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The promise and perils of predictive policing based on big data

Curated on November 16, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

H. V. Jagadish in the Conversation: “Police departments, like everyone else, would like to be more effective while spending less. Given the tremendous attention to big data in recent years, and the value it has provided in fields ranging from astronomy to medicine, it should be no surprise that police departments are using data analysis to inform deployment of scarce resources. Enter the era of what is called “predictive policing.”

Some form of predictive policing is likely now in force in a city near you.Memphis was an early adopter. Cities from Minneapolis to Miami have embraced predictive policing. Time magazine named predictive policing (with particular reference to the city of Santa Cruz) one of the 50 best inventions of 2011. New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton recently said that predictive policing is “the wave of the future.”

The term “predictive policing” suggests that the police can anticipate a crime and be there to stop it before it happens and/or apprehend the culprits right away. As the Los Angeles Times points out, it depends on “sophisticated computer analysis of information about previous crimes, to predict where and when crimes will occur.”

At a very basic level, it’s easy for anyone to read a crime map and identify neighborhoods with higher crime rates. It’s also easy to recognize that burglars tend to target businesses at night, when they are unoccupied, and to target homes during the day, when residents are away at work. The challenge is to take a combination of dozens of such factors to determine where crimes are more likely to happen and who is more likely to commit them. Predictive policing algorithms are getting increasingly good at such analysis. Indeed, such was the premise of the movie Minority Report, in which the police can arrest and convict murderers before they commit their crime.

Predicting a crime with certainty is something that science fiction can have a field day with. But as a data scientist, I can assure you that in reality we can come nowhere close to certainty, even with advanced technology. To begin with, predictions can be only as good as the input data, and quite often these input data have errors.

But even with perfect, error-free input data and unbiased processing, ultimately what the algorithms are determining are correlations. Even if we have perfect knowledge of your troubled childhood, your socializing with gang members, your lack of steady employment, your wacko posts on social media and your recent gun purchases, all that the best algorithm can do is to say it is likely, but not certain, that you will commit a violent crime. After all, to believe such predictions as guaranteed is to deny free will….

What data can do is give us probabilities, rather than certainty. Good data coupled with good analysis can give us very good estimates of probability. If you sum probabilities over many instances, you can usually get a robust estimate of the total.

For example, data analysis can provide a probability that a particular house will be broken into on a particular day based on historical records for similar houses in that neighborhood on similar days. An insurance company may add this up over all days in a year to decide how much to charge for insuring that house….(More)”

Build digital democracy

Curated on November 12, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Dirk Helbing & Evangelos Pournaras in Nature: “Fridges, coffee machines, toothbrushes, phones and smart devices are all now equipped with communicating sensors. In ten years, 150 billion ‘things’ will connect with each other and with billions of people. The ‘Internet of Things’ will generate data volumes that double every 12 hours rather than every 12 months, as is the case now.

Blinded by information, we need ‘digital sunglasses’. Whoever builds the filters to monetize this information determines what we see — Google and Facebook, for example. Many choices that people consider their own are already determined by algorithms. Such remote control weakens responsible, self-determined decision-making and thus society too.

The European Court of Justice’s ruling on 6 October that countries and companies must comply with European data-protection laws when transferring data outside the European Union demonstrates that a new digital paradigm is overdue. To ensure that no government, company or person with sole control of digital filters can manipulate our decisions, we need information systems that are transparent, trustworthy and user-controlled. Each of us must be able to choose, modify and build our own tools for winnowing information.

With this in mind, our research team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), alongside international partners, has started to create a distributed, privacy-preserving ‘digital nervous system’ called Nervousnet. Nervousnet uses the sensor networks that make up the Internet of Things, including those in smartphones, to measure the world around us and to build a collective ‘data commons’. The many challenges ahead will be best solved using an open, participatory platform, an approach that has proved successful for projects such as Wikipedia and the open-source operating system Linux.

A wise king?

