Paper by Henry Chang: “Some of the appealing characteristics of distributed ledger technology (DLT), which blockchain is a type of, include guaranteed integrity, disintermediation and distributed resilience. These characteristics give rise to the possible consequences of immutability, unclear ownership, universal accessibility and trans-border storage. These consequences have the potential to contravene data protection principles of Purpose Specification, Use Limitation, Data Quality, Individual Participation and Trans-Border Data Flow. This paper endeavors to clarify the various types of DLTs, how they work, why they exhibit the depicted characteristics and the consequences. Using the universal privacy principles developed by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this paper then describes how each of the consequence causes concerns for privacy protection and how attempts are being made to address them in the design and implementation of various applications of blockchain and DLT, and indicates where further research and best-practice developments lie….(More)”.
Technology Landscape for Digital Identification
World Bank Report: “Robust, inclusive, and responsible identification systems can increase access to finance, healthcare, education, and other critical services and benefits. Identification systems are also key to improving efficiency and enabling innovation for public- and private-sector services, such as greater efficiency in the delivery of social safety nets and facilitating the development of digital economies. However, the World Bank estimates that more than 1.1 billion individuals do not have official proof of their identity.10 New technologies provide countries with the opportunity to leapfrog paper-based systems and rapidly establish a robust identification infrastructure. As a result, the countries are increasingly adopting nationwide digital identification (ID) programs and leveraging them in other sectors.
Whether a country is enhancing existing ID systems or implementing new systems from the ground up, technology choices are critical to the success of digital identification systems. A number of new technologies are emerging to enable various aspects of ID lifecycle. For some of these technologies, no large-scale studies have been done; for others, current speculation makes objective evaluations difficult.
This report is a first attempt to develop a comprehensive overview of the current technology landscape for digital identification. It is intended to serve as a framework for understanding the myriad options and considerations of technology in this rapidly advancing agenda and in no way is intended to provide advice on specific technologies, particularly given there are a number of other considerations and country contexts which need to be considered. This report also does not advocate the use of a certain technology from a particular vendor for any particular application.
While some technologies are relatively easy to use and affordable, others are costly or so complex that using them on a large scale presents daunting challenges. This report provides practitioners with an overview of various technologies and advancements that are especially relevant for digital identification systems. It highlights key benefits and challenges associated with each technology. It also provides a framework for assessing each technology on multiple criteria, including length of time it has been in use, its ease of integration with legacy and future systems, and its interoperability with other technologies. The practitioners and stakeholders who read this are reminded to bear in mind that the technologies associated with ID systems are rapidly evolving, and that this report, prepared in early 2018, is a snapshot in time. Therefore, technology limitations and challenges highlighted in this report today may not be applicable in the years to come….(More)”
The rise of public sector innovation labs: experiments in design thinking for policy
Paper by Governments are increasingly turning to public sector innovation (PSI) labs to take new approaches to policy and service design. This turn towards PSI labs, which has accelerated in more recent years, has been linked to a number of trends. These include growing interest in evidence-based policymaking and the application of ‘design thinking’ to policymaking, although these trends sit uncomfortably together. According to their proponents, PSI labs are helping to create a new era of experimental government and rapid experimentation in policy design.
But what do these PSI labs do? How do they differ from other public sector change agents and policy actors? What approaches do they bring to addressing contemporary policymaking? And how do they relate to other developments in policy design such as the growing interest in evidence-based policy and design experiments? The rise of PSI labs has thus far received little attention from policy scientists. Focusing on the problems associated with conceptualising PSI labs and clearly situating them in the policy process, this paper provides an analysis of some of the most prominent PSI labs. It examines whether labs can be classified into distinct types, their relationship to government and other policy actors and the principal methodological practices and commitments underpinning their approach to policymaking. Throughout, the paper considers how the rise of PSI labs may challenge positivist framings of policymaking as an empirically driven decision process….(More)”.
Bias in Online Classes: Evidence from a Field Experiment
Paper by Rachel Baker, Thomas Dee, Brent Evans and June John: “While online learning environments are increasingly common, relatively little is known about issues of equity in these settings. We test for the presence of race and gender biases among postsecondary students and instructors in online classes by measuring student and instructor responses to discussion comments we posted in the discussion forums of 124 different online courses. Each comment was randomly assigned a student name connoting a specific race and gender. We find that instructors are 94% more likely to respond to forum posts by White male students. In contrast, we do not find general evidence of biases in student responses. However, we do find that comments placed by White females are more likely to receive a response from White female peers. We discuss the implications of our findings for our understanding of social identity dynamics in classrooms and the design of equitable online learning environments….(More)”.
