Cosmetics company Lush recognizes individuals, groups and organizations dedicated to defending digital rights.

In 2016 Lush and Access Now joined forces for the global #KeepItOn campaign. The sales of a limited edition Error 404 bath bomb reached £213,751 and went into a Digital Fund, with Access Now receiving the first donation of £50k to continue their fight against Internet shutdowns.

“We are thrilled to continue our support of grassroots digital activists fighting to keep the Internet free, open and safe,” says Lush CDO Jack Constantine, who recently helped deliver a petition to the UN asking world leaders to commit to keeping the Internet on.

The fund received 146 applications from 59 countries for the Defenders of Digital Rights awards. These were whittled down by the judging panel, with representatives from Lush joined by Access Now, digital rights organisation Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University, Delhi.

“We need more people, in every part of the world, fighting to protect digital rights. And we need these people to have resources to fight this fight,” adds Melody Patry, advocacy director at Access Now. “Internet shutdowns are often early warning signs of human rights violations, which is why it is so alarming to see their number increase.”

We need more people, in every part of the world, fighting to protect digital rights
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Education and awareness raising is a key component when it comes to digital rights
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The winners span the globe, tapping into different areas of digital rights and using a broad range of techniques. In Germany, Tails is improving safety online by preserving privacy and anonymity through free software. Meanwhile, Social Media Exchange(SMEX) has been campaigning to restore mobile Internet to the residents of Arsal, Lebanon, who have been unable to access 3G or 4G for two years. According to SMEX, mobile Internet was finally restored in September 2017.

In 2016 Lush and Access Now joined forces for the global #KeepItOn campaign
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Lush is supporting grassroots digital activists fighting to keep the Internet free, open and safe
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Education and awareness raising is another key component when it comes to digital rights. In Australia, Digital Rights Watch is piloting a series of short videos about Australia’s privacy rights and how they can be protected. On the other side of the world, the Association for Technology and Internet (ApTI) is developing an educational course for Romanian judges on Open Internet principles.

The fund received 146 applications from 59 countries for the Defenders of Digital Rights awards
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Defenders of Digital Rights Awardees

• Association for Technology and Internet (ApTI), Romania

Developing an educational course for Romanian judges on Open Internet principles.

• Bahrain Watch, Bahrain

An investigative research project aiding critical Internet users in the Gulf, who are being affected by government surveillance and hacking, which is leading to human rights abuses.

• The Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (CIPIT), Kenya

Producing explainer videos on Internet Freedom Concepts.

• Digital Rights Watch Inc., Australia

A pilot for a brief series of short videos about Australia’s privacy rights and how they can be protected.

• European Surveillance Case Law Database, UK

The development and launch of a European Surveillance Case Law Database, cataloguing judgements, previously secret law, and witness statements.

• Facebook Tracking Exposed, UK

A tool that provides researchers with data on Facebook algorithm behaviour, and gives users insights on the quality of their information.

• The Hermes Center For Transparency and Digital Human Rights, Italy

Easy-to-use web authentication, which is encrypted and well documented. This is primarily for journalists, human rights NGOs, and activists.

• Internet Democracy Project, India

Developing and promoting new resources to build awareness around risks related to surveillance in India.

• IPANDETEC, Panama

A digital security campaign that aims to raise awareness within Panama about how to safely engage with the digital world.

• Library Freedom Project, USA

Supporting outreach needs for anti-censorship trainers working with the Library Freedom Project in the Global South.

• Point of View, India

Bringing digital rights closer to women’s lives through community-level workshops with women’s rights and sexual rights advocates.

• Rudi International, Congo

Digital rights training focused on digital security, ICT policy & advocacy for at-risk groups.

• Social Media Exchange (SMEX), Lebanon

A campaign to restore mobile internet to the residents of Arsal, Lebanon.

• Tails, Germany

A web interface for translating the Tails documentation. Tails is an open source security based operating system.

• YODET, Yemen

Research about Internet access and Internet usage in Yemen, giving insights about the Internet status in the country.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Defending Digital Rights appeared first on Tech Trends.

What will be the biggest and most disruptive technology trends of 2018? We talk to industry experts to find out.

