Paper by Meghan J. Ryan: “Burgeoning science and technology have provided the criminal justice system with the opportunity to address some of its shortcomings. And the criminal justice system has significant shortcomings. Among other issues, we have a mass incarceration problem; clearance rates are surprisingly low; there are serious concerns about wrongful convictions; and the system is layered with racial, religious, and other biases. Innovations that are widely used across industries, as well as those directed specifically at the criminal justice system, have the potential to improve upon such problems. But it is important to recognize that these innovations also have downsides, and criminal justice actors must proceed with caution and understand not only the potential of these interventions but also their limitations. Relevant to this calculation of caution is whether the innovation is broadly used across industry sectors or, rather, whether it has been specifically developed for use within the criminal justice system. These latter innovations have a record of not being sufficiently vetted for accuracy and reliability. Accordingly, criminal justice actors must be sufficiently well versed in basic science and technology so that they have the ability and the confidence to critically assess the usefulness of the various criminal justice innovations in light of their limitations. Considering lawyers’ general lack of competency in these areas, scientific and technological training is necessary to mold them into modern competent criminal justice actors. This training must be more than superficial subject-specific training, though; it must dig deeper, delving into critical thinking skills that include evaluating the accuracy and reliability of the innovation at issue, as well as assessing broader concerns such as the need for development transparency, possible intrusions on individual privacy, and incentives to curtail individual liberties given the innovation at hand….(More)”
“Co-construction” in deliberative democracy: lessons from the French Citizens’ Convention for Climate
Paper by Louis-Gaëtan Giraudet et al: “Launched in 2019, the French Citizens’ Convention for Climate (CCC) tasked 150 randomly chosen citizens with proposing fair and effective measures to fight climate change. This was to be fulfilled through an “innovative co-construction procedure”, involving some unspecified external input alongside that from the citizens. Did inputs from the steering bodies undermine the citizens’ accountability for the output? Did co-construction help the output resonate with the general public, as is expected from a citizens’ assembly? To answer these questions, we build on our unique experience in observing the CCC proceedings and documenting them with qualitative and quantitative data. We find that the steering bodies’ input, albeit significant, did not impair the citizens’ agency, creativity, and freedom of choice. While succeeding in creating consensus among the citizens who were involved, this co-constructive approach, however, failed to generate significant support among the broader public. These results call for a strengthening of the commitment structure that determines how follow-up on the proposals from a citizens’ assembly should be conducted…(More)”.
Smartphone apps in the COVID-19 pandemic
Paper by Jay A. Pandit, Jennifer M. Radin, Giorgio Quer & Eric J. Topol: “At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, analog tools such as nasopharyngeal swabs for PCR tests were center stage and the major prevention tactics of masking and physical distancing were a throwback to the 1918 influenza pandemic. Overall, there has been scant regard for digital tools, particularly those based on smartphone apps, which is surprising given the ubiquity of smartphones across the globe. Smartphone apps, given accessibility in the time of physical distancing, were widely used for tracking, tracing and educating the public about COVID-19. Despite limitations, such as concerns around data privacy, data security, digital health illiteracy and structural inequities, there is ample evidence that apps are beneficial for understanding outbreak epidemiology, individual screening and contact tracing. While there were successes and failures in each category, outbreak epidemiology and individual screening were substantially enhanced by the reach of smartphone apps and accessory wearables. Continued use of apps within the digital infrastructure promises to provide an important tool for rigorous investigation of outcomes both in the ongoing outbreak and in future epidemics…(More)”.
Machine Learning Can Predict Shooting Victimization Well Enough to Help Prevent It
Paper by Sara B. Heller, Benjamin Jakubowski, Zubin Jelveh & Max Kapustin: “This paper shows that shootings are predictable enough to be preventable. Using arrest and victimization records for almost 644,000 people from the Chicago Police Department, we train a machine learning model to predict the risk of being shot in the next 18 months. We address central concerns about police data and algorithmic bias by predicting shooting victimization rather than arrest, which we show accurately captures risk differences across demographic groups despite bias in the predictors. Out-of-sample accuracy is strikingly high: of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, 13 percent are shot within 18 months, a rate 130 times higher than the average Chicagoan. Although Black male victims more often have enough police contact to generate predictions, those predictions are not, on average, inflated; the demographic composition of predicted and actual shooting victims is almost identical. There are legal, ethical, and practical barriers to using these predictions to target law enforcement. But using them to target social services could have enormous preventive benefits: predictive accuracy among the top 500 people justifies spending up to $123,500 per person for an intervention that could cut their risk of being shot in half….(More)”.
Governance and societal impact of
blockchain-based self-sovereign identities
Paper by Rachel Benchaya Gans, Jolien Ubacht, and Marijn Janssen: “Traditionally, governments and companies store data to identify persons for services provision and interactions. The rise of self-sovereign identities (SSIs) based on blockchain technologies provides individuals with ownership and control over their personal data and allows them to share their data with others using a sort of “digital safe.” Fundamentally, people have the sole ownership of their identity data and control when and how it is shared, protecting their privacy. As these data need to be validated to be trusted, they may become a more important data source for digital information sharing and transactions than the formal source of identity controlled by governments. Furthermore, SSIs can be used for interacting digitally with any organization. These developments change the relationship between government, companies, and individuals. We explore information sharing and governance in the digital society using blockchain-based SSIs. In addition, the impact of SSIs on data storage in the digital world is assessed. Technology enactment might result in no greater control or privacy and might only reinforce current practices. Finally, we argue that regulation and a combination of centralized and decentralized governance are still required to avoid misuse and ensure that envisaged benefits are realized…(More)”.
