Araz 𝖳aeihagh
Araz Taeihagh is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Principal Investigator at the Centre for Trusted Internet and Community (CTIC) and NUS Cities of the National University of Singapore (NUS). Taeihagh was the Chair (2022-2023) and Co-Chair (2020-2022) of the PhD Programme in Public Policy at LKYSPP, NUS. Taeihagh has a technical background and focuses on various aspects of policy design and governance of emerging disruptive technologies.
Taeihagh is a member of the editorial boards of Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Transport Reviews, Policy and Society, Regulation & Governance, Humanities and Social Science Communications, Journal of Economic Policy Reform, and AIMS Energy, among others. Taeihagh is the co-chair of the Comparative Public Policy Research Committee (RC30) of IPSA and was an elected member of the College of IPPA (2019-2023). Taeihagh is a member of the scientific committee (Governance) of AI Singapore (2023-2025). Taeihagh has conducted more than 210 verified peer reviews for more than 60 journals and has 715 Verified editor records.
Recent Awards and Recognitions:
In 2024, Taeihagh was recognised as Highly Ranked Scholar (top 0.05% of scholars) for the prior 5 years in the area of Governance by ScholarGPS in recognition of exceptional productivity, noteworthy impact and quality of scholarly work worldwide. According to ScholarGPS, Taeihagh had a ranking of 11 in Governance, 12 in Public Policy, 14 in Autonomous Robots, and 69 in Smart city in the past five years.
In 2023 and 2024, Taeihagh was ranked in Top 2% of Scientists worldwide for life time citation impact and in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 he was ranked in the top 2% of scientists worldwide for annual citation impact according to the Stanford/Elsevier study.
In 2023, according to ScholarGPS, Taeihagh was placed in the top 0.5% of all scholars worldwide, with a lifetime ranking of #26 Crowdsourcing and #149 Smart city and rankings of #29 Public Policy, #11 Crowdsourcing, and #69 Smart city in the past five years.
In 2021-2022 his works published in Regulation and Governance and Policy and Internet journals were recognised as the top cited publications for the period in their respective journals. Taeihagh is the winner of the best paper of the year award from Transport Reviews in 2020 for governing autonomous vehicles. On the 50th anniversary of earth day, Elsevier selected his paper on the study of four decades of evolution of policy mix for sustainable energy transition in China published in Applied Energy as one of 50 foundations and future of energy research papers on Earth Day in April 2020. Taeihagh received the Research Excellence Award in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 and the LKYSPP writing fellowship 2022 and NUS HSS faculty research fellowship 2023.
Background:
Taeihagh earned his D.Phil. researching "A novel approach for the development of policies for socio-technical systems" at the University of Oxford, UK.
Taeihagh attended the University of Oxford (D.Phil. Matriculated in 2007 - Supervisor Prof Banares-Alcantara) and passed his Viva in December 2011 under Prof. Venkat Venkatasubramanian (Columbia University - Samuel Ruben-Peter G. Viele Professor) and Prof. Ian Thompson (University of Oxford) and received his D.Phil. Certificate in March 2012.
From July 2012 to October 2014, he did his postdoctoral studies at the City Futures Research Centre (based in Faculty of Built Environment) at the University of New South Wales working with Profs Michael Neuman and Bill Randolph. From July 2015 to December 2017, he was on the faculty at the Singapore Management University. From January 2018, he works at the National University of Singapore.
Aside from academic studies, Taeihagh has more than two decades of consulting and advisory experiences in energy, environmental, transportation and technology domains.
Taeihagh is a member of the editorial boards of Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Transport Reviews, Policy and Society, Regulation & Governance, Humanities and Social Science Communications, Journal of Economic Policy Reform, and AIMS Energy, among others. Taeihagh is the co-chair of the Comparative Public Policy Research Committee (RC30) of IPSA and was an elected member of the College of IPPA (2019-2023). Taeihagh is a member of the scientific committee (Governance) of AI Singapore (2023-2025). Taeihagh has conducted more than 210 verified peer reviews for more than 60 journals and has 715 Verified editor records.
Recent Awards and Recognitions:
In 2024, Taeihagh was recognised as Highly Ranked Scholar (top 0.05% of scholars) for the prior 5 years in the area of Governance by ScholarGPS in recognition of exceptional productivity, noteworthy impact and quality of scholarly work worldwide. According to ScholarGPS, Taeihagh had a ranking of 11 in Governance, 12 in Public Policy, 14 in Autonomous Robots, and 69 in Smart city in the past five years.