Bias-check will become the new spell-check
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Expanding the Immersive Spectrum

We expect 2018 to be a big year for the development and roll-out of second generation hardware for VR/AR such as the Oculus Go and Magic Leap’s Mixed Reality headset – set to be better, lighter and cheaper than ever before,” says Aurelien Simon, Head of Immersive, Digital Catapult.

Just as importantly, however, there will also be increased buy-in from the creative industries in terms of immersive content production: “We’ve seen huge strides in creative content over 2017 and I expect this push for quality over quantity to continue next year. Big production studios are likely to increase their interest and presence in the VR space, while VR games production looks to take a step forward with hotly anticipated games like Doom and Fallout 4 released in VR.”

Trisa Thompson, Chief Responsibility Officer at Dell Technologies also believes that we’ll be donning our AR headsets in 2018 as the technology becomes ubiquitous and increasingly integrates with our daily routines.

“It’s happening in pockets today. But over the next year, VR and AR will cogently bring world issues into our personal reality. Time, money, and geography will no longer be inhibitors to experiencing a different environment, community or perspective.”

Global analyst firm CCS Insight says these technologies are likely to blur and become different dimensions of the “extended reality” spectrum, and the hardware releases of 2018 will reflect that trend: “We expect to see many early examples of augmented reality glasses but also several stand-alone virtual reality headsets.”

2018 will be a big year for the development and roll-out of second-generation hardware for VR and AR
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The Next Era of Human-Machine Partnership report published by Dell and the Institute for the Future (IFTF) also predicts that immersive technologies will increasingly be used to counterbalance our inherent human prejudices. ‘Bias check,’ according to Brian Reaves, Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer at Dell, will become the next spell check as we’ll start applying VR in job interview settings to remove identifying traits, leveraging machine learning and AI to indicate key points of discrimination and program positive bias into our processes.

Immersive technologies will increasingly be used to counterbalance our inherent human prejudices
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Data-Centric Society

According to Nesta’s latest survey, 39 percent of adults say they do not mind sharing their personal information with companies, but 60 percent say they are frustrated by how much of their information has become public. 76 percent of adults around the world say they find it creepy when companies know too much about them.

“Big Data claims to be able to interpret our behaviours, which in theory should help consumers. But with Big Data can come Big Bias, and once personal information is relinquished, all consumers can do is hope companies use it responsibly,” they conclude.

Yet data experts predict that 2018 will mark the year when data starts to become a powerful tool for consumers, as regulators catch up with the data revolution and citizens are put in charge of their data. Accenture’s Fjord Trends 2018 also outlines how technologies such as Blockchain will potentially play a part in creating greater data transparency.

39 percent of adults say they do not mind sharing their personal information with companies, but 60 percent are frustrated by how much of that information becomes public
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In its latest report, the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) indicates that data is a vital component for innovation and stresses the importance of building a broader data infrastructure and managing it responsibly for the greater good.

“Greater access to open data enables greater innovation,” according to the Open Data Institute (ODI) which predicts that over time we will see data helping to create ever greater social and economic value in sectors such as public services, retail and banking.

Vicki Cantrell, Retail Transformation Officer, at Aptos says that retailers will need to leverage data to become more customer-centric. “Analysis tools that deliver actionable data and enable organisations to correctly respond to changing conditions with actionable and repeatable processes at the point of service – whether in-store or online – will be key,” she says.

Banks are recognizing the value of collaboration and outsourcing risk solutions to companies such as Verifi to prevent fraud and improve customer experience
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According to Market Intelligence agency IDC, banks are also increasingly partnering with financial technology companies via open APIs, driven partly by new banking regulations such as PSD2, which involve sharing of customer data.

Retailers will need to leverage data to become more customer-centric
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In 2018 the EU will also begin to fine midmarket firms that violate General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). According to Bill Weber, Principal Security Strategist at eSentire, with the influx of data breaches over the past two years, businesses will have to take the necessary steps to meet the increasing number of cybersecurity requirements set forth by regulatory bodies.

“Regulators are encouraging open banking initiatives, and banks are having to open up their systems via APIs to third parties in providing access to account information and to initiate payments,” a report by consulting firm Capgemini concludes, adding that this will increasingly facilitate collaboration between banks and FinTech companies bringing innovation to industry.

Banks, the report concludes, have a burning need to innovate in this fast-evolving landscape, but have traditionally not been very successful in fostering digital innovation through in-house efforts.