Judging Deliberation: An Assessment of the Crowdsourced Icelandic Constitutional Project
Paper by Delia Popescu and Matthew Loveland: “This study explores deliberation as a lived experience between individuals engaged in putatively deliberative practices. While face-to-face deliberation is well documented, there are fewer empirical studies that address its online counterpart. The authors review current theoretical conceptualizations and operationalize a measure of deliberation, and then apply the measure to the case of the debate fostered by the Constitutional Council online public platform dedicated to drafting the Icelandic constitution – the first “crowdsourced” constitutional project in the world. This is the first effort to both quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the nature of deliberation in the case of Iceland. Generally, this exploration is meant to identify and analyze markers of deliberation in a setting that aspires to foster such exchanges. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this work for future political theory and related empirical investigation….(More).”
How can interoperability stimulate the use of digital public services? An analysis of national interoperability frameworks and e-Government in the European Union
Article by Alexandra Campmas, Nadina Iacob and Felice Simonelli: “This article explores the role of interoperability in the development of digital public services in Europe, analyzing the effects of an European Union (EU)-level initiative (the European interoperability framework, EIF) and the development of e-Government services on how citizens interact online with public administrations. The EIF is a common EU framework providing guidance on public sector interoperability. EU countries are not mandated to follow the EIF, but they are encouraged to take up its guidance in their respective national interoperability frameworks (NIFs). Against this background, this article tests two hypotheses: (a) the introduction of NIFs facilitates the online interaction between citizens and public administrations and (b) better e-Government services encourage citizens to interact online with public administrations. Both hypotheses are confirmed by a panel data analysis covering 26 European countries over the period 2012–2019. The analysis relies on a dummy variable reflecting the adoption of NIFs, built by carefully examining official documents of the countries in the scope of the analysis. Based on the empirical results, this article puts forward two main policy recommendations. First, efforts to improve e-Government services across Europe should be intensified in order to support the overarching digital agenda of the EU and increase benefits for European citizens. Second, interoperability should become a central element when designing new digital public services. Therefore, the European Commission could foster a common approach to interoperability of digital public services across the EU by strengthening the governance of interoperability initiatives and encouraging the adoption of specific interoperability requirements…(More)”.
Citizen science and the potential for mobility policy – Introducing the Bike Barometer
Paper by Tom Storme et al: “In this paper, we report on a citizen science pilot project involving adolescents who digitize and assess their daily home-to-school routes in different school neighborhoods in Flanders (Belgium). As part of this pilot project, a web-based platform, called the “Bike Barometer” (“Fietsbarometer” in Dutch) was developed. We introduce the tool in this paper and summarize the insights gained from the pilot. From the official launch of the platform in March until the end of the pilot in June 2020, 1,256 adolescents from 31 schools digitized 5657 km of roads, of which 3,750 km were evaluated for cycling friendliness and safety. The added value and potential of citizen science in general and the platform in particular are illustrated. The results offer detailed (spatial) insights into local safety conditions for Flanders and for specific school neighborhoods. The potential for mobility policy is twofold: (i) the cycling friendliness and traffic flows in school environments can be monitored over time and (ii) the platform has the potential to create local ecosystems of adolescents and teachers (both considered citizen scientists here) and policymakers. Two key pitfalls are identified as well: the need for a critical mass of citizen scientists and a minimum level of commitment required from local policymakers. By illustrating the untapped potential of citizen science, we argue that the intersection between citizen science and local policymaking in the domain of mobility deserves much more attention….(More)”.
From the smart city to urban justice in a digital age
Paper by Marit Rosol & Gwendolyn Blue: “The smart city is the most emblematic contemporary expression of the fusion of urbanism and digital technologies. Critical urban scholars are now increasingly likely to highlight the injustices that are created and exacerbated by emerging smart city initiatives and to diagnose the way that these projects remake urban space and urban policy in unjust ways. Despite this, there has not yet been a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the concept of justice in the smart city literature. To fill this gap and strengthen the smart city critique, we draw on the tripartite approach to justice developed by philosopher Nancy Fraser, which is focused on redistribution, recognition, and representation. We use this framework to outline key themes and identify gaps in existing critiques of the smart city, and to emphasize the importance of transformational approaches to justice that take shifts in governance seriously. In reformulating and expanding the existing critiques of the smart city, we argue for shifting the discussion away from the smart city as such. Rather than searching for an alternative smart city, we argue that critical scholars should focus on broader questions of urban justice in a digital age…(More)”.
Forecasting hospital-level COVID-19 admissions using real-time mobility data
Paper by Brennan Klein et al: “For each of the COVID-19 pandemic waves, hospitals have had to plan for deploying surge capacity and resources to manage large but transient increases in COVID-19 admissions. While a lot of effort has gone into predicting regional trends in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, there are far fewer successful tools for creating accurate hospital-level forecasts. At the same time, anonymized phone-collected mobility data proved to correlate well with the number of cases for the first two waves of the pandemic (spring 2020, and fall-winter 2021). In this work, we show how mobility data could bolster hospital-specific COVID-19 admission forecasts for five hospitals in Massachusetts during the initial COVID-19 surge. The high predictive capability of the model was achieved by combining anonymized, aggregated mobile device data about users’ contact patterns, commuting volume, and mobility range with COVID hospitalizations and test-positivity data. We conclude that mobility-informed forecasting models can increase the lead-time of accurate predictions for individual hospitals, giving managers valuable time to strategize how best to allocate resources to manage forthcoming surges…(More)”.