Paper by Abhishek Nagaraj & Matteo Tranchero: “This study examines the impact of access to confidential administrative data on the rate, direction, and policy relevance of economics research. To study this question, we exploit the progressive geographic expansion of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Federal Statistical Research Data Centers (FSRDCs). FSRDCs boost data diffusion, help empirical researchers publish more articles in top outlets, and increase citation-weighted publications. Besides direct data usage, spillovers to non-adopters also drive this effect. Further, citations to exposed researchers in policy documents increase significantly. Our findings underscore the importance of data access for scientific progress and evidence-based policy formulation…(More)”.
Collective Intelligence to Co-Create the Cities of the Future: Proposal of an Evaluation Tool for Citizen Initiatives
Paper by Fanny E. Berigüete, Inma Rodriguez Cantalapiedra, Mariana Palumbo and Torsten Masseck: “Citizen initiatives (CIs), through their activities, have become a mechanism to promote empowerment, social inclusion, change of habits, and the transformation of neighbourhoods, influencing their sustainability, but how can this impact be measured? Currently, there are no tools that directly assess this impact, so our research seeks to describe and evaluate the contributions of CIs in a holistic and comprehensive way, respecting the versatility of their activities. This research proposes an evaluation system of 33 indicators distributed in 3 blocks: social cohesion, urban metabolism, and transformation potential, which can be applied through a questionnaire. This research applied different methods such as desk study, literature review, and case study analysis. The evaluation of case studies showed that the developed evaluation system well reflects the individual contribution of CIs to sensitive and important aspects of neighbourhoods, with a lesser or greater impact according to the activities they carry out and the holistic conception they have of sustainability. Further implementation and validation of the system in different contexts is needed, but it is a novel and interesting proposal that will favour decision making for the promotion of one or another type of initiative according to its benefits and the reality and needs of the neighbourhood…(More)”.
Local Data Spaces: Leveraging trusted research environments for secure location-based policy research
Paper by Jacob L. Macdonald, Mark A. Green, Maurizio Gibin, Simon Leech, Alex Singleton and Paul Longely: “This work explores the use of Trusted Research Environments for the secure analysis of sensitive, record-level data on local coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) inequalities and economic vulnerabilities. The Local Data Spaces (LDS) project was a targeted rapid response and cross-disciplinary collaborative initiative using the Office for National Statistics’ Secure Research Service for localized comparison and analysis of health and economic outcomes over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Embedded researchers worked on co-producing a range of locally focused insights and reports built on secure secondary data and made appropriately open and available to the public and all local stakeholders for wider use. With secure infrastructure and overall data governance practices in place, accredited researchers were able to access a wealth of detailed data and resources to facilitate more targeted local policy analysis. Working with data within such infrastructure as part of a larger research project involved advanced planning and coordination to be efficient. As new and novel granular data resources become securely available (e.g., record-level administrative digital health records or consumer data), a range of local policy insights can be gained across issues of public health or local economic vitality. Many of these new forms of data however often come with a large degree of sensitivity around issues of personal identifiability and how the data is used for public-facing research and require secure and responsible use. Learning to work appropriately with secure data and research environments can open up many avenues for collaboration and analysis…(More)”
TASRA: a Taxonomy and Analysis of Societal-Scale Risks from AI
Paper by Andrew Critch and Stuart Russell: “While several recent works have identified societal-scale and extinction-level risks to humanity arising from artificial intelligence, few have attempted an {\em exhaustive taxonomy} of such risks. Many exhaustive taxonomies are possible, and some are useful — particularly if they reveal new risks or practical approaches to safety. This paper explores a taxonomy based on accountability: whose actions lead to the risk, are the actors unified, and are they deliberate? We also provide stories to illustrate how the various risk types could each play out, including risks arising from unanticipated interactions of many AI systems, as well as risks from deliberate misuse, for which combined technical and policy solutions are indicated…(More)”.