With the influx of data breaches over the past two years, businesses will have to take steps to meet increased cybersecurity requirements set by regulatory bodies
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Matthew Katz, CEO of Verifi – a FinTech company providing payment and risk management solutions to banks and merchants – agrees that factors such as the regulatory impacts of PSD2 and strong customer authentication put an increased onus on issuers and acquirers to better manage risk. He believes, however, that banks are increasingly recognizing the value of collaboration, and outsourcing those solutions to companies such as Verifi to not only prevent issues such as fraud and chargebacks, but to deliver a better overall customer experience.

Banks need to innovate but have traditionally not been very successful in fostering digital innovation in-house
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Smart Cities and Borderless Living

In 2018, we could also start seeing drones delivering not only parcels, but broader societal benefits
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Smart Mobility and automation have been big trends in 2017 as societies continued to cope with the rising demands of urbanization. This is set to continue in the coming year as 87 percent of consumers believe cities need better transportation options according to a recent survey conducted by Ford.

87 percent of consumers believe cities need better transportation options
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In 2018, we could also start seeing drones delivering not only parcels, but broader societal benefits. A report by innovation foundation Nesta predicts “cities in Britain will make the laws, rules and infrastructure decisions for drones to take off, creating an airborne version of the Highway Code.”

Smart Mobility and automation have been big trends in 2017 as societies continued to cope with the rising demands of urbanization
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Simulation tools will also enable governments to test out their policies in virtual environments before rolling them out in the real world according to Nesta’s report, which outlines a broader trend towards borderless identity and citizenship.

“We will see the rise of experiments in e-Residency as governments begin to make the nation state virtual. Citizens may be able to choose to educate their children in Finland, access healthcare from South Korea and run businesses in New Zealand, without leaving the comfort of their homes.”

IIoT and the Next Industrial Revolution

As digital fades from being stand-alone to being embedded in our physical world, our relationships with everything around us will be redefined
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In November 2017 the UK government concluded a review addressing how the country could leverage innovation to revitalise business and industry. It outlined how emergent technologies like IoT, Machine Learning and AI have made the transition away from being hypothesized innovations to practical solutions across a broad range of sectors.

“The next step for manufacturers will be to interconnect every step of the manufacturing process to create seamless and more efficient systems by utilising IoT technology to sharpen their competitive edge and better meet customer demands,” explains Richard Bradbury, UK&I Managing Director at Hitachi Vantara.

This trend is broadly defined under the umbrella of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) or Industry 4.0 and its transformative potential for the global economy and society is just as great – if not greater – than that of previous industrial revolutions. Definitely one to watch in 2018.

The transformative potential of Industry 4.0 for the global economy and society is just as great – if not greater – than that of previous industrial revolutions
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Symbiotic Tech

“The more our devices and voice-assistants are ingrained in our daily lives, the more we will turn to them as our moral compass — for advice. As our technology blends into our habits and is able to read and learn our emotions, fears and anxieties, it will tell us to stop wasting less food or remind us to call mom more often. We can expect to see a rise of people objecting to the moral judgments imposed by the likes of Alexa,” reads the Sparks&Honey 2018 Trends Brief, which goes even further, predicting that we’ll soon connect our bodies using technology in increasingly visceral ways.

“We’ve grown comfortable enough with the pervasive use of technology to let it become part of us via implants, such as bio-tattoos or microchip implants for banking and biometrics. Elon Musk’s Neuralink is on a mission to connect our brains to the cloud and Emily Borghard is now recognized as one of the world’s first true cyborgs, thanks to a Neuropace chip implanted in her brain,” it concludes

The more our devices and voice-assistants are ingrained in our daily lives, the more we will turn to them as our moral compass
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“As digital fades from being stand-alone to being embedded in our physical world, our relationships with everything around us will be redefined,” agrees Baiju Shah, global co-lead, Fjord and managing director, Accenture Interactive.

Nesta’s research also backs up this view, pointing to the fact that AI is already showing impressive healthcare capabilities such as diagnosing Parkinson’s via audio recordings and cancer via molecules in breath. It predicts that in 2018 one or more of the major technology companies will buy a healthcare provider to turbocharge their efforts in that space. “In combination with new forms of facial recognition, AI is being trained to read minds and moods with increasing accuracy,” is says, adding that we will increasingly see it being used to predict and manage both physical and mental health outcomes.

