Building Capacity in Technology Horizon Scanning
The OECD released a working paper that surveys 129 technology‑horizon‑scanning exercises conducted between 2020 and 2025. It maps a wide range of practices, from dedicated government units to multilateral initiatives, and highlights methodological breakthroughs such as AI‑driven analytics. The paper spotlights emerging sectors—including advanced materials, quantum technologies and bioengineering—and outlines their policy ramifications for security, resilience and sustainability. It also flags the difficulty of interpreting early signals and calls for robust standards and cross‑border cooperation.
Smart as a City: The Politics of Test-Bed Urbanism
Burcu Baykurt’s new book examines Kansas City’s experiment with Google’s city‑wide gigabit broadband and a suite of municipal smart‑city pilots in transportation, public housing, and services. The ethnography follows civic entrepreneurs, residents, and officials as they try to match local...
Constructing a New Knowledge Infrastructure
The authors argue that effective community health and safety depend on timely, granular environmental data. They propose building an environmental knowledge commons—a shared data infrastructure that aggregates real‑time measurements, historical records, and analytical tools across neighboring towns such as Benicia,...
Non-Traditional Data in Pandemic Preparedness and Response: Identifying and Addressing First- and Last-Mile Challenges
A new paper by Mattia Mazzoli et al. examines how non‑traditional data—mobility traces, social media, wearables—were used during COVID‑19 and why they fell short. Drawing on a March 2024 Brussels workshop with 50 stakeholders and a survey of 29 epidemic modelers, the...
Relational Futures: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The Relational Futures project, an Indigenous‑led study by Bronwyn Carlson and Tamika Worrell, examined how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples encounter AI technologies such as generative models, automated decision‑making tools, and AI companions. Using an online survey of 36...
Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, From Ancient Oracles to AI
Carissa Véliz’s new book *Prophecy* argues that today’s AI‑driven forecasts are the modern equivalent of ancient oracles, wielded by powerful firms to steer societies. She shows how algorithms now decide who gets loans, jobs, housing, or even organ transplants, often...
The Context Loop: How AI Remembers Us, and Shapes Digital Self-Determination
The article argues that modern AI systems rely on persistent, relational memory—what the authors call the “context loop”—to deliver personalized value. This memory goes beyond simple data storage, linking information across social, temporal, and functional dimensions. While such context improves...
The Commodification of Sensitive Open Data
The European Union’s European Health Data Space (EHDS) regulation, adopted in March 2025, will make the electronic health records of roughly 450 million residents available for secondary use by March 2029. The framework defaults to inclusion, requiring citizens to opt out and offering...
Living Well with Data: Stewardship as a Just and Viable Paradigm
A new report by Reema Patel, authored by Stefaan Verhulst, outlines ten prevailing mental models that shape data governance, from data colonialism to data stewardship. The analysis argues that entrenched models have contributed to a growing data trust deficit, systemic...
Democratic Infrastructure for Creative Futures: Building the AI, IP & Culture Repository
A UNESCO‑backed paper proposes a civil‑society‑led AI, IP & Culture Repository to address the strain generative AI places on existing intellectual‑property frameworks. The authors argue that AI systems harvest vast public, proprietary, and Indigenous data, risking cultural appropriation and undermining...
Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works
Beyond Belief, Helen Pearson’s new book chronicles the rise of the evidence revolution, tracing how data‑driven thinking reshaped medicine in the 1990s and is now infiltrating policy, education, and business. The author argues that solid scientific proof, not opinion, should...
Isle of Man Passes World-First Legislation to Establish Data as an Asset
The Isle of Man has enacted world‑first legislation that creates Data Asset Foundations, a statutory framework that legally recognises data as an asset. Built on the 2011 Foundations Act, the new regime lets companies treat data like property, enabling valuation,...
OpenPOIs
OpenPOIs is an open‑source toolkit that aggregates and conflates Points of Interest (POIs) across major U.S. geospatial datasets. It pulls current POI snapshots from OpenStreetMap and Overture Maps, merging them into a single unified dataset. Each POI receives a confidence...
Openwashing by Architecture: How AI Reveals Budget Opacity
The article argues that AI’s ability to query public budget APIs exposes a long‑standing supply‑side flaw: many government datasets underreport financial figures by up to five times. While the open‑data movement focused on demand‑side challenges—who uses the data and how—AI...
AI Is Changing Who Wins Research Grants
A Northwestern Innovation Institute study examined confidential grant proposals from two universities alongside all NIH and NSF awards from 2021‑2025, revealing a sharp rise in AI‑assisted writing after 2023. At the NIH, proposals with higher AI involvement secured more funding...
From Search Engines to AI Agents: Interface Control and the Restructuring of Communication Power
The paper by Ortiz‑Freuler and Castells argues that control over digital interfaces—search engines, social media platforms, and emerging AI agents—has become a central arena of geopolitical competition. It traces how these interfaces evolved from corporate innovations to contested assets that...