In 2023 and 2024, Taeihagh was ranked in Top 2% of Scientists worldwide for life time citation impact and in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 he was ranked in the top 2% of scientists worldwide for annual citation impact according to the Stanford/Elsevier study.
In 2023, according to ScholarGPS, Taeihagh was placed in the top 0.5% of all scholars worldwide, with a lifetime ranking of #26 Crowdsourcing and #149 Smart city and rankings of #29 Public Policy, #11 Crowdsourcing, and #69 Smart city in the past five years.
In 2021-2022 his works published in Regulation and Governance and Policy and Internet journals were recognised as the top cited publications for the period in their respective journals. Taeihagh is the winner of the best paper of the year award from Transport Reviews in 2020 for governing autonomous vehicles. On the 50th anniversary of earth day, Elsevier selected his paper on the study of four decades of evolution of policy mix for sustainable energy transition in China published in Applied Energy as one of 50 foundations and future of energy research papers on Earth Day in April 2020. Taeihagh received the Research Excellence Award in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 and the LKYSPP writing fellowship 2022 and NUS HSS faculty research fellowship 2023.
Background:
Taeihagh earned his D.Phil. researching "A novel approach for the development of policies for socio-technical systems" at the University of Oxford, UK.
Taeihagh attended the University of Oxford (D.Phil. Matriculated in 2007 - Supervisor Prof Banares-Alcantara) and passed his Viva in December 2011 under Prof. Venkat Venkatasubramanian (Columbia University - Samuel Ruben-Peter G. Viele Professor) and Prof. Ian Thompson (University of Oxford) and received his D.Phil. Certificate in March 2012.
From July 2012 to October 2014, he did his postdoctoral studies at the City Futures Research Centre (based in Faculty of Built Environment) at the University of New South Wales working with Profs Michael Neuman and Bill Randolph. From July 2015 to December 2017, he was on the faculty at the Singapore Management University. From January 2018, he works at the National University of Singapore.
Aside from academic studies, Taeihagh has more than two decades of consulting and advisory experiences in energy, environmental, transportation and technology domains.
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CCS Concepts:
• Social and professional topics → Government technology policy; Governmental regulations; User characteristics;
• Security and privacy → Human and societal aspects of security and privacy;
• Computing methodologies → Artificial intelligence ;
CCS Concepts:
• Social and professional topics → Government technology policy; Governmental regulations; User characteristics;
• Security and privacy → Human and societal aspects of security and privacy;
• Computing methodologies → Artificial intelligence ;
T13P03 - GOVERNANCE AND POLICY DESIGN LESSONS FOR TRUST BUILDING AND RESPONSIBLE USE OF AI, AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS AND ROBOTICS
https://www.ippapublicpolicy.org/conference/icpp6-toronto-2023/panel-list/17/panel/governance-and-policy-design-lessons-for-trust-building-and-responsible-use-of-ai-autonomous-systems-and-robotics/1390
Abstract submission deadline: 31 January 2023
GENERAL OBJECTIVES, RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND SCIENTIFIC RELEVANCE
Artificial intelligence (AI), Autonomous Systems (AS) and Robotics are key features of the fourth industrial revolution, and their applications are supposed to add $15 trillion to the global economy by 2030 and improve the efficiency and quality of public service delivery (Miller & Sterling, 2019). A McKinsey global survey found that over half of the organisations surveyed use AI in at least one function (McKinsey, 2020). The societal benefits of AI, AS, and Robotics have been widely acknowledged (Buchanan 2005; Taeihagh & Lim 2019; Ramchurn et al. 2012), and the acceleration of their deployment is a disruptive change impacting jobs, the economic and military power of countries, and wealth concentration in the hands of corporations (Pettigrew et al., 2018; Perry & Uuk, 2019).
However, the rapid adoption of these technologies threatens to outpace the regulatory responses of governments around the world, which must grapple with the increasing magnitude and speed of these transformations (Taeihagh 2021). Furthermore, concerns about these systems' deployment risks and unintended consequences are significant for citizens and policymakers. Potential risks include malfunctioning, malicious attacks, and objective mismatch due to software or hardware failures (Page et al., 2018; Lim and Taeihagh, 2019; Tan et al., 2022). There are also safety, liability, privacy, cybersecurity, and industry risks that are difficult to address (Taeihagh & Lim, 2019) and The opacity in AI operations has also manifested in potential bias against certain groups of individuals that lead to unfair outcomes (Lim and Taeihagh 2019; Chesterman, 2021).