The science of human decision-making is far from understood. Yet our habits, routines and social interactions are surprisingly predictable. Our behaviour is increasingly steered by personalized advertisements and search results, recommendation systems and emotion-tracking technologies. Thousands of pieces of metadata have been collected about every one of us (seego.nature.com/stoqsu). Companies and governments can increasingly manipulate our decisions, behaviour and feelings¹.

Many policymakers believe that personal data may be used to ‘nudge’ people to make healthier and environmentally friendly decisions. Yet the same technology may also promote nationalism, fuel hate against minorities or skew election outcomes² if ethical scrutiny, transparency and democratic control are lacking — as they are in most private companies and institutions that use ‘big data’. The combination of nudging with big data about everyone’s behaviour, feelings and interests (‘big nudging’, if you will) could eventually create close to totalitarian power.

Countries have long experimented with using data to run their societies. In the 1970s, Chilean President Salvador Allende created computer networks to optimize industrial productivity³. Today, Singapore considers itself a data-driven ‘social laboratory’⁴ and other countries seem keen to copy this model.

The Chinese government has begun rating the behaviour of its citizens⁵. Loans, jobs and travel visas will depend on an individual’s ‘citizen score’, their web history and political opinion. Meanwhile, Baidu — the Chinese equivalent of Google — is joining forces with the military for the ‘China brain project’, using ‘deep learning’ artificial-intelligence algorithms to predict the behaviour of people on the basis of their Internet activity⁶.

The intentions may be good: it is hoped that big data can improve governance by overcoming irrationality and partisan interests. But the situation also evokes the warning of the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, that the “sovereign acting … to make the people happy according to his notions … becomes a despot”. It is for this reason that the US Declaration of Independence emphasizes the pursuit of happiness of individuals.

Ruling like a ‘benevolent dictator’ or ‘wise king’ cannot work because there is no way to determine a single metric or goal that a leader should maximize. Should it be gross domestic product per capita or sustainability, power or peace, average life span or happiness, or something else?

Better is pluralism. It hedges risks, promotes innovation, collective intelligence and well-being. Approaching complex problems from varied perspectives also helps people to cope with rare and extreme events that are costly for society — such as natural disasters, blackouts or financial meltdowns.

Centralized, top-down control of data has various flaws. First, it will inevitably become corrupted or hacked by extremists or criminals. Second, owing to limitations in data-transmission rates and processing power, top-down solutions often fail to address local needs. Third, manipulating the search for information and intervening in individual choices undermines ‘collective intelligence’⁷. Fourth, personalized information creates ‘filter bubbles’⁸. People are exposed less to other opinions, which can increase polarization and conflict⁹.

Fifth, reducing pluralism is as bad as losing biodiversity, because our economies and societies are like ecosystems with millions of interdependencies. Historically, a reduction in diversity has often led to political instability, collapse or war. Finally, by altering the cultural cues that guide peoples’ decisions, everyday decision-making is disrupted, which undermines rather than bolsters social stability and order.

Big data should be used to solve the world’s problems, not for illegitimate manipulation. But the assumption that ‘more data equals more knowledge, power and success’ does not hold. Although we have never had so much information, we face ever more global threats, including climate change, unstable peace and socio-economic fragility, and political satisfaction is low worldwide. About 50% of today’s jobs will be lost in the next two decades as computers and robots take over tasks. But will we see the macroeconomic benefits that would justify such large-scale ‘creative destruction’? And how can we reinvent half of our economy?

The digital revolution will mainly benefit countries that achieve a ‘win–win–win’ situation for business, politics and citizens alike¹⁰. To mobilize the ideas, skills and resources of all, we must build information systems capable of bringing diverse knowledge and ideas together. Online deliberation platforms and reconfigurable networks of smart human minds and artificially intelligent systems can now be used to produce collective intelligence that can cope with the diverse and complex challenges surrounding us….(More)” See Nervousnet project

Technology is a new kind of lifeline for refugees

Curated on November 10, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Marketplace: “Imagine you’re a refugee leaving home for good. You’ll need help. But what you ask for today is much different than it would have been just 10 years ago.

