During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, relief organizations and government agencies lacked data about events on the ground and struggled to mount an effective response. New methods of event detection were urgently needed. A research team comprised of country experts and computational social scientists created a Twitter-based event detection system that provides geo-located event data on humanitarian needs, displaced persons, human rights abuses and civilian resistance in near real-time.
Country: United States
Bias Buccaneers is the first non-profit algorithmic bias bounty organization. We organize competitions to engage a broad global community in identifying and fixing ethical problems in the algorithms all companies use. The long term vision of Bias Buccaneers is to create global expertise, standards, and verifiable talent in a nascent, but rapidly growing, field.
Metroverse is an urban economy navigator built at the Growth Lab at Harvard University. It is based on over a decade of research on how economies grow and diversify and offers brand new insights on a city's growth prospects by placing its existing technological capabilities and knowhow at the heart of how diversification unfolds. Metroverse was built using a user-centered design process to help city leaders, policymakers and researchers grapple with 21st-century urbanization challenges.
The Austin Civilian Conservation Corps (ACCC) began as a pandemic response program to help residents earn income and access green careers, and has evolved into a leading model for equitable, climate-focused workforce development. The ACCC, a collaboration with 10+ City departments and multiple community partners, has provided over 125 living-wage opportunities with supportive services, training, and career pathways for Austin’s underserved residents, and is actively shaping the green economy.
Mind the Class, a mental health prevention organization, is partnering with school systems to reduce the risks and reverse the rates of mental and behavioral health disorders by creating a community ecosystem. This full year project collaboratively designs a preventive implementation plan using proven wellbeing research and data-driven solutions in collaboration with our University of Warsaw partners and through local public and private partners support sustainable development.
Austin has experienced rapid growth yet many underserved Austinites have found themselves forced to move when they don't want to, or experiencing homelessness. The City didn't have an anti-displacement strategy. We created a first set of anti displacement insights, accelerated community co-created anti displacement strategies, developed an interactive data tool to stimulate driven approaches, and co-created an equity tool to mitigate displacement risk heightened by its own transit investments.
We can agree on a lot more than we are led to believe. PolicyKeys is firstly a robust one-page narrative tool built around a ground truth so an AI can assist in predicting support for any public policy solution. PolicyKeys is secondarily a role-playing game to help player's better understand their own internal conflicts, as well as better understand their fellow citizen's differing beliefs—the result is a leaderboard of ideas that have deep and wide acceptance—approaching consensus.
Case Study
CrowdBots – Using hybrid intelligence to extract value from smaller datasets in biomedical…
When artificial intelligence (AI) is unable to achieve required accuracy levels in biomedical analysis involving very large data sets, the models are often discarded and the research is severely hindered. To solve this problem we created a crowd-powered citizen science game, Stall Catchers, to integrate the cognition of public volunteers with AI methods to achieve rapid, expert-like analysis of Alzheimer's research data aimed at accelerating the discovery of a therapeutic treatment.
The $800B events industry is antiquated. Huge gaps exist between cities and events. EQ is a mobile platform that streamlines traffic, navigation, crowd control, and security in real time around crowded environments while collecting critical data and analytics. Vasta will soon unveil this next-generation suite of event and venue planning services and digital simulation platform. The EQ Platform was made for cities of any size; public safety; citizens/visitors; fans/non-fans; and for organizers.