These risks require appropriate governance mechanisms to be mitigated, and traditional policy instruments may be ineffective due to insufficient information on industry developments, technological and regulatory uncertainties, coordination challenges between multiple regulatory bodies and the opacity of the underlying technology (Scherer 2016; Guihot et al. 2017; Taeihagh et al. 2021), which necessitate the use of more nuanced approaches to govern these systems. Subsequently, the demand for the governance of these systems has been increasing (Danks & London, 2017; Taeihagh, 2021).
CALL FOR PAPERS
Many studies have highlighted the urgency for and the challenges of governing AI, AS and Robotics (Firlej and Taeihagh 2021; He et al. 2020; Tan and Taeihagh 2021; Tan et al. 2021; Radu 2021; Taeihagh 2021). In this panel, we are interested in governance and policy design lessons for Responsible Use and Building trust in AI, AS and Robotics by answering the following key research questions:
· What governance and policy design lessons have been learnt so far in addressing risks and unintended consequences of adopting AI, AS and Robotics in different domains and geographies?
· What are the challenges of responsible use of AI, AS and Robotics, particularly in the public sector?
· What are the emerging theoretical, conceptual and empirical approaches to understanding new and unconventional regulatory approaches, governance strategies, institutions and discourses to govern these systems?
· What lessons have been learnt so far from the public and private organisations' standard setting and development of guidelines in managing these systems?
· How can the public and expert viewpoints be better considered for the regulation and governance of AI, AS, and Robotics to increase trust in AI?
· What is the role of governments in promoting trustworthy AI and building trust in AI?
Abstract submission deadline (up to 500 words) 31 January 2023
REFERENCES
Buchanan, B. G. (2005). A (very) brief history of artificial intelligence. Ai Magazine, 26(4), 53.
Chesterman, S. (2021). Through a Glass, Darkly: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Opacity. The American Journal of Comparative Law, 69(2), 271-294.
Danks, D. (2019). The value of trustworthy AI. Proceedings of the 2019 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 521–522.
Guihot, M., Matthew, A. F., & Suzor, N. P. (2017). Nudging Robots: Innovative Solutions to Regulate Artificial Intelligence. Vand. J. Ent. & Tech. L., 20, 385.
He, H., Gray, J., Cangelosi, A., Meng, Q., McGinnity, T. M., & Mehnen, J. (2020). The Challenges and Opportunities of Artificial Intelligence for Trustworthy Robots and Autonomous Systems. 2020 3rd International Conference on Intelligent Robotic and Control Engineering (IRCE), 68–74.
Lim, H. S. M., & Taeihagh, A. (2019). Algorithmic decision-making in AVs: Understanding ethical and technical concerns for smart cities. Sustainability, 11(20), 5791.
McKinsey. (2020, November 17). Global survey: The state of AI in 2020 | McKinsey.https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-analytics/our-insights/global-survey-the-state-of-ai-in-2020
Miller, H., & Stirling, R. (2019) The Government Artificial Intelligence (AI) Readiness Index Report 2019.https://www.oxfordinsights.com/ai-readiness2019
Page, J., Bain, M., & Mukhlish, F. (2018, August). The risks of low level narrow artificial intelligence. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Safety for Robotics (ISR) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.
Perry, B., & Uuk, R. (2019). AI governance and the policymaking process: key considerations for reducing AI risk. Big Data and Cognitive Computing, 3(2), 26.
Pettigrew, S., Fritschi, L., & Norman, R. (2018). The potential implications of autonomous vehicles in and around the workplace. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(9), 1876.
Radu, R. (2021). Steering the governance of artificial intelligence: national strategies in perspective. Policy and Society, 40(2), 178-193.
Ramchurn, S. D., Vytelingum, P., Rogers, A., & Jennings, N. R. (2012). Putting the 'smarts' into the smart grid: a grand challenge for artificial intelligence. Communications of the ACM, 55(4), 86-97.
Scherer, M. U. (2015). Regulating artificial intelligence systems: Risks, challenges, competencies, and strategies. Harv. JL & Tech., 29, 353.