“What people are demanding, more and more, is not classic food, shelter, water, healthcare, but they demand wifi,” said Melita Šunjić, a spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Šunjić began her work with Syrian refugees in camps in Amman, Jordan. Many were from rural areas with basic cell phones.

“The refugees we’re looking at now, who are coming to Europe – this is a completely different story,” Šunjić said. “They are middle class, urban people. Practically each family has at least one smart phone. We calculated that in each group of 20, they would have three smart phones.”

Refugees use their phones to call home and to map their routes. Even smugglers have their own Facebook pages.

“I don’t remember a crisis or refugee group where modern technology played such a role,” Šunjić said.

As refugees from Syria continue to flow into Europe, aid organizations are gearing up for what promises to be a difficult winter.

Emily Eros, ‎a GIS mapping officer with the American Red Cross, said her organization is working on the basics like providing food, water and shelter, but it’s also helping refugees stay connected. “It’s a little bit difficult because it’s not just a matter of getting a wifi station up, it’s also a matter of having someone there who’s able to fix it if something goes wrong,” she said. …(More)”

Role of Citizens in India’s Smart Cities Challenge

Curated on November 5, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Florence Engasser and Tom Saunders at the World Policy Blog: “India faces a wide range of urban challenges — from serious air pollution and poor local governance, to badly planned cities and a lack of decent housing. India’s Smart Cities Challenge, which has now selected 98 of the 100 cities that will receive funding, could go a long way in addressing these issues.

According to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, there are five key instruments that make a “smart” city: the use of clean technologies, the use of information and communications technology (ICT), private sector involvement, citizen participation and smart governance. There are good examples of new practices for each of these pillars.

For example, New Delhi recently launched a program to replace streetlights with energy efficient LEDs. The Digital India program is designed to upgrade the country’s IT infrastructure and includes plans to build “broadband highways” across the country. As for private sector participation, the Indian government is trying to encourage it by listing sectors and opportunities for public-private partnerships.

Citizen participation is one of Modi’s five key instruments, but this is an area where smart city pilots around the world have tended to perform least well on. While people are the implied beneficiaries of programs that aim to improve efficiency and reduce waste, they are rarely given a chance to participate in the design or delivery of smart city projects, which are usually implemented and managed by experts who have only a vague idea of the challenges that local communities face.

Citizen Participation

Engaging citizens is especially important in an Indian context because there have already been several striking examples of failed urban redevelopments that have blatantly lacked any type of community consultation or participation….

In practice, how can Indian cities engage residents in their smart city projects?

There are many tools available to policymakers — from traditional community engagement activities such as community meetings, to websites like Mygov.in that ask for feedback on policies. Now, there are a number of reasons to think smartphones could be an important tool to help improve collaboration between residents and city governments in Indian cities.

First, while only around 10 percent of Indians currently own a smartphone, this is predicted to rise to around half by 2020, and will be much higher in urban areas. A key driver of this is local manufacturing giants like Micromax, which have revolutionized low-cost technology in India, with smartphones costing as little as $30 (compared to around $800 for the newest iPhone).

Second, smartphone apps give city governments the potential to interact directly with citizens to make the most of what they know and feel about their communities. This can happen passively, for example, the Waze Connected Citizens program, which shares user location data with city governments to help improve transport planning. It can also be more active, for example, FixMyStreet, which allows people to report maintenance issues like potholes to their city government.

Third, smartphones are one of the main ways for people to access social media, and researchers are now developing a range of new and innovative solutions to address urban challenges using these platforms. This includes Petajakarta, which creates crowd-sourced maps of flooding in Jakarta by aggregating tweets that mention the word ‘flood.’

Made in India

Considering some of the above trends, it is interesting to think about the role smartphones could play in the governance of Indian cities and in better engaging communities. India is far from being behind in the field, and there are already a few really good examples of innovative smartphone applications made in India.

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (translated as Clean India Initiative) is a campaign launched by Modi in October 2014, covering over 4,000 towns all over the country, with the aim to clean India’s streets. The Clean India mobile application, launched at the end of 2014 to coincide with Modi’s initiative, was developed by Mahek Shah and allows users to take pictures to report, geo-locate, and timestamp streets that need cleaning or problems to be fixed by the local authorities.