AI-Enhanced Deliberative Democracy and the Future of the Collective Will
Manon Revel and Théophile Pénigaud examine AI‑enhanced deliberative democracy, outlining computational frameworks that aim to aggregate collective preferences more accurately than traditional opinion polls. They argue that preferences are shaped by context, making AI a potential discovery tool for uncovering...
Finally, Access: How Article 40 DSA Changes Platform Research in Practice
The EU’s Digital Services Act now grants independent researchers a legal right to access data from Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Search Engines serving at least 45 million EU users. Article 40 creates two routes: public‑data access beyond voluntary tools (40‑12)...
Signals From the Frontier of Digital Statecraft: Rethinking Governance in the Age of AI
Last week Cambridge’s Jesus College hosted the inaugural Digital Statecraft Fellows, bringing together policymakers, technologists, scholars, and practitioners to confront the question of governing in the age of AI. The convening, anchored by the Digital Statecraft Manifesto, moved beyond digitising...
NOODL. An Experiment in Equitable Data Licensing: Promise and Limits
The Nwulite Obodo Open Data License (NOODL) is a tiered licensing model designed for African language datasets, aiming to close the equity gap between researchers in the Global South and multinational firms. Built on Creative Commons foundations, it grants permissive...
America’s Data Crisis: Saving Trusted Facts Is Essential to Democracy
A coalition of researchers, technologists, and civic leaders is urging a coordinated national program to safeguard the United States' most critical public datasets. The proposal outlines a ten‑step, AI‑enabled framework that begins with scanning the federal data ecosystem to catalog...
Artificial Intelligence and Evidence-Informed Policy: Emerging Challenges and Opportunities
The World Health Organization released a discussion paper on the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and evidence‑informed policy‑making (EIP) in health. It outlines how AI can accelerate data integration, predictive modelling, scenario simulation and adaptive feedback throughout the policy cycle....
Participatory Modelling and Simulation to Improve AI-Based Public Social Services
The new open‑access volume presents a suite of agent‑based simulations that examine AI’s role in welfare‑related public services across nine countries. It emphasizes participatory modelling to ensure AI systems are context‑specific, adaptive, and aligned with diverse societal values. Case studies...
Mirror: An Automated Journal of AI Interpretability
Mirror, an entirely AI‑generated journal, publishes interpretability research written, conducted, and reviewed by large language models. The platform focuses on mechanistic studies that decompose LLM behavior, but welcomes any rigorous analysis of AI systems. By releasing papers openly on the...
The Evolution of Collective Intelligence
Royal Society Publishing has released a special issue titled "The evolution of collective intelligence" in Philosophical Transactions B. Edited by Cathal O’Madagain, Sarah Alami, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Edmond Seabright, José Segovia Martin, James Winters and Andrew Whiten, the issue gathers scholars from...
Disneyland and the Rise of Automation: How Technology Created the Happiest Place on Earth
Roland Betancourt’s new book chronicles how Disneyland transformed post‑war industrial automation into immersive attractions. By repurposing technologies such as missile‑grade magnetic tape and automotive PLCs, Disney engineers created iconic rides like the Enchanted Tiki Room, Matterhorn Bobsleds and Space Mountain. The...
Auditing AI
Auditing AI, a new MIT Press book by Christian Sandvig and co‑authors, outlines a practical framework for evaluating artificial‑intelligence systems. It defines what an AI audit entails, why it’s essential, and the components of a best‑practice audit. The authors illustrate...
Priority Technologies
The edited volume "Priority Technologies" outlines a strategic roadmap for the United States to maintain security and prosperity in a volatile global landscape. It identifies six priority technology sectors—critical minerals, semiconductors, biomanufacturing, quantum computing, drones, and advanced manufacturing—as essential for...
General Scales Unlock AI Evaluation with Explanatory and Predictive Power
Researchers led by Lexin Zhou propose a set of "general scales" that transform AI benchmarking from simple scorecards into explanatory and predictive tools. The framework uses 18 cognitive rubrics to map both task demands and model abilities, testing 15 large...
Surveillance Pricing: Exploiting Information Asymmetries
The article recounts how John Wanamaker’s 1876 Grand Depot introduced fixed price tags, ending haggling and boosting market efficiency. It then argues that today’s data‑driven economy is reviving variable pricing through surveillance pricing, where retailers use purchase history, location and demographics...
Responsible AI in Practice: 2025 Global Insights From the AI Company Data Initiative
UNESCO’s 2025 Responsible AI Practice report highlights a widening gap between the rapid integration of artificial intelligence in corporate products and services and the slower evolution of governance and disclosure standards. Drawing on the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s AI Company Data...
What Patients Value in Data Reuse for Oncology Research: A Multi-Stakeholder Qualitative Study to Inform the European Health Data Space...
A new multi‑stakeholder qualitative study examined what oncology patients value when their health data are reused for research. Conducted in Belgium, the research highlights patients’ demand for transparent consent, robust data security, and clear societal benefits. Findings are intended to...
The Use of Artificial Intelligence Technologies in the European Union
Eurostat’s new statistical report details AI usage among European Union enterprises and citizens. Adoption among firms rose to roughly 15 % in 2023, up from 10 % two years earlier, while about one‑fifth of citizens interact daily with AI‑driven services. Manufacturing and...
