quality-submissions of the individuals. Yet, little is known about the factors that influence individuals’ continued participation in these contests. We address this issue, by conducting an empirical study using data from an online crowdsourcing contest platform, Kaggle, which delivers data science and machine learning solutions and models to its clients.

The findings show that the community activities and team activities do not contribute to motivating the continued participation, but tenure does significantly affect the continued participation. We also found statistically significant effects of amount of prize, number of competitions, previous team performance, and competition duration on individuals sustained participation in crowdsourcing contests. This research contributes to the literature by identifying the factors influencing individuals’ sustained participation in crowdsourcing contests…(More)”.

Not so gameful: A critical review of gamification in mobile energy applications

Curated on January 29, 2019January 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ariane L.Beck et al in Energy Research & Social Sciences: “In order to help mitigate climate change and reduce the health-related consequences of air pollution, consumers need to be empowered to make better and more effective decisions regarding energy use. Utilities, government, and commercial entities offer numerous programs and consumer products to help individuals set or reach goals related to energy use.

Many of these interventions and products have related apps that use gamification in some capacity in order to improve the user experience, offer motivation, and encourage behavior change. We identified 57 apps from nearly 2400 screened apps that both target direct energy use and employ at least one element of gamification.

We evaluated these apps with specific focus on gamification components, game elements, and behavioral constructs. Our analysis shows that the average energy related app heavily underutilizes search engine optimization, gamification components, and game design elements, as well as the behavioral constructs known to impact energy-related decision-making and behavior. Our findings offer several insights for the design of more effective energy apps….(More)”.

Knowledge and Politics in Setting and Measuring SDGs

Curated on January 29, 2019June 30, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Special Issue of Global Policy: “The papers in this special issue investigate the politics that shaped the SDGs, the setting of the goals, the selection of the measurement methods. The SDGs ushered in a new era of ‘governance by indicators’ in global development. Goal setting and the use of numeric performance indicators have now become the method for negotiating a consensus vision of development and priority objectives. The choice of indicators is seemingly a technical issue, but measurement methods interprets and reinterprets norms, carry value judgements, theoretical assumptions, and implicit political agendas. As social scientists have long pointed out, reliance on indicators can distort social norms, frame hegemonic discourses, and reinforce power hierarchies.

The case studies in this collection show the open multi-stakeholder negotiations helped craft more transformative and ambitious goals. But across many goals, there was slippage in ambition when targets and indicators were selected. The papers also highlight how the increasing role of big data and other non-traditional sources of data is altering data production, dissemination and use, and fundamentally altering the epistemology of information and knowledge. This raises questions about ‘data for whom and for what’ – fundamental issues concerning the power of data to shape knowledge, the democratic governance of SDG indicators and of knowledge for development overall.

“Giving something back”: A systematic review and ethical enquiry into public views on the use of patient data for research in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland

Curated on January 24, 2019January 24, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jessica Stockdale, Jackie Cassell and Elizabeth Ford: “The use of patients’ medical data for secondary purposes such as health research, audit, and service planning is well established in the UK, and technological innovation in analytical methods for new discoveries using these data resources is developing quickly. Data scientists have developed, and are improving, many ways to extract and process information in medical records. This continues to lead to an exciting range of health related discoveries, improving population health and saving lives. Nevertheless, as the development of analytic technologies accelerates, the decision-making and governance environment as well as public views and understanding about this work, has been lagging behind¹.

Public opinion and data use

A range of small studies canvassing patient views, mainly in the USA, have found an overall positive orientation to the use of patient data for societal benefit^2–7. However, recent case studies, like NHS England’s ill-fated Care.data scheme, indicate that certain schemes for secondary data use can prove unpopular in the UK. Launched in 2013, Care.data aimed to extract and upload the whole population’s general practice patient records to a central database for prevalence studies and service planning⁸. Despite the stated intention of Care.data to “make major advances in quality and patient safety”⁸, this programme was met with a widely reported public outcry leading to its suspension and eventual closure in 2016. Several factors may have been involved in this failure, from the poor public communication about the project, lack of social licence⁹, or as pressure group MedConfidential suggests, dislike of selling data to profit-making companies¹⁰. However, beyond these specific explanations for the project’s failure, what ignited public controversy was a concern with the impact that its aim to collect and share data on a large scale might have on patient privacy. The case of Care.data indicates a reluctance on behalf of the public to share their patient data, and it is still not wholly clear whether the public are willing to accept future attempts at extracting and linking large datasets of medical information. The picture of mixed opinion makes taking an evidence-based position, drawing on social consensus, difficult for legislators, regulators, and data custodians who may respond to personal or media generated perceptions of public views. However, despite differing results of studies canvassing public views, we hypothesise that there may be underlying ethical principles that could be extracted from the literature on public views, which may provide guidance to policy-makers for future data-sharing….(More)”.