Taeihagh, A. (2021). Governance of artificial intelligence. Policy and Society, 40(2), 137-157.
Taeihagh, A., & Lim, H. S. M. (2019). Governing autonomous vehicles: emerging responses for safety, liability, privacy, cybersecurity, and industry risks. Transport reviews, 39(1), 103-128.
Taeihagh, A., Ramesh, M., & Howlett, M. (2021). Assessing the regulatory challenges of emerging disruptive technologies. Regulation & Governance, 15(4), 1009-1019.
Tan, S.Y., & Taeihagh, A. (2021). Adaptive governance of autonomous vehicles: Accelerating the adoption of disruptive technologies in Singapore. Government Information Quarterly, 38(2), 101546.
Tan, S.Y., Taeihagh, A., & Tripathi, A. (2021). Tensions and antagonistic interactions of risks and ethics of using robotics and autonomous systems in long-term care. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 167, 120686.
Tan, S., Taeihagh, A., & Baxter, K. (2022). The Risks of Machine Learning Systems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.09852.
T13P05 - PLATFORM GOVERNANCE IN TURBULENT TIMES
https://www.ippapublicpolicy.org/conference/icpp6-toronto-2023/panel-list/17/panel/platform-governance-in-turbulent-times/1428
Abstract submission deadline: 31 January 2023
GENERAL OBJECTIVES, RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND SCIENTIFIC RELEVANCE
Platforms significantly increase the ease of interactions and transactions in our societies. Crowdsourcing and sharing economy platforms, for instance, enable interactions between various groups ranging from casual exchanges among friends and colleagues to the provision of goods, services, and employment opportunities (Taeihagh 2017a). Platforms can also facilitate civic engagements and allow public agencies to derive insights from a critical mass of citizens (Prpić et al. 2015; Taeihagh 2017b). More recently, governments have experimented with blockchain-enabled platforms in areas such as e-voting, digital identity and storing public records (Kshetri and Voas, 2018; Taş & Tanrıöver, 2020; Sullivan and Burger, 2019; Das et al., 2022).
How platforms are implemented and managed can introduce various risks. Platforms can diminish accountability, reduce individual job security, widen the digital divide and inequality, undermine privacy, and be manipulated (Taeihagh 2017a; Loukis et al. 2017; Hautamäki & Oksanen 2018; Ng and Taeihagh 2021). Data collected by platforms, how platforms conduct themselves, and the level of oversight they provide on the activities conducted within them by users, service providers, producers, employers, and advertisers have significant consequences ranging from privacy and ethical concerns to affecting outcomes of elections. Fake news on social media platforms has become a contentious public issue as social media platforms offer third parties various digital tools and strategies that allow them to spread disinformation to achieve self-serving economic and political interests and distort and polarise public opinion (Ng and Taeihagh 2021). The risks and threats of AI-curated and generated content, such as a Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT-3) (Brown et al., 2020) and generative adversarial networks (GANs) are also on the rise (Goodfellow et al., 2014) while there are new emerging risks due to the adoption of blockchain technology such as security vulnerabilities, privacy concerns (Trump et al. 2018; Mattila & Seppälä 2018; Das et al. 2022).
The adoption of platforms was further accelerated by COVID-19, highlighting their governance challenges. The rise of misinformation and digital health technologies have created heated debates around trust and privacy on these platforms, and the term ‘misinfodemic’, though coined in 2018, is now used to refer to misinformation related to the pandemic (Marrelli, 2020). The US Sub-Committee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law recently released its report investigating competition in digital markets (US Antitrust Report, 2020). The report also finds that due to the absence of competition, dominant tech firms bear little financial consequence when misinformation is promoted online, and content moderation of unlawful and harmful content hosted on such platforms is an ongoing issue.
With this backdrop, countries worldwide have started looking into regulating technology platforms more seriously. This panel will present papers discussing the various dimensions of the use of digital platforms and their implications for policy-making.
CALL FOR PAPERS
This panel welcomes papers that explore the challenges of platform governance. Key research questions to be addressed are:
· Theoretical and empirical papers using various qualitative and quantitative approaches from disciplines that provide insights about the implications of the rapid adoption of these platforms and their effect on policy-making.
