More New Ways to Explore Patent Data; Blog by Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO Michelle K. Lee, Director's Forum Blog, 1/12/17

Michelle K. Lee, Blog by Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO Michelle K. Lee, Director's Forum Blog; More New Ways to Explore Patent Data

"Making patent data accessible to the public has been a cornerstone of this agency’s policy since its inception. I’m pleased to announce yet another step we’ve taken at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to make such data even easier for the public to understand and use, namely the addition of new features to our patent data visualization and analysis tool, PatentsView. First launched in 2014, PatentsView provides the public a variety of ways to interactively engage, through a web-based platform, the highest-quality patent data available. The underlying database connects 40 years’ worth of information about inventors, their organizations, and their locations in unprecedented ways. PatentsView is a key component of our open data efforts to improve the accessibility, usability, and transparency of U.S. patent data...

You could argue that the innovations documented in our records may very well, collectively, constitute the world’s largest repository of scientific and technological knowledge. But the larger a data set, the more challenging it is to find useful information or trends or, put another way, to separate the signal from the noise. This collaborative tool, developed by the USPTO’s Office of the Chief Economist in conjunction with the American Institutes for Research, New York University, the University of California at Berkeley, Twin Arch Technologies, and Periscopic, aims to make that sorting and separation possible. The shared public and private effort in creating and improving the platform is symbolized in the “.org” domain of http://www.PatentsView.org.

By providing new tools and data to the public, PatentsView demonstrates this agency’s continuing commitment to open data, open government, and evidence-based policymaking."

What does 2017 hold for open data initiatives?; Guardian, 1/6/17

Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Guardian; What does 2017 hold for open data initiatives?

"In 2016, open data was central to a growing number of projects across the globe. Throughout the year, data initiatives attempted to change the banking industry, took strides towards getting London fit, and fought “superbugs” through a real-time record of antibiotic resistance.

How will we see the open data ecosystem continue to grow in 2017? We asked the experts to tell us what the coming year will hold."

White House expanding open data initiatives; FedScoop, 9/21/16

Samantha Ehlinger, FedScoop; White House expanding open data initiatives:

"The Obama administration has big plans to improve its open data — particularly around contracting data, data on foreign aid and data to aid development.

In a series of new commitments announced Tuesday to further expand its third Open Government National Action Plan, the administration calls for increased engagement with contracting officers to discuss data quality and accessibility, and directs the Small Business Administration and Treasury Department to "reach out to small business owners to better understand what types of contracting data are most useful to them.”"

'Moonshot' cancer panel calls for US to create national research database; Guardian, 9/7/16

Amanda Holpuch, Guardian; 'Moonshot' cancer panel calls for US to create national research database:

"The Cancer Moonshot Blue Ribbon Panel report said the recommendations, if implemented, “will transform our understanding of cancer and result in new opportunities to more effectively prevent and treat the disease”.

The 10 recommendations include existing programs that need more funding – such as research to update guidelines for patient symptom control – and brand new initiatives including a human tumor database to monitor and analyze multi-dimensional cell behavior...

But the funding necessary to fulfill these recommendations has not been approved by Congress despite lobbying by the Obama administration, which said it hoped to spend $1bn on the program."

Pennsylvania wades into open data; GCN, 8/26/16

Matt Leonard, GCN; Pennsylvania wades into open data:

"The data currently available on OpenDataPA supports Gov. Tom Wolf’s three governing objectives -- education, employment and government services -- includes prison population numbers, school performance profiles and summary information on well inspections. The state also plans to release datasets from other state agencies on the site...

The administration’s main goals for releasing this data is three-fold: accountability, modernization and innovation. The portal will allow citizens to keep track of government projects, find this information in one place and use if to “make data-driven decisions.”"

There’s No Such Thing as Innocuous Personal Data; Slate, 8/8/16

Elizabeth Weingarten, Slate; There’s No Such Thing as Innocuous Personal Data:

"The way you walk can be as unique as your fingerprint; a couple of studies show that gait can help verify the identity of smartphone users. And gait can also predict whether someone is at risk for dementia. Seemingly useless pieces of data may let experts deduce or predict certain behaviors or conditions now, but the big insights will come in the next few years, when companies and consumers are able to view a tapestry of different individual data points and contrast them with data across the entire population. That’s when, according to a recent report from Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, we’ll be able to “gain deep insight into human emotional experiences.”

But it’s the data that you’re creating now that will fuel those insights. Far from meaningless, it’s the foundation of what you (and everyone else) may be able to learn about your future self."