The world’s first blockchain-powered elections just happened in Sierra Leone
Yomi Kazeem in Quartz: “On Mar. 7, elections in Sierra Leone marked a global landmark: the world’s first ever blockchain-powered presidential elections….
In Sierra Leone’s Western District, the most populous in the country, votes cast were manually recorded by Agora, a Swiss foundation offering digital voting solutions, using a permissioned blockchain. The idea was simple: just like blockchain technology helps ensure transparency with crytpocurrency transactions using public ledgers, by recording each vote on blockchain, Agora ensured transparency with votes cast in the district. While entries on permissioned blockchains can be viewed by everyone, entries can only be validated by authorized persons.
A lack of transparency has plagued many elections around the world, but particularly in some African countries where large sections of the electorate are often suspicions incumbent parties or ethnic loyalties have been responsible for the manipulation of the results in favor of one candidate or another. These suspicions remain even when there is little evidence of manipulation. A more transparent system could help restore trust.
Leonardo Gammar, CEO of Agora, says Sierra Leone’s NEC was “open minded” about the potential of blockchain in its elections after talks began late last year. “I also thought that if we can do it in Sierra Leone, we can do it everywhere else,” he says. That thinking is rooted in Sierra Leone’s developmental challenges which make electoral transparency difficult: poor network connectivity, low literacy levels and frequent electoral violence.
The big picture for Agora is to deploy solutions to automate the entire electoral process with citizens voting electronically using biometric data and personalized cryptographic keys and the votes in turn validated by blockchain. Gammar hopes Agora can replicate its work in other African elections on a larger scale but admits that doing so will require understanding the differing challenges each country faces.
Gammar says blockchain-powered electronic voting will be cheaper for African countries by cutting out the printing cost of paper-based elections but perhaps, more importantly, vastly reduce electoral violence…(More)”.
NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge: Strategy, results, and lessons learned
Jennifer L. Gustetic et al in Space Policy: “Beginning in 2012, NASA utilized a strategic process to identify broad societal questions, or grand challenges, that are well suited to the aerospace sector and align with national priorities. This effort generated NASA’s first grand challenge, the Asteroid Grand Challenge (AGC), a large-scale effort using multi-disciplinary collaborations and innovative engagement mechanisms focused on finding and addressing asteroid threats to human populations. In April 2010, President Barack Obama announced a mission to send humans to an asteroid by 2025. This resulted in the agency’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) to leverage and maximize existing robotic and human efforts to capture and reroute an asteroid, with the goal of eventual human exploration. The AGC, initiated in 2013, complemented ARM by expanding public participation, partnerships, and other approaches to find, understand, and overcome these potentially harmful asteroids.
This paper describes a selection of AGC activities implemented from 2013 to 2017 and their results, excluding those conducted by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program and other organizations. The strategic development of the initiative is outlined as well as initial successes, strengths, and weaknesses resulting from the first four years of AGC activities and approaches. Finally, we describe lesson learned and areas for continued work and study. The AGC lessons learned and strategies could inform the work of other agencies and organizations seeking to conduct a global scientific investigation with matrixed organizational support, multiple strategic partners, and numerous internal and external open innovation approaches and audiences….(More)”.
Exploring the Motives of Citizen Reporting Engagement: Self-Concern and Other-Orientation
In smart city contexts, voluntary citizen reporting can be a particularly valuable source of information for local authorities. A key question in this regard is what motivates citizens to contribute their data. Drawing on motivation research in social psychology, the paper examines the question of whether self-concern or other-orientation is a stronger driver of citizen reporting engagement.
To test their hypotheses, the authors rely on a sample of users from the mobile application “Zurich as good as new” in Switzerland, which enables citizens to report damages in and other issues with the city’s infrastructure. Data was collected from two different sources: motivation was assessed in an online user survey (n = 650), whereas citizen reporting engagement was measured by the number of reports per user from real platform-use data. The analysis was carried out using negative binomial regression.
The findings suggest that both self-concern and other-orientation are significant drivers of citizen reporting engagement, although the effect of self-concern appears to be stronger in comparison. As such, this study contributes to a better understanding of what motivates citizens to participate in citizen reporting platforms, which are a cornerstone application in many smart cities….(More)”.