· The emerging theoretical, conceptual and empirical approaches to understanding new and unconventional regulatory approaches and governance strategies, as well as lessons learnt from the public and private organisations' standard-setting activities and development of guidelines for managing online platforms
· Theoretical, conceptual, or empirical studies that evaluate the effects of platforms on public service delivery and analyse how these platform activities affect the perceived political legitimacy of governments.
· Analysis of the roles of different actors in influencing policy outcomes through participation in platforms and at different stages of policy making.
· Analysis of the role of tech companies in addressing and/or exacerbating the governance challenges of platforms.
· Examining the different types of platform governance structures (e.g., in blockchain), their risks and unintended consequences, and the organisational, administrative, and institutional changes to accommodate these platforms.
· Cross-national and cross-sectoral studies and theoretically informed case studies examining different types of platforms (e.g., social media, blockchain, sharing economy, crowdsourcing) are especially welcome.
Abstract submission deadline (up to 500 words) 31 January 2023
REFERENCES
Brown, T., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J. D., Dhariwal, … Amodei, D. (2020). Language Models are Few-Shot Learners. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33.
Das, S., Rout, J., & Mishra, M. (2022). Blockchain Technology: Applications and Open Issues. In 2022 International Conference on Communication, Computing and Internet of Things (IC3IoT) (pp.1-6). IEEE.
Goodfellow, I. J., Pouget-Abadie, J., Mirza, M., Xu, B., Warde-Farley, D., Ozair, S., Courville, A., & Bengio, Y. (2014). Generative Adversarial Nets. Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems – Vol(2):2672–2680.
Hautamäki, A., & Oksanen, K. (2018). Digital Platforms for Restructuring the Public Sector. In Collaborative Value Co-creation in the Platform Economy (pp.91-108). Springer, Singapore.
Kshetri, N., & Voas, J. (2018). Blockchain-enabled e-voting. Ieee Software, 35(4):95-99.
Loukis, E., Charalabidis, Y., & Androutsopoulou, A. (2017). Promoting open innovation in the public sector through social media monitoring. Government Information Quarterly, 34(1):99-109.
Marrelli, M. (2020). Exploring COVID-19 in Emerging Economies: Announcing the 2020 Global Misinfodemic Report. Meedan
Mattila, J., & Seppälä, T. (2018). Distributed Governance in Multi-sided Platforms: A Conceptual Framework from Case: Bitcoin. In Collaborative Value Co-creation in the Platform Economy (pp.183-205). Springer, Singapore.
Ng, L. H., & Taeihagh, A. (2021). How does fake news spread? Understanding pathways of disinformation spread through APIs. Policy & Internet, 13(4):560-585.
Prpić, J., Taeihagh, A., & Melton, J. (2015). The fundamentals of policy crowdsourcing. Policy & Internet, 7(3):340-361.
Sullivan, C., & Burger, E. (2019). Blockchain, digital identity, e-government. In Business Transformation through Blockchain (pp.233-258). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Taeihagh, A. (2017a). Crowdsourcing, Sharing Economies and Development, Journal of Developing Societies, Vol 33(2):191–222.
Taeihagh, A. (2017b). Crowdsourcing: a new tool for policy-making? Policy Sciences Journal, 50(4):629-647
Taş, R., & Tanrıöver, Ö. Ö. (2020). A systematic review of challenges and opportunities of blockchain for E-voting. Symmetry, 12(8):1328.
Trump, B. D., Wells, E., Trump, J., & Linkov, I. (2018). Cryptocurrency: Governance for what was meant to be ungovernable. Environment Systems and Decisions, 38(3):426-430.
US Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law (2020). Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets. Majority Staff Report and Recommendations.
Over the past decade, the concept of “Smart City” with an emphasis on economic development, use of ICT and provision of engineering solutions has skyrocketed [1-5]. Amidst the increased competition among cities for businesses and talent, regardless of city-size, state of development, or socio-cultural context, local and national governments worldwide have launched Smart City initiatives. These initiatives often are driven by a focus on smart infrastructure provision through the use of connected devices and sensors for data collection, transmission through the internet, and the use of data mining and artificial intelligence to allow for better decision making and interaction among the devices in domains such as transportation, electricity distribution, health, and community development [6-10].
Scholars have argued that this strong emphasis on connectivity as the main source of growth in smart cities is shifting the focus away from traditional environmental concerns of the predecessor “sustainable city” concept towards more focus on infrastructure and use of information to increase economic efficiency, raising concerns over neglecting social and environmental issues [11-13].
