The following texts are taken from Algorithm Observatory’s Website.

Why this project is necessary

We know that social computing algorithms are used to categorize us, but the way they do so is not always transparent. To take just one example, ProPublica recently uncovered that Facebook allows housing advertisers to exclude users by race.

Even so, there are no simple and accessible resources for us, the public, to study algorithms empirically, and to engage critically with the technologies that are shaping our daily lives in such profound ways.

That is why we created Algorithm Observatory.

Part media literacy project and part citizen experiment, the goal of Algorithm Observatory is to provide a collaborative online lab for the study of social computing algorithms. The data collected through this site is analyzed to compare how a particular algorithm handles data differently depending on the characteristics of users.

Algorithm Observatory is a work in progress. This prototype only allows users to explore Facebook advertising algorithms, and the functionality is limited. We are currently looking for funding to realize the project’s full potential: to allow anyone to study any social computing algorithm.

Who we are

This project was conceived and is currently being developed by Dr. Ulises Mejias, Associate Professor at SUNY Oswego.

Initial funding for the prototype was generously provided by LINGOs/Humentum.

Holly Reitmeier is research assistant. Tahira Abdo is project assistant.

We would also like to thank students in Prof. Mejias’ BRC 421/521 and HON 301 classes for helping us test the prototype.

Who can use our data

Data generated through this site (ie., data included in the Results page) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. You can use it on any reports or projects that you want, but please cite Algorithm Observatory as the source.

Our future plans

This is a prototype, which only begins to showcase the things that Algorithm Observatory will be able to do in the future.

Eventually, the website will allow anyone to design an experiment involving a social computing algorithm. The platform will allow researchers to recruit volunteer participants, who will be able to contribute content to the site securely and anonymously. Researchers will then be able to conduct an analysis to compare how the algorithm handles users differently depending on individual characteristics. The results will be shared by publishing a report evaluating the social impact of the algorithm. All data and reports will become publicly available and open for comments and reviews. Researchers will be able to study any algorithm, because the site does not require direct access to the source code, but relies instead on empirical observation of the interaction between the algorithm and volunteer participants.

We are currently seeking funding to develop the full version of the project.

Contact us

For more information, please email [email protected].

Intentionally, we do not have any social media accounts.

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Want to discover the world around you? Then maybe it’s time you picked up a sensor.

This exciting online course on citizen monitoring and science starts today. The following introduction was written by Drew Hemment and originally published in the Grow Observatory‘s Medium blog.

This is an astonishing, precarious time to be alive. There are little things, close at hand, we can all do to make things better.

The planet is under severe environmental strain, from climate change to biodiversity loss. Yet at the same time, we have abilities to discover and learn about the world around us that would have been unimaginable only a few decades ago.

People, like you and me, can join together with others like us to monitor the environment, to make positive changes locally, and contribute to solving problems globally. There are more and more people getting involved in citizen science, and sharing free and open data. People are coming together to organise at a local level, and to act together to solve issues we ourselves identify and define — we call this citizen sensing.

This is what we are going to explore in the upcoming online course, Citizen Science: Sensing the World.

Observing, understanding and predicting change on the Earth is the focus of ‘big science’ programmes. These include the latest European Space Agency satellite programme, Sentinel-1.

This is also increasingly the focus of community groups, individuals and NGOs, who are taking up newly accessible sensing devices, connected to the Internet, to create and share knowledge on the environment.

These tools are ever closer to hand. Small, hand held, low cost sensors are becoming more available, a growing number of people carry smartphones and tablets. There is also today a movement of people building open tools and platforms, often centred around FabLabs and Makerspaces.

This is inspired by the powerful idea that by making designs, technologies and data ‘free and open’, other people will be able to take our creations, build on them and improve them — and allow us to do the same in turn — so we all benefit.

There are other networks of people, who also care about the land, and who take a bottom up approach to sharing knowledge, and making changes to turn negative impacts into positive change in the environment. Growers and small scale farmers using permaculture and agroecology are examples, where peer to peer, grower to grower knowledge sharing has been central to their approach.

Working together, people who care about the land can make important contributions to science, by “ground truthing” observations by satellites in orbit high above the Earth.

The vision behind citizens’ observatories is immense. It is nothing short of changing humanity’s relationship to the planet we call home. We can all be part of a collective endeavour to understand and care for the planet. We can all be more aware, more knowing, more engaged, closer together as a community, understanding the global picture, and showing better husbandry for our local spaces and environment.

Ultimately this is all about adopting a more responsible relationship to nature. To do this we can nurture enquiring minds, discover a world of incredible knowledge, build our own tools, strengthen communities, and see the benefits of open and shared data and knowledge.

Until a few years ago, Some of the capabilities of satellites up above us, and networked sensors in the ground, were in the realm of science fiction. Suddenly we have the ability to observe what is happening around us at the microscale. We can browse, explore and zoom into the world around us as if it were a search engine or wikipedia for the natural world.

Citizen sensing is a journey not a destination, and still in its early days. There are real challenges in ensuring the quality and validity of the data, so it is trusted by the science community, and so there are tangible impacts people can see on the ground.

There is a lot of work to do to convince everyone it is worthwhile. That goes for the experts who might use this information to make decisions on policy or investment. And for the individuals who collect and also can benefit from the data.

The good news is we are seeing the positive impact on the ground. One example is another project by some of the people in GROW. In Making Sense, citizen scientists gathered data across three cities for 26 months. In Prishtina, Kosovo there is chronic air pollution, but no official monitoring by the government of air quality. Young people came together to monitor air quality and evidenced air pollution at twenty times the recommended WHO level. The direct outcome was a ban on cars in the city centre, and a change to the Constitution of the Republic of Kosovo, which now includes a right to clean air for citizens.