Does good governance foster trust in government? A panel data analysis

Curated on January 23, 2019January 25, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jonathan Spiteri and Marie Briguglio: “This study examines the relationship between good governance and trust in government. It sets out to test which aspects of good governance, if any, foster strong trust in government. We construct a panel data set drawn from 29 European countries over the period 2004 to 2015. The data set includes measures of government trust, six different dimensions of good governance, as well as variables on GDP growth and income inequality.

We find that freedom of expression and citizen involvement in the democratic process, to be the good governance dimension that has the strongest relationship with government trust, across all specifications of our regression models. We also find that real GDP growth rates have a significant (albeit weaker) relationship with trust in government. Our results suggest that certain elements of good governance foster trust in government over and above that generated by economic success. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of declining levels of public trust in government around the world….(More)”.

Machine Learning and the Rule of Law

Curated on January 22, 2019January 22, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Daniel L. Chen: “Predictive judicial analytics holds the promise of increasing the fairness of law. Much empirical work observes inconsistencies in judicial behavior. By predicting judicial decisions—with more or less accuracy depending on judicial attributes or case characteristics—machine learning offers an approach to detecting when judges most likely to allow extra legal biases to influence their decision making. In particular, low predictive accuracy may identify cases of judicial “indifference,” where case characteristics (interacting with judicial attributes) do no strongly dispose a judge in favor of one or another outcome. In such cases, biases may hold greater sway, implicating the fairness of the legal system….(More)”

Outcomes of open government: Does an online platform improve citizens’ perception of local government?

Curated on January 22, 2019January 25, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Lisa Schmidthuber et al: “Governments all over the world have implemented citizensourcing initiatives to integrate citizens into decision-making processes. A more participative decision-making process is associated with an open government and assumed to benefit public service quality and interactive value creation. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the outcomes of open government initiatives and ask to what extent open government participation is related to perceived outcomes of open government....

Data conducted from a survey among users of a citizensourcing platform and platform data are used to perform non-parametric analyses and examine the relationship between platform participation and perceived outcomes of open government....

The findings of this paper suggest that active platform usage positively relates to several outcomes perceived by citizens, such as improved information flow, increased trust in and satisfaction with local government. In contrast, repetitive participation does not significantly relate to users’ outcome evaluation….(More)”.

Can I Trust the Data I See? A Physician’s Concern on Medical Data in IoT Health Architectures

Curated on January 22, 2019January 22, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Conference Paper by Fariha Tasmin Jaigirdar, Carsten Rudolph, and Chris Bain: “With the increasing advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) enabled systems, smart medical devices open numerous opportunities for the healthcare sector. The success of using such devices in the healthcare industry depends strongly on secured and reliable medical data transmission. Physicians diagnose that data and prescribe medicines and/or give guidelines/instructions/treatment plans for the patients. Therefore, a physician is always concerned about the medical data trustworthiness, because if it is not guaranteed, a savior can become an involuntary foe! This paper analyses two different scenarios to understand the real-life consequences in IoT-based healthcare (IoT-Health) application. Appropriate sequence diagrams for both scenarios show data movement as a basis for determining necessary security requirements in each layer of IoT-Health.

We analyse the individual entities of the overall system and develop a system-wide view of trust in IoT-Health. The security analysis pinpoints the research gap in end-to-end trust and indicates the necessity to treat the whole IoT-Health system as an integrated entity. This study highlights the importance of integrated cross-layer security solutions that can deal with the heterogeneous security architectures of IoT healthcare system and finally identifies a possible solution for the open question raised in the security analysis with appropriate future research directions….(More)”.