Artificial intelligence could identify gang crimes—and ignite an ethical firestorm
Matthew Hutson at Science: “When someone roughs up a pedestrian, robs a store, or kills in cold blood, police want to know whether the perpetrator was a gang member: Do they need to send in a special enforcement team? Should they expect a crime in retaliation? Now, a new algorithm is trying to automate the process of identifying gang crimes. But some scientists warn that far from reducing gang violence, the program could do the opposite by eroding trust in communities, or it could brand innocent people as gang members.
That has created some tensions. At a presentation of the new program this month, one audience member grew so upset he stormed out of the talk, and some of the creators of the program have been tight-lipped about how it could be used….
For years, scientists have been using computer algorithms to map criminal networks, or to guess where and when future crimes might take place, a practice known as predictive policing. But little work has been done on labeling past crimes as gang-related.
In the new work, researchers developed a system that can identify a crime as gang-related based on only four pieces of information: the primary weapon, the number of suspects, and the neighborhood and location (such as an alley or street corner) where the crime took place. Such analytics, which can help characterize crimes before they’re fully investigated, could change how police respond, says Doug Haubert, city prosecutor for Long Beach, California, who has authored strategies on gang prevention.
To classify crimes, the researchers invented something called a partially generative neural network. A neural network is made of layers of small computing elements that process data in a way reminiscent of the brain’s neurons. A form of machine learning, it improves based on feedback—whether its judgments were right. In this case, researchers trained their algorithm using data from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in California from 2014 to 2016 on more than 50,000 gang-related and non–gang-related homicides, aggravated assaults, and robberies.
The researchers then tested their algorithm on another set of LAPD data. The network was “partially generative,” because even when it did not receive an officer’s narrative summary of a crime, it could use the four factors noted above to fill in that missing information and then use all the pieces to infer whether a crime was gang-related. Compared with a stripped-down version of the network that didn’t use this novel approach, the partially generative algorithm reduced errors by close to 30%, the team reported at the Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) conference this month in New Orleans, Louisiana. The researchers have not yet tested their algorithm’s accuracy against trained officers.
It’s an “interesting paper,” says Pete Burnap, a computer scientist at Cardiff University who has studied crime data. But although the predictions could be useful, it’s possible they would be no better than officers’ intuitions, he says. Haubert agrees, but he says that having the assistance of data modeling could sometimes produce “better and faster results.” Such analytics, he says, “would be especially useful in large urban areas where a lot of data is available.”…(More).
Informed Diet Selection: Increasing Food Literacy through Crowdsourcing
Paper by Niels van Berkel et al: “The obesity epidemic is one of the greatest threats to health and wellbeing throughout much of the world. Despite information on healthy lifestyles and eating habits being more accessible than ever before, the situation seems to be growing worse And for a person who wants to lose weight there are practically unlimited options and temptations to choose from. Food, or dieting, is a booming business, and thousands of companies and vendors want their cut by pitching their solutions, particularly online (Google) where people first turn to find weight loss information. In our work, we have set to harness the wisdom of crowds in making sense of available diets, and to offer a direct way for users to increase their food literacy during diet selection. The Diet Explorer is a crowd-powered online knowledge base that contains an arbitrary number of weight loss diets that are all assessed in terms of an arbitrary set of criteria…(More)”.
Citicafe: conversation-based intelligent platform for citizen engagement
Paper by Amol Dumrewal et al in the Proceedings of the ACM India Joint International Conference on Data Science and Management of Data: “Community civic engagement is a new and emerging trend in urban cities driven by the mission of developing responsible citizenship. The recognition of civic potential in every citizen goes a long way in creating sustainable societies. Technology is playing a vital role in helping this mission and over the last couple of years, there have been a plethora of social media avenues to report civic issues. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, and other online portals help citizens to report issues and register complaints. These complaints are analyzed by the public services to help understand and in-turn address these issues. However, once the complaint is registered, often no formal or informal feedback is given back from these sites to the citizens. This de-motivates citizens and may deter them from registering further complaints. In addition, these sites offer no holistic information about a neighborhood to the citizens. It is useful for people to know whether there are similar complaints posted by other people in the same area, the profile of all complaints and a know-how of how and when these complaints will be addressed.
In this paper, we create a conversation-based platform CitiCafe for enhancing citizen engagement front-ended by a virtual agent with a Twitter interface. This platform back-end stores and processes information pertaining to civic complaints in a city. A Twitter based conversation service allows citizens to have a direct correspondence with CitiCafe via “tweets” and direct messages. The platform also helps citizens to (a) report problems and (b) gather information related to civic issues in different neighborhoods. This can also help, in the long run, to develop civic conversations among citizens and also between citizens and public services….(More)”.