Critical factors influencing information disclosure in public organisations
Paper by Francisca Tejedo-Romero & Joaquim Filipe Ferraz Esteves Araujo: “Open government initiatives around the world and the passage of freedom of information laws are opening public organisations through information disclosure to ensure transparency and encourage citizen participation and engagement. At the municipal level, social, economic, and political factors are found to account for this trend. However, the findings on this issue are inconclusive and may differ from country to country. This paper contributes to this discussion by analysing a unitary country where the same set of laws and rules governs the constituent municipalities. It seeks to identify critical factors that affect the disclosure of municipal information. For this purpose, a longitudinal study was carried out over a period of 4 years using panel data methodology. The main conclusions seem to point to municipalities’ intention to increase the dissemination of information to reduce low levels of voter turnout and increase civic involvement and political participation. Municipalities governed by leftist parties and those that have high indebtedness are most likely to disclose information. Additionally, internet access has created new opportunities for citizens to access information, which exerts pressure for greater dissemination of information by municipalities. These findings are important to practitioners because they indicate the need to improve citizens’ access to the Internet and maintain information disclosure strategies beyond election periods…(More)”.
The Generic Collective Intelligence Framework: A Qualitative View
Paper by Shweta Suray, Vishwajeet Pattanaik and Dirk Draheim: “Web-based crowd-oriented systems can be seen everywhere today. Some popular examples of such platforms include Reddit, MyGov, Wikipedia and GalaxyZoo. The main aim of such platforms is to harness individuals’ collective intelligence (CI) to offer several benefits to society — from solving complex problems to developing innovative solutions. Also, CI platforms are developing at an impressive pace, and each platform has unique features to gather, motivate and engage the crowd to achieve the platform’s goal. However, the design and development of CI systems is an expensive and time-consuming task. Thus, it is difficult for civic and government organizations to develop such platforms. Moreover, many CI platforms do not sustain for a longer period due to a lack of scientific knowledge about the several components that are required to build CI platforms. To fulfil this research gap, we developed a conceptual generic framework for CI systems that can be used to understand and examine CI systems regardless of their domains. Additionally, our CI generic framework allows stakeholders to combine several components in order to perform requirement elicitation for new platforms, thus enabling them to develop their own platforms in an efficient and effective manner. In order to evaluate the completeness and genericness and to find out the limitations of the CI generic model, we have conducted qualitative interviews with a series of CI experts. This article aims to present the findings of these expert interviews and suggest future directions for CI research to improve the generic CI model and to explore the CI from different perspectives…(More)”
From Ethics to Law: Why, When, and How to Regulate AI
Paper by Simon Chesterman: “The past decade has seen a proliferation of guides, frameworks, and principles put forward by states, industry, inter- and non-governmental organizations to address matters of AI ethics. These diverse efforts have led to a broad consensus on what norms might govern AI. Far less energy has gone into determining how these might be implemented — or if they are even necessary. This chapter focuses on the intersection of ethics and law, in particular discussing why regulation is necessary, when regulatory changes should be made, and how it might work in practice. Two specific areas for law reform address the weaponization and victimization of AI. Regulations aimed at general AI are particularly difficult in that they confront many ‘unknown unknowns’, but the threat of uncontrollable or uncontainable AI became more widely discussed with the spread of large language models such as ChatGPT in 2023. Additionally, however, there will be a need to prohibit some conduct in which increasingly lifelike machines are the victims — comparable, perhaps, to animal cruelty laws…(More)”
Detecting Human Rights Violations on Social Media during Russia-Ukraine War
Paper by Poli Nemkova, et al: “The present-day Russia-Ukraine military conflict has exposed the pivotal role of social media in enabling the transparent and unbridled sharing of information directly from the frontlines. In conflict zones where freedom of expression is constrained and information warfare is pervasive, social media has emerged as an indispensable lifeline. Anonymous social media platforms, as publicly available sources for disseminating war-related information, have the potential to serve as effective instruments for monitoring and documenting Human Rights Violations (HRV). Our research focuses on the analysis of data from Telegram, the leading social media platform for reading independent news in post-Soviet regions. We gathered a dataset of posts sampled from 95 public Telegram channels that cover politics and war news, which we have utilized to identify potential occurrences of HRV. Employing a mBERT-based text classifier, we have conducted an analysis to detect any mentions of HRV in the Telegram data. Our final approach yielded an F2 score of 0.71 for HRV detection, representing an improvement of 0.38 over the multilingual BERT base model. We release two datasets that contains Telegram posts: (1) large corpus with over 2.3 millions posts and (2) annotated at the sentence-level dataset to indicate HRVs. The Telegram posts are in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war. We posit that our findings hold significant implications for NGOs, governments, and researchers by providing a means to detect and document possible human rights violations…(More)” See also Data for Peace and Humanitarian Response? The Case of the Ukraine-Russia War
