Open data for public good
As economies have shut down, output and spending have collapsed. How can statistics capture this unprecedented situation? Diane Coyle offers a few examples:
- The UK Office for National Statistics is looking at VAT returns, and shipping and road traffic data. It is adding analysis of some private data sources such as credit card usage.
- Carvalho and al. exploit high-frequency/high-resolution transaction data from BBVA, the second-largest bank in Spain, to analyse the dynamics of expenditure in Spain during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
But such information is in short supply.
There is a wider point, though, about the potential public benefit left untapped because so much valuable information sits in private silos. The debate about the use of data for public good was under way before the pandemic. One good thing that could emerge from the current crisis would be greater access to the wealth of valuable information that could help policymakers stimulate and shape the eventual economic recovery.
Big Data for the Public Good
By: Diane Coyle – University of Cambridge
The issues with collecting health data?
The current proposed solutions that include contact tracing, smart-phone tracking, and e-temperature measurements would create big amounts of data but pose many critical questions:
- Who owns the health data generated by tracing?
- Who manages the data generated by tracking?
- Are they selling it to third party vendors?
- How are they protecting the data infrastructure from computer viruses and hacker attacks?
Data democracy allows personal data ownership, makes data available to citizens, and reduces costs to popularise, disseminate, and crowd-source data. The opposite of that (i.e. a big data tyranny), is a centralisation of all personal health datasets in the hands of few companies or entities that have not been chosen by data creators. That notion dictates the transformation of the famous saying “data is the new oil” (indicating the rising power of data in the global economy) to “data is the new blood”.
Pandemics and big data tyrannies
By: Feras A. Batarseh – George Mason University
Why AI is not playing a significant role in this pandemic
BlueDot, a relatively low cost AI tool based in Canada, predicted the outbreak of the infection at the end of 2019, issuing a warning to its clients on 31st of December 2019, before the World Health Organization did so on 9th of January 2020!
But:
AI is not yet playing a significant role in the fight against COVID-19, at least from the epidemiological, diagnostic and pharmaceutical points of view. Its use is constrained by a lack of data and by too much noisy and outlier data. The creation of unbiased time series data for AI training is necessary. A growing number of international initiatives in this regard is encouraging; however, there is an imperative for more diagnostic testing. Not only for providing training data to get AI models operational but moreover for more effectively managing the pandemic and reducing its cost in terms of human lives and economic damage.
Artificial Intelligence against COVID-19: An Early Review
Author: Wim Naudé
From: RWTH Aachen University