Tech Trends’  Virtual Reality Consultancy services offers support for companies looking to get a foothold in the growing Mixed Reality spectrum and enhance their brand strategy with immersive technologies.

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio on Twitter.

The post Looking Forward to 2018 Tech Trends appeared first on Tech Trends.

Making the huge volume of data out there useful to humans is about contextualizing it, but if Facebook has taught us anything is that this must be done responsibly.

Back in 2012 Forbes Magazine declared that data was “the new oil,” and nobody these days disputes the fact that there is a ridiculously large amount of useful data available out there. The use of HTTP as an access method and semantic web languages as interchange formats have turned the Web into the largest decentralised database the world has ever seen. The problem we face, however, is that there are major issues around reliability, accessibility and socialisation of that data that stop it from being as universally useful as it could be.

There are challenges in extracting scientific data from PDFs
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It was Tim Berners-Lee who once said that the next evolution of the World Wide Web – or Web 3.0 if you prefer – would be about the “Giant Global Graph”. What he was talking about was Big Data, but in a social dynamic context which people can easily access and take advantage of. In the words of Gerhard Weikum, Research Director at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science, nearly all experimental “Big Data” is “utterly boring,” with evaluations ending up in “completely synthetic data with a synthetic workload that has been beaten to death for the last twenty years”. To make this data “interesting”, what he proposes is to bring Big Data and Open Data together, creating Linked Open Data.

Major administrative authorities already publish their statistical data in a Linked Data aware format, but the actual value of these datasets is not unleashed or fully exploited, because data needs context to be of value, and “socialising” is what provides such context. One example of this is the Digital Agenda EU Portal, which has a huge number of datasets on important European indicators, but does not allow people to share their findings or to discuss its interpretations. This means that the context, which gives the data most of its meaning, is simply missing.

As a researcher, you tend to spend most of your time trying to make sense of datasets
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That is the problem that a group of EU-funded researchers are trying to tackle, together with industry partners such as London-based research collaboration platform Mendeley. They launched an open beta version of 42-data, a portal that aims- as the name will suggest to any fans of “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” – to provide answers to the universe and everything by socialising statistical data. This is the main output of theCODE project, which has a remit of facilitating “community-driven insight generation” by lifting non-semantic web data silos in an ecosystem around Linked Open Data, bootstrapped by micropayments and trust mechanisms. Their goal is to essentially create a “flea market for research data” by combining crowd sourced workflows with offline statistical data. This would create a Linked Open Data cloud capable of generating customised datasets to backup and answer all manner of research questions.

Scientific articles are obviously the perfect fodder for this cloud database, but they come with a major problem attached: most papers are in PDF format, which means that it’s difficult (not to say impossible) to extract the primary research data contained in tables and figures. The CODE project, which Mendeley participates in, addresses this by reverse-engineering the paper to extract this information in a format that can then be easily processed and analysed.

“We have a long-standing partnership with Mendeley which started with the TEAM-Beam project, and was then extended to CODE,” says Professor Michael Granitzer, from the University of Passau, Germany, the academic partners responsible for the 42-data portal. “The vision with CODE is basically to make the daily lives of researchers a bit easier, and Mendeley is the perfect partner for that, because it already offers so many tools like the group collaboration and the open API. In the scope of the CODE project, we developed and deployed lots of tools to analyse research publications. Most of that analysis consists of information from inside the paper itself, the primary statistical research data such as tables. We enrich this analysis with linked Open Data to generate meaningful insights and broaden a researcher’s view in a user-friendly way, with sophisticated visualisations that can generate interactive charts and other assets for their research,” he explains.

As a researcher, you tend to spend most of your time actually making (or trying to make) sense out of datasets, and this process means that you have less time to come up with interesting insights and advance research in your field. Take, for example, a researcher preparing to write up their paper: Why is the proposed approach better? The hypothesis they’re putting forward must be backed up by meaningful data, so they are faced with the task of extracting and aggregating statistical primary research data that is stored in tables within various research papers, and then combining, comparing and contrasting this with their own evaluation data. Without integrating these workflows, you’d need a plethora of tools, specially since copying and pasting from PDFs does not work for this type of data. Within 42-data, however, Mendeley hosts and pre-processes those papers, using the Know-Center services to extract the information in a format that is easily processed and manipulable.