Making Sense has shared its methods and tools in a toolkit for citizen sensing you can download for free.

GROW itself has a big ambition. To improve the accuracy of climate forecasting on drought and floods, to widen use of regenerative food production and soil management techniques, and to help build a movement of people around the world collaborating on shared knowledge and positive action.

We will get there by many small steps. It takes people like you to pick up a sensor and join a citizen science community.

So join us! Learn all about sensing and Earth observation on the Citizen Science: Sensing the World online course from 26 March. Click below.

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From perfecting a do it yourself spectrometer to mapping and monitoring pollution emissions, Public Lab believes that environmental science can be everyone’s responsibility, and that collaboration should begin at the earliest stages of scientific investigation in order to change the way people see the world around them socially, politically, and environmentally.

Public Lab is free and open for everyone to get involved. Find out more at their website.

Interview with Stevie Lewis (Outreach Manager), Liz Barry (Director of Community Development ), and Mathew Lippincott (Director of Production)

How does Public Lab view open science and citizen science as a pathway to participation in civic community?

Traditional science researcher-subject relationships remove people from the inquiry process. In Public Lab, local environmental questions are asked by people living nearby, and can be explored with tools that are low cost and easy to use. Practicing open source science increases not only the number of people who engage on environmental issues, but creates the space for everyone to explore, generate data, and define the outcomes they seek. Open science and citizen science put people in the center, empowering them with tools and resources to speak substantively about their environmental concerns.

Open licensing is built into all the Public Lab’s projects. In what ways have you seen open source effectively foster collaboration through open processes and licensing?

Open licenses set a basic expectation of sharing. Public Lab’s friendly community norms around sharing are backed with legal structures, so participants know that their authorship will be credited and downstream contributions will continue to grow the commons. When working with community groups, open licensing is the basis for community ownership and provides a sense of security. This transparency increases conversation and discussion, which reinforces the community’s ability to pursue long-term environmental justice outcomes.

Why is “open” important to the Public Lab? How do you use openness to support scientific and educational communities?

Science is fundamentally about replication, and truly independent replication without openness is impossible. Closed licenses and proprietary hardware limit independent evaluation and access to knowledge. Openness has many aspects, however, and we see openness as about more than just licenses. Consider the accessibility of communications and data: Translating content out of difficult expert discourses expands the number of people who can interact with the issues and concepts. Accessible data, such as photographic monitoring, and other visual data, helps people to engage with results. So being open isn’t only about the science itself, but about making the process accessible.

Photo: Public Lab River Rat Pack St. Louis Exhibition CC BY-SA-3.0

How does openness drive innovation within environmental science and other scientific work?

It is exciting to see science today thinking a lot about openness at the publication stage with a push towards publishing full datasets and articles in the open access movement. However, there is even more work to be done at the pre-press stage. This is not just about “open source between scientists” — but a project to use the principles of open source from problem identification to publication. This helps to break down barriers between science practitioners and the public, to the benefit of both. In many fields there’s little or no open collaboration, especially with the public in other parts of the process. This has contributed to a wide gap between science practice and the public; a gap which keeps key environmental and pollution knowledge from communities which need it.

When openness is the part of the focus, and communities are part of the entire process, we all work in the same space. This means that we can more easily share ideas, learn from each other, and collaboratively generate more knowledge.

What kinds of projects have you worked on that have been particularly inspiring? Have you seen your work remixed or built upon by your community in any surprising ways?

Balloon and Kite mapping, the project that launched Public Lab, continues to inspire. Our original case– making online photo maps of pollution sites (recent example in Picayune, MS)– has expanded to include photography and videography at protests, enhancing public discussions on the qualitative experiences of place and dislocation, and new photography rigs for panoramas and 3D scans.

The spectrometry project has been through many variations, and builds. There are over 70,000 spectra from these and over 8,800 contributors. Where originally this project aimed at exploring questions such as “can I tell if this sample contains petrochemical oils?”, people have built and used spectrometers that look different and explore all kinds of other questions such as food oil fraud and the presence of organophosphate pesticides.

Balloon Mapping the Camp. Photo by Claudia Martinez Mansell CC BY-SA 3.0

What environmental challenges are you solving for with your community right now? How do you initiate projects?

Examples of some of the challenges people have been working through on Public Lab recently have included things like: How can I measure the size of a landfill in my community, and can I determine when it has reached its capacity? Can I monitor emissions from polluters with any body sensing methods such as visual or odor monitoring, and if so, what types of violations can I catch with these? How do I capture a pollution runoff event from a development or a facility? These challenges come into Public Lab from people who bring them to the website, the online forums, and in-person events.

What’s coming up for the Public Lab? How can people get involved?

There is a lot of exciting activity in Public Lab right now. We are working to bring structure and strength to the research culture of the community by creating systems for publishing assistance and tool versioning. There are also new ways to interact on Public Lab with the creation of activity grids on tool pages and a new “Question/Answer” feature that’s helping people to interact and share information. We also have a number of live spaces where people can collaborate, from our monthly OpenHour, to the upcoming Annual Barnraising in Louisiana this coming November. Everything from building the questions and the knowledge base on Public Lab, to creating the website itself is an open process that people can get involved in. Join us online or in person!

lead photo credit: Regional Barnraising CC BY-SA 3.0. Article by Jennie Rose Halperin. Cross-published from Creative Commons

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