Civic Tech Weekly April 2: Estonian government leads the way in AI innovation.
1. Estonia: Replacing government workers with AI
Estonia is transitioning its government services to include AI-based in a big way. A country of 1.3 million citizens, 22 percent of Estonia’s population work for the government (on average for European countries, but higher when compared to 18% in the US). Estonia’s chief data officer, 28-year-old Ott Velsberg is aiming to trim the size of the government by introducing AI into various ministries to streamline governmental services.
The biggest project assigned to Velsberg so far is a “robot judge” designed to adjudicate small claims disputes. This is the first attempt in the world to give an algorithm decision-making authority, with its pilot to be scheduled this year. In Estonia, AI or machine learning has been deployed in 13 areas so far to replace government workers. An additional 35 AI-related demonstration projects will be proposed by the governmental AI task force this May, to be rolled out by 2020.
2. Return of the Iron Curtain: Test to cut off Russia from global Internet
In another world first, Russia is planning to test if it can disconnect itself from the global Internet in the next weeks, while still keeping its Internet services up and running. This test is an integral part of a proposed “sovereign Internet” law that is being discussed in the Russian parliament. The new law will require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) within the country to only use exchange points that are approved by Russia’s telecoms regulator, Roskomnadzor. The aim is for the government to have an on/off switch to put up electronic barriers between Russia and the rest of the world.
There are many technical challenges to this operation, which will be very expensive and difficult to implement. Citizens are also protesting against this tightening of their online space. However, the Russian government has shown its willingness to go great lengths to control the Internet, and will likely go ahead with its plans.
3. Travelling to the past with the Time Machine
Time Machine is an ambitious project to create a search engine that spans 2,000 years of European history, by digitising and organising the archives of Europe’s cities into one database. The fragility of the ancient artifacts complicates the digitising process, so X-Ray scans and AI text recognition are employed to read and decipher the content of old books and sealed letters.
The Time Machine rides on the trend of recent years, of mining historical information out of old texts using data science. According to Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, a historian of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, scholars increasingly use this approach to conduct network analyses on social networks of the past, avoiding the focus on “big men and big places” which may lead to the cherry-picking of cases that skew research findings.
4. Civic Tech Timeline shows you the growth trends of civic tech
Check out the Civic Tech Timeline at the Civic Tech Field Guide, a crowd-sourced, global collection of civic tech tools and projects. The Timeline is a steamgraph showing the evolution of the field of civic tech, starting from 1994 up till March 2019. Based on the start dates of more than 2,000 projects and sorted by the Field Guide’s categories, you can view the growth trends of different types of civic tech projects. It is also possible to request access to the data.
5. Citizen keeps tabs on crime
In the past, those interested could monitor emergency radio broadcasts by the police with scanners, to know about crime and unusual happenings in the neighbourhood. Nowadays, there is an app that does it better: Citizen curates these happenings from emergency broadcasts and puts them on a map based on your location. Users in the vicinity can stream videos or take photos of the incidents, or discuss them via chat as they unfold.
Citizen states that its goal is to provide awareness to users about what is happening around them so that they can avoid bad incidents. It is a popular app – more than 100,000 videos have been recorded on it, and it has been rated over 19,000 times on Apple’s AppStore. It is yet unclear how Citizen would generate income, as there are no advertisements and no user fee; users are also promised that their data will not be sold.
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