Making citizens the eyes of policy makers: a sweet spot for hybrid AI? (Daniele Miorandi, U-Hopper)

2. © All rights reserved, U-Hopper 2019 Environmental governance • Policy- and decision-makers need data to take informed actions • Authoritative sources may be expensive to obtain (and hard of reach in developing countries) • Limited awareness and engagement of citizens hinder the impact of the policies/ actions The context

3. Can we involve citizens to provide data useful for environmental governance?

5. © All rights reserved, U-Hopper 2019 Use (better: leverage) citizens as sensors • Many potential sensors! • Sensors that move (as people do) - finer spatial granularity • Finer temporal granularity • Free (well, kind of) Side beneﬁts

6. © All rights reserved, U-Hopper 2019 • Crowdsourcing/crowdsensing as an established research field • Rather large body of literature • “Crowdsensing” returns 11,400 results on Google Scholar • Some well-known success stories • Related keyword: citizens science Is this really new?

7. © All rights reserved, U-Hopper 2019 Citizens' Observatories are community-based environmental monitoring and information systems. They build on innovative and novel Earth observation applications embedded in portable or mobile personal devices. This means that citizens can help and be engaged in observing our environment. An EU perspective

9. Citizens Portable sensors Mobile personal devices Citizens Observatory Citizen-generated data

10. © All rights reserved, U-Hopper 2019 Citizen-generated data has quality issues • Noisy (low-cost sensors, non professional people, etc.) • Unreliable (no control on people, connectivity issues etc.) Data quality

11. © All rights reserved, U-Hopper 2019 Traditionally, policy and decision-maker in environment have been working with authoritative data sources • Fully trusted data of high quality • High availability Working with noisy, unreliable data

12. can AI help?

13. NO, not this AI

14. The ‘humble’ AI

15. Citizens Portable sensors Mobile personal devices Citizens Observatory Citizen-generated data AI AI-annotated data

16. Is AI fit for purpose?

18. © All rights reserved, U-Hopper 2019 “Science which assists the needs and concerns of citizens” and “a form of science developed and enacted by the citizens themselves”. (Alan Irwin) Citizen science

19. © All rights reserved, U-Hopper 2019 A large community of volunteers supporting various citizen science projects across very diverse fields, such as space (astronomy), biology (biodiversity), geography etc, Typical task: image annotation Data: • 1,765,830 registered volunteers • 422,416,250 annotations generated Example: Zooniverse

20. Citizens (in situ) Portable sensors Mobile personal devices Citizens Observatory Citizen-generated data AI Data Quality Engine AI-annotated data Citizens (remote/online) Data to annotate Annotations Citizen-generated data with validated annotations

21. © All rights reserved, U-Hopper 2019 A large-scale initiative to demonstrate the viability of using citizen- generated information in river monitoring and flood prevention. SCENT engages citizens in environmental monitoring and enables them to become the ‘eyes’ of the policy makers. Focus on monitoring land-cover/use changes using citizens smartphones and tablets. Funded by EC within the H2020 framework The SCENT project @SCENT_EU scent-project.eu

22. © All rights reserved, U-Hopper 2019 Two large-scale pilots (Danube delta in Romania and Kifisos basin in Greece) Collected so far: • 13,939 citizen-generated images • 2,132 citizen-generated videos SCENT: pilots

24. © All rights reserved, U-Hopper 2019 The creator signalled the presence of a water level meter The AI identified a bank river with low grass Both got invalidated in the final human intelligence stage Into the wild…

25. © All rights reserved, U-Hopper 2019 What AI said: • Fruit tree (99% confidence —> Passed) • Tree (92% confidence —> Passed) • River bank.Bare soil (74% confidence —> Validated) • Pasture/Grassland (49% confidence —> Invalidated) • River bank.Low grass (48% confidence —> Invalidated) More from the wild

28. Citizens (in situ) Portable sensors Mobile personal devices Citizens Observatory Citizen-generated data AI Data Quality Engine AI-annotated data Citizens (remote/online) Data to annotate Annotations Citizen-generated data with validated annotations Harmonisation platform EOs data Data for policy- and decision-makers

29. © All rights reserved, U-Hopper 2019 Hybrid AI: artificial intelligence + collective intelligence as an approach for solving complex, wicked problems A lot of space for application in environmental monitoring/ environmental governance Do not reinvent the wheel • Protocols for user engagement • Software components (open source/Apache v.2) • Existing citizen science communities to tap in Summing it up

30. © All rights reserved, U-Hopper 2019 www.u-hopper.com Via Sanseverino 95 38122 - Trento, Italy Contacts Daniele Miorandi daniele.miorandi@u-hopper.com CEO +39 347 5865883 Get in touch if you want to run a project We can help!

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