“My sex-related data is more sensitive than my financial data and I want the same level of security and privacy”: User Risk Perceptions and Protective Actions in Female-oriented Technologies
Paper by Maryam Mehrnezhad, and Teresa Almeida: “The digitalization of the reproductive body has engaged myriads of cutting-edge technologies in supporting people to know and tackle their intimate health. Generally understood as female technologies (aka female-oriented technologies or ‘FemTech’), these products and systems collect a wide range of intimate data which are processed, transferred, saved and shared with other parties. In this paper, we explore how the “data-hungry” nature of this industry and the lack of proper safeguarding mechanisms, standards, and regulations for vulnerable data can lead to complex harms or faint agentic potential. We adopted mixed methods in exploring users’ understanding of the security and privacy (SP) of these technologies. Our findings show that while users can speculate the range of harms and risks associated with these technologies, they are not equipped and provided with the technological skills to protect themselves against such risks. We discuss a number of approaches, including participatory threat modelling and SP by design, in the context of this work and conclude that such approaches are critical to protect users in these sensitive systems…(More)”.
Opportunities and Challenges in Reusing Public Genomics Data
Introduction to Special Issue by Mahmoud Ahmed and Deok Ryong Kim: “Genomics data is accumulating in public repositories at an ever-increasing rate. Large consortia and individual labs continue to probe animal and plant tissue and cell cultures, generating vast amounts of data using established and novel technologies. The human genome project kickstarted the era of systems biology (1, 2). Ambitious projects followed to characterize non-coding regions, variations across species, and between populations (3, 4, 5). The cost reduction allowed individual labs to generate numerous smaller high-throughput datasets (6, 7, 8, 9). As a result, the scientific community should consider strategies to overcome the challenges and maximize the opportunities to use these resources for research and the public good. In this collection, we will elicit opinions and perspectives from researchers in the field on the opportunities and challenges of reusing public genomics data. The articles in this research topic converge on the need for data sharing while acknowledging the challenges that come with it. Two articles defined and highlighted the distinction between data and metadata. The characteristic of each should be considered when designing optimal sharing strategies. One article focuses on the specific issues surrounding the sharing of genomics interval data, and another on balancing the need for protecting pediatric rights and the sharing benefits.
The definition of what counts as data is itself a moving target. As technology advances, data can be produced in more ways and from novel sources. Events of recent years have highlighted this fact. “The pandemic has underscored the urgent need to recognize health data as a global public good with mechanisms to facilitate rapid data sharing and governance,” Schwalbe and colleagues (2020). The challenges facing these mechanisms could be technical, economic, legal, or political. Defining what data is and its type, therefore, is necessary to overcome these barriers because “the mechanisms to facilitate data sharing are often specific to data types.” Unlike genomics data, which has established platforms, sharing clinical data “remains in a nascent phase.” The article by Patrinos and colleagues (2022) considers the strong ethical imperative for protecting pediatric data while acknowledging the need not to overprotections. The authors discuss a model of consent for pediatric research that can balance the need to protect participants and generate health benefits.
Xue et al. (2023) focus on reusing genomic interval data. Identifying and retrieving the relevant data can be difficult, given the state of the repositories and the size of these data. Similarly, integrating interval data in reference genomes can be hard. The author calls for standardized formats for the data and the metadata to facilitate reuse.
Sheffield and colleagues (2023) highlight the distinction between data and metadata. Metadata describes the characteristics of the sample, experiment, and analysis. The nature of this information differs from that of the primary data in size, source, and ways of use. Therefore, an optimal strategy should consider these specific attributes for sharing metadata. Challenges specifics to sharing metadata include the need for standardized terms and formats, making it portable and easier to find.
We go beyond the reuse issue to highlight two other aspects that might increase the utility of available public data in Ahmed et al. (2023). These are curation and integration…(More)”.