The platform itself collects that table-based data and the University of Passau uses Mendeley’s API to merge all those single results accordingly, creating a “data cube” of merged and linked data. This data cube presents the researcher with an integrated view of all those disparate data sources. “But that’s not even the end of it, as a data cube can then be enriched with Open Data to offer up even more insights,” concludes Granitzer. The analysis and discovery is thus not limited to the initial dataset, as the platform offers virtually endless possibilities for customised mixing and matching within what 42-data calls “Data Cubes” to address specific research questions and needs. Individual cubes can be interconnected and aggregated using a graphical interface, which guides the user through and warns of any integrity constraint violations, and how these can be solved, by modifying its structure.

This uncovers some exciting possibilities for accelerating scientific discovery; if some of the sensemaking legwork was automated by such portals, we could see the emergence of a virtual meeting place for people interested in getting insights from such Open Data sets, similarly to how Mendeley users interact in groups based around their research interests. “It is a well-known fact that discoveries in academia come out of intense communication processes, and that is what we’re looking to support,” says Florian Stegmaier, Senior Researcher at the University of Passau. “In addition, the social/crowdsourcing aspect of the platform means that we’re going way beyond the text-based model of asking questions, broadening the scope of discussions to include virtually everything. You could assess the suitability of your research ideas based on existing data, ask for statistics to be included in a paper, or simply discuss a range of published papers to get an in-depth view of the subject,” he enthuses.

But analysing, integrating and sharing data comes with associated costs, as does running such a portal. Beyond the initial EU Seventh Framework Programme grant, how does 42-data actually propose to fund itself? “It’s crucial to establish a value chain for data that creates a positive benefit-to-cost ratio, and we are doing that through two main mechanisms: Reputation and Donations,” Michael Granitzer explains. Reputation is certainly the core motivation driver in the crowdsourcing ecosystem, as we’ve seen withStackExchange and Github, amongst many other high-profile examples. They set out to provide a similar proposition, where users contribute to open-source data projects, analysing data sets and creating interesting insights.

In order for this reputation model to work within the Web of Data you need to establish provenance. This means there is a solid chain of data, which tells you the origin or source of every individual piece of information within that chain. That includes records about which individuals were involved in creating, changing or extracting the data at any given point in time. If a particular person generates a data cube with their query, their ID is stored in that cube to guarantee this reproducible mapping (in the case of data extracted from a paper hosted on Mendeley, the metadata referring to the author name, abstract, publication date, academic status, discipline, research interests, etc. is automatically extracted and linked to the cube). The plan as the platform develops is to triangulate this information with community ratings and recommendation algorithms to produce a “user trust score” that will further feed the reputational ecosystem.

What we see with data today is a similar situation to what we had in the era prior to Web 2.0
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Donations also provide monetary incentives, in the community-driven financing model that Wikipedia pioneered. A “revenue chain” is created by allowing people to donate to users, questions, answers or resources that they find particularly helpful. The idea is to explore the long tail of micro-payments by keeping it flexible. You can target your donation to a specific user, or if it’s a collaborative effort, this can be sent to multiple targets, with user’s trust and reputation scores on the site also influencing how well they do out of those transactions, which is hoped will foster a stronger and more cooperative community. “The complete ecosystem is driven by trust and reputation mechanisms. The higher the trust is, the more likely one will donate for something,” says Granitzer.

What we see with data today is a similar situation to what we had in the era prior to Web 2.0, where there was a lot of content around, but socialisation over that content was not enabled. Just as we’ve seen with the social media boom of recent years, however, there is now an opportunity and appetite for creating communities of interest around the socialisation of data. Through exploring Linked Open Data, users should be empowered to aggregate and integrate interesting data, quickly tailoring it to their specific research needs. That is, however, just the first step, as this increased socialisation could make these datasets accessible to non-scientists as well. The growing momentum of the Citizen Science movement goes to show the enormous potential of opening up science in this way, and the possibilities that this opens up are truly amazing.

Exploring Linked Open Data, users could aggregate interesting data and tailor it to their specific research needs
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Originally published in the Huffington Post

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Making Big Data More Social appeared first on Tech Trends.