Similar to FixMyStreet, users are able to tag their reports with keywords to categorize problems. Today, Clean India has been downloaded over 12,000 times and has 5,000 active users. Although still at a very early stage, Clean India has great potential to facilitate the complaint and reporting process by empowering people to become the eyes and ears of municipalities on the ground, who are often completely unaware of issues that matter to residents.

In Bangalore, an initiative by the MOD Institute, a local nongovernmental organization, enabled residents to come together, online and offline, to create a community vision for the redevelopment of Shanthinagar, a neighborhood of the city. The project, Next Bengaluru, used new technologies to engage local residents in urban planning and tap into their knowledge of the area to promote a vision matching their real needs.

The initiative was very successful. In just three months, between December 2014 and March 2015, over 1,200 neighbors and residents visited the on-site community space, and the team crowd-sourced more than 600 ideas for redevelopment and planning both on-site and through the Next Bangalore website.

The MOD Institute now intends to work with local urban planners to try get these ideas adopted by the city government. The project has also developed a pilot app that will enable people to map abandoned urban spaces via smartphone and messaging service in the future.

Finally, Safecity India is a nonprofit organization providing a platform for anyone to share, anonymously or not, personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. Men and women can report different types of abuses — from ogling, whistles and comments, to stalking, groping and sexual assault. The aggregated data is then mapped, allowing citizens and governments to better understand crime trends at hyper-local levels.

Since its launch in 2012, SafeCity has received more than 4,000 reports of sexual crime and harassment in over 50 cities across India and Nepal. SafeCity helps generate greater awareness, breaks the cultural stigma associated with reporting sexual abuse and gives voice to grassroots movements and campaigns such as Sayfty, Protsahan, or Stop Street Harassment, forcing authorities to take action….(More)

Using Crowdsourcing to Track the Next Viral Disease Outbreak

Curated on November 5, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The TakeAway: “Last year’s Ebola outbreak in West Africa killed more than 11,000 people. The pandemic may be diminished, but public health officials think that another major outbreak of infectious disease is fast-approaching, and they’re busy preparing for it.

Boston public radio station WGBH recently partnered with The GroundTruth Project and NOVA Next on a series called “Next Outbreak.” As part of the series, they reported on an innovative global online monitoring system called HealthMap, which uses the power of the internet and crowdsourcing to detect and track emerging infectious diseases, and also more common ailments like the flu.

Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital are the ones behind HealthMap (see below), and they use it to tap into tens of thousands of sources of online data, including social media, news reports, and blogs to curate information about outbreaks. Dr. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and co-founder of HealthMap, says that smarter data collection can help to quickly detect and track emerging infectious diseases, fatal or not.

“Traditional public health is really slowed down by the communication process: People get sick, they’re seen by healthcare providers, they get laboratory confirmed, information flows up the channels to state and local health [agencies], national governments, and then to places like the WHO,” says Dr. Brownstein. “Each one of those stages can take days, weeks, or even months, and that’s the problem if you’re thinking about a virus that can spread around the world in a matter of days.”

The HealthMap team looks at a variety of communication channels to undo the existing hierarchy of health information.

“We make everyone a stakeholder when it comes to data about outbreaks, including consumers,” says Dr. Brownstein. “There are a suite of different tools that public health officials have at their disposal. What we’re trying to do is think about how to communicate and empower individuals to really understand what the risks are, what the true information is about a disease event, and what they can do to protect themselves and their families. It’s all about trying to demystify outbreaks.”

In addition to the map itself, the HealthMap team has a number of interactive tools that individuals can both use and contribute to. Dr. Brownstein hopes these resources will enable the public to care more about disease outbreaks that may be happening around them—it’s a way to put the “public” back in “public health,” he says.

“We have a app called Outbreaks Near Me that allows people to know about what disease outbreaks are happening in their neighborhood,” Dr. Brownstein says. “Flu Near You is a an app that people use to self report on symptoms; Vaccine Finder is a tool that allows people to know what vaccines are available to them and their community.”

