policymaking20

"I have a brain cancer. Yesterday I went to get my digital medical records: I have to show them to many doctors. Sadly they were in a closed, proprietary format and, thus, I could not open them using my computer, or send them in this format to all the people who could have saved my life. I cracked them. I opened them and converted the contents into open formats, so that I could share them with everyone. Just today I have been able to share the data about my health condition (about my brain cancer) with 3 doctors. 2 of them already replied."

Update here: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/25/opinion/iaconesi-cure-open-source/index.html

Attracted much attention as an example of gamification of science

We help cities, housing corporations and cultural organizations make interactive and collaborative plans with multiple stakeholders.

Nice example of how games can be used for urban planning.

One of the catalogues of COTS serious games. Not recently updated however.

The interconnectedness of the global economy makes it more vulnerable to major shocks. In the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, global leaders are acutely aware of the threats another such crisis would pose to economic recovery, social cohesion and political stability. How can governments and business prepare for and respond to such unanticipated events?

This research note provides a general introduction to REsCape: an agent-based computational framework for studying the relationship between natural resources, ethnicity, and civil war. By permitting the user to specify: (i) different resource profiles ranging from a purely agrarian economy to one based on the artisanal or industrial extraction of alluvial or kimberlite diamonds; (ii) different patterns of ethnic domination, ethnic polarization, and varying degrees of ethnic salience; as well as (iii) specific modes of play for key agents, the framework can be used to assess the effects of key variables - whether taken in isolation or in various combinations - on the onset and duration of civil war. Our objective is to make REsCape available as an open source toolkit in the future, one that can be used, modified, and refined by students and scholars of civil war.

Example of big data analysis.

Catastrophic events have raised numerous issues concerning how effectively the built environment accommodates the evacuation needs of individuals with disabilities. Individuals with disabilities represent a significant, yet often overlooked, portion of the population disproportionately affected in emergency situations. Incorporating disability considerations into emergency evacuation planning, preparation, and other activities is critical. The most widely applied method used to evaluate how effectively the built environment accommodates emergency evacuations is agent-based or microsimulation modeling. However, current evacuation models do not adequately address individuals with disabilities in their simulated populations. This manuscript describes the BUMMPEE model, an agent-based simulation capable of classifying the built environment according to environmental characteristics and simulating a heterogeneous population according to variation in individual criteria. The method allows for simulated behaviors which more aptly represent the diversity and prevalence of disabilities in the population and their interaction with the built environment. Comparison of the results of an evacuation simulated using the BUMMPEE model is comparable to a physical evacuation with a similar population and setting. The results of the comparison indicate that the BUMMPEE model is a reasonable approach for simulating evacuations representing the diversity and prevalence of disability in the population.

The potential for the Avian Flu (H5N1) virus to become a pandemic disease has mandated an examination of public health surveillance, response and containment strategies for developing countries. We have developed a Multi Agent System Simulation system known as IDESS (Infectious Disease Epidemic Simulation System) that rapidly constructs infectious disease models from existing data for any geographical region. This approach addresses an important area of infectious disease outbreak management, as it allows public health professionals to rapidly construct a simulation model for any geographic region and observe how an infectious disease spreads between communities. Such simulations will facilitate testing of containment strategies for rapid response.

Abstract: Bangladesh exemplifies the complex challenges facing densely populated coastal regions. The pressures on the country are immense: around 145 million people live within an area of just 145,000 sq-km at the confluence of three major river systems: the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna. While progress has been made, poverty remains widespread, with around 39% of children under five malnourished. Most of its land-mass lies below 10m above sea level with considerable areas at sea level, leading to frequent and prolonged flooding during the monsoons. Sea level rise is leading to more flooding as storm surges rise off higher sea levels, pushing further inland. Higher sea levels also result in salt-water intrusion into freshwater coastal aquifers and estuaries, contaminating drinking water and farmland. Warmer ocean waters are also expected to lead to an increase in the intensity of tropical storms.

The HYDRA integration architecture is an effort to develop a service-oriented architecture for integrated Web-based access of LANL agent-modeling capabilities. The work here includes both semantic and syntactic interoperability issues, optimization, computing performance, human machine interface design, and multi-scale, multi-model simulation and analysis software integration.

The HCSim model is used to gauge the impact of mass-casualty incidents on hospital capacity.

BudgIT is creative start-up driven to retell the Nigerian budget and public data  in a finer detail across every literacy span.  We aim to stimulate citizens interests around public data and hence trigger  discussions towards better governance. We are committed to principles of open data & governance, citizen participation and data transparency. 

TITLE: SocialSYNC Launched by Syncapse and developed by Crimson Hexagon REFERENCE PEOPLE/ORGANISATION: LOCATION:US IMPLEMENTATION LEVEL:Deployed DESCRIPTION:SocialSYNC provides a powerful framework that pulls brands' unstructured social marketing data and content from third-party platforms and social media sites, and stores it in one managed, hosted and secure datacenter. This addition to the Syncapse Platform is designed to eliminate the data fragmentation that currently exists for brands as they ingest massive amounts of big data and content driven by disparate social applications. SocialSYNC allows global brands to compare campaign results from multiple channels side-by-side, and more accurately and effectively build a social data strategy linked to internal and external IT systems.

Clarabridge provides individual departments, Global 1000 enterprises and technology and service providers with an universal view of their customers through transforming of text-based verbatim into customer experience insight. Clarabridge collects all sources of customer feedback, transforms it using Natural Language Processing (NLP), categorizes the content, performs sentiment scoring and delivers customer insights enterprise-wide though a variety of interfaces.

Founded in 2006, Radian6 was created with the idea that companies need to actively engage in Social Media Monitoring. Intelligence about online conversations is critical: companies need to know what's being said about their brand, industry, and competitors online. So we built a listening platform designed to help companies do just that. But listening is just the beginning. Businesses need to measure, analyze, and report on their social media efforts. They need to discover insights from their information. They need to engage. And they need the best tools to reach these targets. Radian6 provides the ability to do it all, and to incorporate all the areas that social media touches across the enterprise, including customer service, sales and lead generation, public relations, marketing, and more. Learn more about how we can help here.

this focusses on social media analytics

HDI Forum III: The Health Datapalooza promises to bring together a diverse group of data experts, technology developers, entrepreneurs, policy makers, health care system leaders, CIOs, CTOs, and community advocates to support innovative applications of health and health care data. The Health Data Initiative (HDI), originally launched in 2010 by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as the Community Health Data Initiative, is a public-private collaboration that encourages innovators to utilize health data to develop applications to raise awareness of health and health system performance and spark community action to improve health. The Forum will feature keynote addresses, an Apps Expo, demonstrations of new, cutting-edge apps, and thought-provoking panel discussions. There will also be plenty of time for networking and one-on-one interaction. It is a great opportunity to be in on the vanguard of data applications to improve health and health care. This year's event promises to be one you do not want to miss!

interesting case of data-intensive policy-making

The CyberEmotions consortium began in February 2009 for a period of four years. The project focuses on the role of collective emotions in creating, forming and breaking-up e-communities.