Zika Data From the Lab, and Right to the Web; New York Times, 7/18/16

Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times; Zika Data From the Lab, and Right to the Web:

"Dr. O’Connor’s decision was the most radical manifestation of a trend already underway. In early February, more than 30 of the most prominent academic journals, research institutions and research funders signed a “Statement on Data Sharing in Public Health Emergencies” in which the journals agreed to make all articles about the Zika virus available free instead of charging their subscription fees, which can be hundreds of dollars.

The journals also agreed to consider articles that had first been posted for comment on public forums like bioRxiv, which is hosted by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. The funders agreed to make everyone receiving their money share data as widely as possible...

“I never planned to be an evangelist,” he said. “I was happy toiling in anonymity, so this is a surreal experience. We all grew up in the same system: You do a study, you submit it to a journal, and your place in the hierarchy depends on the quality of the journal it appears in.”

“If it’s all you’ve known, you assume it’s the right way. But if you’ve got data that can contribute to the public health response during an epidemic — is it really yours to hang onto?”"

Public info, now: As county and city improve, the state stays lousy; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 6/6/16

Editorial Board, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Public info, now: As county and city improve, the state stays lousy:

"County officials in recent days have rolled out new online tools to make certain types of public information more accessible.

Controller Chelsa Wagner on Thursday debuted alleghenycounty.opengov.com, which features graphs, charts and sortable data about spending, vendors, employees, salaries and benefits. She also introduced allegheny.openbookportal.com, providing instant access to contracts with vendors...

Local governments are getting better at providing basic financial and vendor information to the public, and some officials, such as city Controller Michael Lamb, take pride in providing easy access to public information...

Across the state, however, access to public documents is uneven, and obtaining anything beyond routine documents, such as annual budgets, often involves a cumbersome right-to-know process in which the government agency drags its feet and attempts to keep secret anything potentially embarrassing or controversial. Incremental progress on openness should be applauded, but it is important to remember that the larger battle is far from won."

Open Data Platform Lets Aid Groups Respond More Efficiently To Crises; Huffington Post, 5/27/16

Eleanor Goldberg, Huffington Post; Open Data Platform Lets Aid Groups Respond More Efficiently To Crises:

"When a humanitarian crisis hits, there’s an inevitable mad scramble to collect data, which is often scattered, limited and fail to offer a “big picture” of the situation at hand.

Nearly two years after the launch of the Humanitarian Data Exchange, however, governments, nonprofits, aid workers and the general public can now share information from the ground and upload it to one platform so that it’s stored, and accessible, in a single location.

The goal is to be able to offer up humanitarian aid in an efficient and faster way.

The project, which is managed by the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs, now covers about 250 locations across the world. Those include Ecuador and Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, according to Reuters."

Making the Most of Clinical Trial Data; New York Times, 4/12/16

Editorial Board, New York Times; Making the Most of Clinical Trial Data:

"Some researchers may oppose sharing data they have worked hard to gather, or worry that others will analyze it incorrectly. Creating opportunities for collaboration on subsequent analysis may help alleviate these concerns.

Of course, any data sharing must take patients’ privacy into account; patients must be informed before joining a clinical trial that their data may be shared and researchers must ensure that the data cannot be used to identify individuals.

By making data available and supporting analysis, foundations, research institutions and drug companies can increase the benefit of clinical trials and pave the way for new findings that could help patients."

Open Data: Why We Should Care; Huffington Post, 3/17/16

Apolitical, Huffington Post; Open Data: Why We Should Care:

"Excited by the connectivity revolution, governments all over the world are trying to find clever uses for the enormous amounts of digital information they now possess. One of the Big Data movements with the most momentum is Open Data — making this information available to the public. But what good does this actually do? Apolitical spoke to three pioneers in the field in Burkina Faso, Brazil and India, who told us about fighting corruption, ensuring free elections and preventing crime. These real, substantive issues go beyond the inevitably vague buzzwords of transparency and accountability. Here we discover what Open Data can really do about them."

Sara Fine Institute presents: Christine Borgman, "Big Data, Open Data, and Scholarship": Mon Feb 29th 3.00pm - 5.00pm, University of Pittsburgh

Sara Fine Institute presents: Christine Borgman, "Big Data, Open Data, and Scholarship" :

"Monday Feb 29th 3.00pm - 5.00pm

University Club, Ballroom A, 123 University Pl, Pittsburgh, PA 15260

"Big Data, Open Data, and Scholarship"

by Christine L. Borgman

Distinguished Professor & Presidential Chair in Information Studies

University of California, Los Angeles

Scholars gathered data long before the emergence of books, journals, libraries, publishers, or the Internet. Until recently, data were considered part of the process of scholarship, essential but largely invisible. In the “big data” era, the products of these research processes have become valuable objects in themselves to be captured, shared, reused, and sustained for the long term. Data also has become contentious intellectual property to be protected, whether for proprietary, confidentiality, competition, or other reasons. Public policy leans toward open access to research data, but rarely with the public investment necessary to sustain access. Enthusiasm for big data is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship and the challenges for stewardship. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. This talk will explore the stakes and stakeholders in research data and implications for policy and practice.