In addition to developing their own app, the HealthMap has partnered with existing tech firms like Uber to spread the word about public health.

“We worked closely with Uber last year and actually put nurses in Uber cars and delivered vaccines to people,” Dr. Brownstein says. “The closest vaccine location might still be only a block away for people, but people are still hesitant to get it done.”…(More)”

How big data and The Sims are helping us to build the cities of the future

Curated on November 4, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The Next Web: “By 2050, the United Nations predicts that around 66 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. It is expected that the greatest expansion will take place in developing regions such as Africa and Asia. Cities in these parts will be challenged to meet the needs of their residents, and provide sufficient housing, energy, waste disposal, healthcare, transportation, education and employment.

So, understanding how cities will grow – and how we can make them smarter and more sustainable along the way – is a high priority among researchers and governments the world over. We need to get to grips with the inner mechanisms of cities, if we’re to engineer them for the future. Fortunately, there are tools to help us do this. And even better, using them is a bit like playing SimCity….

Cities are complex systems. Increasingly, scientists studying cities have gone from thinking about “cities as machines”, to approaching “cities as organisms”. Viewing cities as complex, adaptive organisms – similar to natural systems like termite mounds or slime mould colonies – allows us to gain unique insights into their inner workings. …So, if cities are like organisms, it follows that we should examine them from the bottom-up, and seek to understand how unexpected large-scale phenomena emerge from individual-level interactions. Specifically, we can simulate how the behaviour of individual “agents” – whether they are people, households, or organisations – affect the urban environment, using a set of techniques known as “agent-based modelling”….These days, increases in computing power and the proliferation of big datagive agent-based modelling unprecedented power and scope. One of the most exciting developments is the potential to incorporate people’s thoughts and behaviours. In doing so, we can begin to model the impacts of people’s choices on present circumstances, and the future.

For example, we might want to know how changes to the road layout might affect crime rates in certain areas. By modelling the activities of individuals who might try to commit a crime, we can see how altering the urban environment influences how people move around the city, the types of houses that they become aware of, and consequently which places have the greatest risk of becoming the targets of burglary.

To fully realise the goal of simulating cities in this way, models need a huge amount of data. For example, to model the daily flow of people around a city, we need to know what kinds of things people spend their time doing, where they do them, who they do them with, and what drives their behaviour.

Without good-quality, high-resolution data, we have no way of knowing whether our models are producing realistic results. Big data could offer researchers a wealth of information to meet these twin needs. The kinds of data that are exciting urban modellers include:

Electronic travel cards that tell us how people move around a city.
Twitter messages that provide insight into what people are doing and thinking.
The density of mobile telephones that hint at the presence of crowds.
Loyalty and credit-card transactions to understand consumer behaviour.
Participatory mapping of hitherto unknown urban spaces, such as Open Street Map.

These data can often be refined to the level of a single person. As a result, models of urban phenomena no longer need to rely on assumptions about the population as a whole – they can be tailored to capture the diversity of a city full of individuals, who often think and behave differently from one another….(More)

Strengthening the Connective Links in Government

Curated on November 2, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

John M. Kamensky at the IBM Center for The Business of Government: “Over the past five years, the Obama administration has pursued a host of innovation-fostering initiatives that work to strengthen the connective links among and within federal agencies.

Many factors contribute to the rise of such efforts, including presidential support, statutory encouragement, and an ongoing evolution in the way government does its business. The challenge now is how to solidify the best of them so they remain in place beyond the upcoming 2017 presidential transition.

Increased Use of Collaborative Governance

Dr. Rosemary O’Leary, an astute observer of trends in government, describes how government has steadily increased its use of collaborative approaches in lieu of the traditional hierarchical, bureaucratic approach. According to O’Leary, there are several explanations for this shift:

First, “most public challenges are larger than one organization, requiring new approaches to addressing public issues” such as housing, pollution, transportation, and healthcare.
Second, collaboration helps to improve the effectiveness and performance of programs “by encouraging new ways of providing services.”
Third, technology advances in recent years have helped “organizations and their employees to share information in a way that is integrative and interoperable.”
Finally, “citizens are seeking additional avenues for engaging in governance, resulting in new and different forms of collaborative problem solving and decision making.”