A key consideration should be the understanding of the impact of rapid adoption of various digital technologies under the smart city umbrella on the society as a whole and finding ways to address their risks and unintended consequences, which can cause safety, liability, privacy, security, environmental, discrimination, and social inclusion concerns among others [14-20]. Moreover, with the global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, smart cities and digitalisation are seen as a means to increase emergency preparedness and emergency responses to the virus, which has resulted in the more rapid adoption of digitalisation and further highlights the importance of the study of the issues at hand [21-23]. Since the onset of this health crisis and its socio-economic consequences have made it clear that its impact will not fade any time soon, it is a serious possibility that COVID-19 and its successors will have a lasting impact on our society and daily operations, and these will be intimately and permanently interwoven with digitisation and smart governance.
What are the long-term effects of the rapid and extensive adoption of digitisation in smart cities? Whereas a previous Special Issue in Technological Forecasting and Social Change published in May 2019 ‘Understanding Smart Cities: Innovation ecosystems, technological advancements, and societal challenges’ appeared before the outbreak of the epidemic and highlighted issues such as the contribution smart technologies could make to sustainable urban development, boosting local innovation climates and accommodating active urbanite citizenship, the air of the times anno 2022 appears to have changed significantly.
Globally both the application of and scepticism (if not outright fear among some) towards smart technologies digesting massive amounts of data to guide, regulate, and move people in directions desired by public authorities and private sector giants have increased. What have the experiences so far been with various relevant technologies deployed? How can and should various relevant technologies be trusted and used responsibly? What policies, regulations, legislation, standards, certificates, and auditing mechanisms can and should be developed to benefit from smart city developments while protecting the citizens and negating legitimate concerns over risks and unintended consequences of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, internet of things, platforms, virtual reality, augmented reality, blockchains, 3D printing and smart health solutions to name but a few? How has COVID-19 changed plans for the adoption and long-term rolling out of these technologies? How concerned should we be about the ‘dark sides’ of smart cities when it comes to the behavioural opportunities urbanites are left within the face of large organisations armed with high-power technologies? Do they become smart citizens, or are they outsmarted by forces beyond their control? Can we distinguish between different societal groups in the way they are able to participate or excluded from using smart technologies?
In this workshop and limited special section articles, building on the previous TFSC special issue on Smart Cities in 2019, we will examine broader impacts of smart cities post COVID-19. We will explore issues such as risks and unintended consequences, stakeholder impacts, changes to spatial planning because of COVID-19, as well as the dark side of smart cities, which can stem from the increasing power of tech giants and their impact on urban governance, surveillance capitalism, and differentiated participation or exclusion of various societal groups in smart cities and their inclusiveness). In this Special Collection, we invite scholars to contribute articles that examine the long-term impact of digitisation on smart city governance in the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak and explore the practical and normative aspects that local and national governments should address when dealing with it, as well as exploring the dark side of the smart cities. Key issues to be covered in the workshop include:
• The broader risks and impacts of rapid adoption of emerging and/or disruptive technologies in smart cities, such as critical examination of the hypes, realities and impacts of the adoption of AI and Big Data on civil liberties and inclusiveness.
• The opportunities and challenges underlying smart city development and the role of the different levels of the government and broader epistemic community in adopting various technologies as part of smart cities (e.g. through knowledge transfer, policy mobility and learning).
• The impact of digitisation and Smart City development on various aspects of inclusive urban development and challenges governments face when ensuring access to digital technologies among vulnerable and uninitiated groups
• The increased role of tech companies in Smart city development and the consequences of their increased influence over policy and regulatory development
• The existence of various business models for governing smart city development and their relative impact on the inclusiveness of public governance and services in terms of democracy, equity and diversity
• The appropriateness of different regulatory and governance approaches to address the risks of various technologies deployed in smart city initiatives
• The role of emerging tools and initiatives in the governance of smart cities and their impact on aspects of broad societal inclusion (living labs, digital tools, regulatory sandboxes, integrated development plans)
• The role of policy design and handling of capability and capacity challenges in ensuring the quality and sustainability of smart city initiatives
It is these questions that the workshop and a collection of articles in the special section of Technological Forecasting and Social Change aims to address. Araz Taeihagh (Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and Centre for Trusted Internet and Community, National University of Singapore) and Martin de Jong (Rotterdam School of Management and Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam) invite their peers worldwide to contribute high-quality articles on these pertinent topics for the workshop and selection of a limited number of articles for the special section of TFSC.