Join us Feb. 29, 2016 at 3pm at the University of Pittsburgh’s University Club (Ballroom A). This event is free to attend and no RSVP is required. A reception will follow."

Balancing Benefits and Risks of Immortal Data Participants’ Views of Open Consent in the Personal Genome Project; Hastings Center Report, 12/17/15

Oscar A. Zarate, Julia Green Brody, Phil Brown, Monica D. Ramirez-Andreotta, Laura Perovich andJacob Matz, Hastings Center Report; Balancing Benefits and Risks of Immortal Data: Participants’ Views of Open Consent in the Personal Genome Project:

"Abstract

An individual's health, genetic, or environmental-exposure data, placed in an online repository, creates a valuable shared resource that can accelerate biomedical research and even open opportunities for crowd-sourcing discoveries by members of the public. But these data become “immortalized” in ways that may create lasting risk as well as benefit. Once shared on the Internet, the data are difficult or impossible to redact, and identities may be revealed by a process called data linkage, in which online data sets are matched to each other. Reidentification (re-ID), the process of associating an individual's name with data that were considered deidentified, poses risks such as insurance or employment discrimination, social stigma, and breach of the promises often made in informed-consent documents. At the same time, re-ID poses risks to researchers and indeed to the future of science, should re-ID end up undermining the trust and participation of potential research participants.

The ethical challenges of online data sharing are heightened as so-called big data becomes an increasingly important research tool and driver of new research structures. Big data is shifting research to include large numbers of researchers and institutions as well as large numbers of participants providing diverse types of data, so the participants’ consent relationship is no longer with a person or even a research institution. In addition, consent is further transformed because big data analysis often begins with descriptive inquiry and generation of a hypothesis, and the research questions cannot be clearly defined at the outset and may be unforeseeable over the long term. In this article, we consider how expanded data sharing poses new challenges, illustrated by genomics and the transition to new models of consent. We draw on the experiences of participants in an open data platform—the Personal Genome Project—to allow study participants to contribute their voices to inform ethical consent practices and protocol reviews for big-data research."

Give Up Your Data to Cure Disease; New York Times, 2/6/16

David B. Agus, New York Times; Give Up Your Data to Cure Disease:

"HOW far would you go to protect your health records? Your privacy matters, of course, but consider this: Mass data can inform medicine like nothing else and save countless lives, including, perhaps, your own.

Over the past several years, using some $30 billion in federal stimulus money, doctors and hospitals have been installing electronic health record systems. More than 80 percent of office-based doctors, including me, use some form of E.H.R. These systems are supposed to make things better by giving people easier access to their medical information and avoiding the duplication of tests and potentially fatal errors.

Yet neither doctors nor patients are happy. Doctors complain about the time it takes to update digital records, while patients worry about confidentiality. Last month the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons went so far as to warn that E.H.R.s could “crash” the medical system.

We need to get over it. These digital databases offer an incredible opportunity to examine trends that will fundamentally change how doctors treat patients. They will help develop cures, discover new uses for drugs and better track the spread of scary new illnesses like the Zika virus."

How open data can help save lives; Guardian, 8/18/15

Eleanor Ross, Guardian; How open data can help save lives:

"The most interesting thing with providing raw data, says Shadbolt, is that you provide the information and the apps “think” about it when a situation arises. “The whole genius of the web is that you don’t even know how the data you put up will be used. For this reason it’s best to collect more information than you think you might ever need.”

Emma Thwaites, a spokesperson for the Open Data Institute, explains that data layering is where open data can have the most impact. “That’s when you can really see where the black spots are. Overlay air pollution, crime stats, and fuse the data together, and you can see the likelihood of the most dangerous things. From this you can work out where to position your ambulances, or fire stations. Data helps you to find the epicentre.”

As well as benefiting the local community, open data can also be used to help individuals."