Early in his administration, President Barack Obama publicly placed a premium on the use of collaboration. One of his first directives to federal agencies set the tone for how he envisioned his administration would govern, directing agencies to be “collaborative” and “use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across levels of government, and with nonprofits, businesses and individuals.” To that end, the Obama administration undertook a series of supporting actions, including establishing crossagency priority goals around issues such as reducing veteran homelessness, data sharing, and streamlining the sharing of social media licenses between agencies. Tackling many of these issues successfully involved the transformative intersection of innovation and technology.

In 2010, when Congress passed a series of amendments to the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), it provided the statutory basis for a broader, more consistent use of collaboration as a way of implementing policies and programs. These changes put in place a series of administrative processes:

The designation of agency and cross-agency priority goals
The naming of goal leaders
The convening of a set of regular progress reviews

Taken together, these legislative changes embedded the value of collaboration into the administrative fabric of the governing bureaucracy. In addition, the evolution of technology tools and the advances in the use of social media has dramatically lowered the technical and bureaucratic barriers to working in a more collaborative environment….(More)”

Cleaning Up Lead Poisoning One Tweet at a Time

Curated on October 29, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

WorldPolicy Blog: “At first, no one knew why the children of Bagega in Zamfara state were dying. In the spring of 2010, hundreds of kids in and around the northern Nigerian village were falling ill, having seizures and going blind, many of them never to recover. A Médecins Sans Frontières‎ team soon discovered the causes: gold and lead.

With the global recession causing the price of precious metals to soar, impoverished villagers had turned to mining the area’s gold deposits. But the gold veins were mingled with lead, and as a result the villagers’ low-tech mining methods were sending clouds of lead-laced dust into the air. The miners, unknowingly carrying the powerful toxin on their clothes and skin, brought it into their homes where their children breathed it in.

The result was perhaps the worst outbreak of lead poisoning in history, killing over 400 children in Bagega and neighboring villages. In response, the Nigerian government pledged to cleanup the lead-contaminated topsoil and provide medical care to the stricken children. But by mid-2012, there was no sign of the promised funds. Digitally savvy activists with the organization Connected Development (CODE) stepped in to make sure that the money was disbursed.

A group of young Nigerians founded CODE in 2010 in the capital Abuja, with the mission of empowering local communities to hold the government to account by improving their access to information and helping their voices to be heard. “In 2010, we were working to connect communities with data for advocacy programs,” says CODE co-founder Oludotun Babayemi, a former country director of a World Wildlife Fund project in Nigeria. “When we heard about Bagega, we thought this was an opportunity for us.”

In 2012, CODE launched a campaign dubbed ‘Follow the Money Nigeria’ aimed at applying pressure on the government to release the promised funds. “Eighty percent of the less developed parts of Nigeria have zero access to Twitter, let alone Facebook, so it’s difficult for them to convey their stories,” says Babayemi. “We collect all the videos and testimonies and take it global.”

CODE members travelled to the lead-afflicted area to gather information. They then posted their findings online, and publicized them with a #SaveBagegahashtag, which they tweeted to members of the government, local and international organizations and the general public. CODE hosted a 48-hour ‘tweet-a-thon’, joined by a senator, to support the campaign….

By July 2014, CODE reported that the clean-up was complete and that over 1,000 children had been screened and enrolled in lead treatment programs. Bagega’s health center has also been refurbished and the village’s roads improved. “There are thousands of communities like Bagega,” says Babayemi. “They just need someone to amplify their voice.”….

Key lessons

Revealing information is not enough; change requires a real-world campaign driven by that information and civil society champions who can leverage their status and networks to draw international attention to the issues and maintain pressure.
Building relationships with sympathetic members of government is key.
Targeted online campaigns can help amplify the message of marginalized communities offline to achieve impact (More)”