Araz Taeihagh
Martin de Jong
Guest Editors
Over the past decade, amidst the acceleration of competition among cities for businesses and talent, which has resulted in a focus on economics and provision of engineering solutions, the concept of “Smart Cities” has emerged, in which the emphasis is on the use of innovative information and communication technology to serve the needs of people (De Jong et al. 2015, Trindade et al. 2017; Lim and Taeihagh 2019). The push for “Smart Cities” is driven by the development of smart infrastructure in the cities thought the use of connected sensors and devices that can collect, store, and transmit data through the internet, which allows different devices to interact and synchronize their actions in different domains, such as electricity distribution (smart grid), transportation (smart mobility), and community developments (Höjer and Wangel 2015, Suziki 2017). Due to its emphasis on connectivity as the main source of growth, the ‘smart city’ tends to shift attention away from environmental considerations and more towards infrastructure and information use (Lim and Taeihagh 2018). However, scholars argue that a city can only be smart if technological solutions are utilized in a holistic fashion addressing social and environmental sustainability issues and not just focusing on economic efficiency (Lim and Taeihagh 2018, 2019; Yigitcanlar et al. 2019).
One key aspect is to establish governance frameworks for technologies (e.g., autonomous vehicles, smart health solutions, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and robotics, 3D printing, sharing economy, blockchain, virtual reality, and augmented reality) that would guide the development of these Smart Cities. In this Special Issue, we are especially interested in articles that explore governance challenges of technologies that are being adopted in smart cities and solutions to them. Key issues to be covered in the Special Issue include:
• The new risks, uncertainties and unintended consequences of the adoption of emerging and/or disruptive technologies (e.g., autonomous vehicles, smart health solutions, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and robotics, 3D printing, sharing economy, blockchain, virtual reality and augmented reality) in Smart City developments to our social, economic, environmental, and political systems;
• The opportunities and challenges for the governance of technologies that can be adopted in smart cities and smart city developments as a whole;
• The diverse types of regulatory and governance responses to address the risks posed by novel technologies and the Smart City developments;
• The impacts of these rapid technological adoptions and smart city developments on stakeholders and society as a whole;
• The pros and cons of the heavy involvements of the private sector (particularly tech companies) in these smart city developments;
• The consequences of these developments for concepts such as inequality, discrimination, bias, accountability, transparency, responsibility, and liability;
• And finally, how the hype around smart cities matches the reality of smart city developments now and in the coming decades.
It is these and similar questions which a new Special Issue of Sustainability is aiming to address. Araz Taeihagh (Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore) and Martin de Jong (Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam) invite their peers around the world to contribute high-quality articles on these pertinent topics.
Prof. Araz Taeihagh
Prof. Martin de Jong
Guest Editors
Keywords
• Smart City
• Governance
• Technology
• Governance of technology
• Built environment
• Low carbon innovation
• Infrastructure systems
• Intelligent systems
• Internet of Things
• Autonomous systems
• Artificial Intelligence
Special Issue on “Governance of Technology in Smart Cities”
Deadline for manuscript submissions extended to:
30 September 2021.
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/special_issues/Governance_of_Technology_in_Smart_Cities
Convenors: Gregory Trencher, Araz Taeihagh, Andrew Chapman, Tohoku University, National University of Singapore, and International Institute for Carbon Neutral Energy
As the energy transition to a post-carbon society gathers pace, renewable energy, batteries, and battery electric vehicles are rapidly diffusing while improving considerably in cost and performance. Thus, for many, hydrogen has slipped from the field of attention. Yet hydrogen and fuel-cells can play (and are already playing) an important role in accelerating the electrification and decarbonisation of transport, industry, and households. This is especially so for long-range or heavy-duty vehicles, long-term and long-distance energy storage, and difficult to decarbonise sectors like steel, chemicals, and heat production.
With hydrogen and fuel-cell technologies rapidly developing and diffusing around the world, it is time to take stock of this situation and consider:
• What governance strategies are being used to accelerate the production and diffusion of hydrogen and fuel-cell technologies?
• How are countries or regions using hydrogen and fuel-cells to accelerate the decarbonisation of transport (e.g. road and maritime) in particular, but also industry and households?
• How are countries or regions using hydrogen and fuel-cells to support the upscaling of renewable energies?