Stephen Hawking, Russian Billionaire Launch New Alien-Hunting Effort; Huffington Post, 7/20/15

Jacqueline Howard, Huffington Post; Stephen Hawking, Russian Billionaire Launch New Alien-Hunting Effort:

"At the Royal Society in London today, the famed physicist and Russian tech billionaire Yuri Milner announced the launch of a $100-million initiative to search for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth, BBC News reported. The initiative -- part of the Breakthrough Initiatives group -- is named Breakthrough Listen.

"With Breakthrough Listen, we’re committed to bringing the Silicon Valley approach to the search for intelligent life in the universe," Milner said in a written statement. "Our approach to data will be open and taking advantage of the problem-solving power of social networks."...

Milner said the search will be transparent and will rely on open-source software so that its findings can be shared with space enthusiasts around the world."

Why I'm Betting On Cities And Data; Huffington Post, 4/20/15

Michael R. Bloomberg, Huffington Post; Why I'm Betting On Cities And Data:

"Technology has unleashed an explosion of new information for city halls to work with. The possibilities for how cities can use that data to improve lives -- and improve the way services are provided to citizens -- are limitless.

To help more cities embrace those possibilities, today Bloomberg Philanthropies is launching a new national program called What Works Cities. It is the most comprehensive effort yet to help city leaders use data and evidence in their decision-making to improve the lives of residents.

The $42 million program will do that by offering technical support and guidance to cities who want to do more with data. Working with a group of world-class partners, we'll help cities create plans for using data and evidence to reach concrete goals that their mayors identify as high priorities.

We'll also provide a forum for cities to work together and learn from each other. Sharing ideas and experiences is important, because cities face many common challenges. They shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel -- wasting employees' time and taxpayers' money -- when they don't have to. By giving cities a way to study the best examples of how others are using data, we'll help them take big steps forward.

City governments have a responsibility to make the most of every dollar, and data helps them do that."

The White House’s first chief data scientist is no stranger to Washington; Washington Post, 3/29/15

Amrita Jayakumar, Washington Post; The White House’s first chief data scientist is no stranger to Washington:

"DJ Patil, who was named the nation’s first chief data scientist last month, shares credit for coining the term “data science.” He is the latest Silicon Valley transplant to join the Obama administration, working under former Google executive Megan Smith, the White House’s chief technology officer...

Q. What does the first chief data scientist do?

A. To me, the government says, “Okay, we have data, but how do we use that responsibly to create efficiencies, to create transparency, to unlock economic potential? How do we get that data to preserve American competitiveness and advance innovation?”

The mission of this role is an amplification of things that have been happening.

How will you achieve those goals?

There are three areas where we have the biggest chance to succeed in our mission...

The next one is open data. We’ve got data.gov [a Web site that features machine-readable government data], which has really changed the game. Think about the billions of dollars that rest on open data infrastructure. People do research on that data, that research turns into insight, that insight turns into wisdom and that wisdom is put back into models and scientific results. The foundation of all this is open data. How do we enhance that across-the-board?"

Open data's Achilles heel: re-identification; ZDNet, 9/3/14

Rob O'Neill, ZDNet; Open data's Achilles heel: re-identification:

'Governments around the globe are embracing the mantra of open data and talking up its productivity benefits, but none have so far made the re-identification of this mass of anonymised data illegal... The possibility of outlawing re-identification is now being discussed in New Zealand, with both the Privacy Commissioner, John Edwards, and a May report (pdf) from the New Zealand Data futures Forum suggesting legal protections against re-identification may be necessary.

Edwards told ZDNet he is trying to look towards the future and ensure that the value in government data can be safely extracted in ways that maintain public confidence.

“One of the methods might be a prohibition on re-identification. If we did that we would be world leaders," he said.

Similarly, the Data Futures Forum report said it is necessary to develop a "robust data-use ecosystem" and to get the rules around open data right. This should include a data council to act as guardians and advisers, and a broad review of legislation."

Unlocking the Benefits of Open Data; HuffingtonPost.com, 2/25/14

Ariel Smilowitz, HuffingtonPost.com; Unlocking the Benefits of Open Data:

"This past weekend marked the third annual Open Data Day, an international event that gathers people around the globe each year in an effort to support and encourage the adoption of open data policies by the world's governments and institutions. Open data is defined as "data that can be freely used, shared, and built-on by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose". With this in mind, over the weekend, designers, coders, statisticians, and those interested in open data participated in workshops and open data hackathons. Ultimately, each event provided participants with the chance to "write applications, liberate data, create visualizations, and publish analyses using public open data." In other words, participants were given a space to come together and collaborate on new ways to visualize, analyze, and spread information throughout the world.

All in all, Open Data Day connected over 100 cities on five continents."