Assessing the State of AI Adoption Across the Federal Government
Three consecutive U.S. administrations have placed AI adoption at the top of the federal agenda, most recently through the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan. Recent inventories show a rapid acceleration of AI projects between 2023 and 2025, yet usage remains...
Clichés We Live By
"Clichés We Live By" by Nana Ariel and Dana Riesenfeld examines how the cliché—once dismissed as stale—functions as a dynamic cultural force shaping modern notions of originality. The authors trace its evolution from industrial‑age print to today’s AI‑driven content generation,...
Impact-Oriented Evaluation of Smart City Projects
The new guide by Andreas Marx and co‑authors highlights the shortcomings of conventional smart‑city assessments that focus on technical roll‑out, user counts and simple cost‑benefit analysis. It argues that municipalities must shift to impact‑oriented evaluation that quantifies quality‑of‑life, social participation,...
Civil Society in Crisis Times: New Geographies of Governance in an Era of AI
The paper by Hardill, Milnes, Mills, and Jones examines how artificial intelligence reshapes governance across the UK, focusing on civil‑society organisations that advise citizens in Wales and England. It maps emerging geographies of digital transformation, highlighting the interplay between AI,...
How Accurate Are Google’s A.I. Overviews?
A study by AI startup Oumi evaluated Google’s AI Overviews, finding they are correct about 85% with Gemini 2 and 91% with Gemini 3—roughly nine‑times‑out‑of‑ten overall. With more than five trillion searches a year, even a 9% error rate translates to tens...
No Privacy without AI
Norman Sadeh argues that the rise of autonomous, agentic AI intensifies privacy concerns while simultaneously becoming essential for safeguarding personal data. AI systems now read emails, draft documents, manage calendars, and act on users’ behalf, continuously observing and inferring sensitive...
Peace Infrastructures
UN peacekeepers have expanded from traditional security duties to constructing roads, bridges, renewable power plants, and electricity grids in conflict zones. Since the post‑World II era, the Blue Helmets have cemented streets, built bridges, and dug wells, reflecting a broader definition...
AI Summer, Data Winter: What the AI Index Reveals — and What It Doesn’t Yet Measure
The Stanford HAI AI Index Report 2026 paints a picture of an ongoing AI summer, with rapid adoption—over half the global population using AI within three years—record investment, and near‑human performance across many domains. At the same time, the report warns...
Generative AI as a Weapon of War in Iran
On February 28, 2026, a U.S.-Israeli strike dubbed Operation Epic Fury hit Iranian nuclear and military targets, triggering a flood of false media on social platforms. Generative AI tools produced realistic videos, images, and satellite‑style graphics that depicted fictitious explosions,...
How Non-Profits and Governments Use Data to Drive Real System Change
Philanthropic groups are redesigning funding models in the Global South to make data a catalyst for systemic change. Generation India restructured payments, cutting input‑linked fees to 56% and tying 44% to verified job placement and retention, boosting employment outcomes. The...
Same Platform, Different Outcomes: Metadata Practices and Open Data Use
The study examines how metadata design on open‑government data portals influences user behavior across 15 U.S. cities, analyzing 5,863 datasets. Using affordance theory, researchers measured metadata quality and linked it to two usage metrics: dataset views and downloads. Results show...
The Imaginary of Informed Consent: Rethinking Approaches to Data Use for AI in Healthcare
The article examines how India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 relies on informed consent to legitimize health data use for AI, but this model struggles with the complex, secondary purposes of AI training. It outlines three consent challenges: multiple...
Data Governance in the AI Era: 10 Shifts Redefining Data, Institutions, and Practice
The essay argues that data governance is the foundation of AI governance, as AI systems depend on high‑quality input data. It outlines ten transformative shifts, including redefined data definitions, expanded ownership, real‑time pipelines, and new ethical risk assessments. These changes...
StatGPT and the Fourth Wave of Open Data
Decades of investment in statistical systems have yielded abundant official data, yet users still struggle to discover, interpret, and apply it. The IMF’s new StatGPT report argues that the core issue is not data availability but (re)usability, highlighting fragmented portals,...
Finding the Innovators Hiding in Plain Sight
Northwestern Innovation Institute launched InnovationInsights, an AI‑driven platform that surfaces university research with high commercial promise. The system creates searchable researcher profiles and assigns each publication a commercial‑potential score based on machine‑learning models trained on decades of data linking academic...
Tipping Out of Trouble: How Societies Transformed and How We Can Do So Again
Marten Scheffer’s new book examines how societies have historically tipped out of crises and offers a scientifically grounded roadmap to avoid ecological and social collapse. Drawing on complex‑systems theory, neuroscience, and case studies—from the abolition of slavery to the end...
Scaling Artificial Intelligence in Health
The OECD released a report outlining a policy checklist to scale artificial intelligence responsibly in health systems. It identifies four pillars—enablers, guardrails, meaningful engagement, and trustworthy deployment—covering nine policy categories and 43 guiding questions. The document highlights persistent barriers such...