• What trends and planning insights can help us to understand how hydrogen and fuel-cells can help accelerate the transition to a post-carbon world?
The Call for Papers is open to all disciplines, approaches and perspectives and we welcome theoretical and empirical papers using diverse qualitative and quantitative methods and approaches to the topics listed above as well as upon other relevant issues related to the subject.
We invite colleagues to submit your manuscript to the journal no later than August 31, 2021. More info at https://www.mdpi.com/si/45546
Keywords: Hydrogen, Fuel cells, Policy, Governance, Diffusion, Infrastructure, Vehicles, Decarbonization, Energy storage and transmission, Energy Vector
on Public Policy (ICPP4)
June 26-28, 2019 – Montreal, Canada
CALL FOR PAPERS – ICPP Panel on Governance of AI and the Special Issue on Governance of AI and Robotics
T13P04 - Governing Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems
http://www.ippapublicpolicy.org/conference/icpp4-montreal-2019/panel-list/10/panel/governing-artificial-intelligence-and-autonomous-systems/860
Panel Chair and Special Issue Editor: Araz Taeihagh, LKYSPP NUS
Abstract submission deadline: 30 January 2019
Developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Autonomous Systems (AS) offer various benefits that will revolutionise all aspects of society, ranging from search algorithms for online advertising (Goodfellow et al. 2016), signal processing (Karaboga et al. 2014), credit scoring (Tsai & Wu 2008; Brown & Mues 2012), medical diagnosis (Russell & Norvig 2016; Amato et al. 2013), autonomous vehicles (Fagnant & Kockelman 2015; Milakis et al. 2017; Taeihagh & Lim 2018), robotic medical assistants (Stahl and Coeckelbergh 2016) to autonomous weapon systems in warfare (Krishnan 2016). The rapid adoption of these technologies threaten to outpace the regulatory responses of governments around the world, which must grapple with the increasing magnitude and speed of these transformations.
The societal benefits of AI and AS have been widely acknowledged (Buchanan 2005; Taeihagh & Lim 2018; Ramchurn et al. 2012), but these technologies introduce risks and unintended consequences. New risks include and are not limited to unemployment (Acemoglu & Restrepo 2018; Frey & Osborne 2017; Peters 2017; Osoba & Welser IV 2017), safety risks (Taeihagh & Lim 2018; Kalra & Paddock 2016), privacy risks (Russell et al. 2015; Lim & Taeihagh 2018; Litman 2017), liability risks (Marchant & Lindor 2012; Čerka et al. 2015; Taeihagh & Lim 2018) and inequality (Makridakis 2017; Acemoglu & Restrepo 2018), which require appropriate governance mechanisms to be mitigated. Traditional policy instruments may be ineffective due to insufficient information on industry developments, technological and regulatory uncertainties, coordination challenges between multiple regulatory bodies (Guihot et al. 2017), and the opacity of the underlying technology (Scherer 2016), which necessitate the use of more nuanced approaches to govern AI and AS.
Many studies have highlighted the urgency for and the challenges of governing AI and AS (Arkin 2009; Simshaw et al. 2015; Guihot et al. 2017; Scherer 2016; Krishnan 2016; Taeihagh & Lim 2018; Lim & Taeihagh 2018), which need to be addressed by answering the following key research questions:
• What are the types of unintended consequences and risks that can arise from the adoption of AI and AS in different domains (e.g. ICT, transport, energy, public sector, healthcare, water management etc.) and how can they be effectively managed and governed?
• How can AI and AS be responsibly deployed by public administrators?
• What are the implications of AI and AS on incumbent industries and how can the relationship between these technologies and incumbent industries be reconciled?
• Theoretical, conceptual and empirical approaches to understand new and unconventional regulatory approaches, governance strategies, institutions and discourses to govern risks arising from AI and AS.
• What types of standards or guidelines have been developed in industry and governments to manage the risks arising from AI and AS?
• How are risks arising from AI and AS allocated among different stakeholders vertically through the value chain (manufacturers, third-party service providers, consumers) and horizontally across different domains (transport, healthcare, financial sector, public agencies, ICT, education etc.)?
• Single and comparative case studies of governance responses across different countries, regions and domains to address the risks arising from AI and AS.
ICPP 2019 Abstract submission deadline - 30 January 2019
T02P14 - IT-Mediated Platforms and the Public Sector: Applications of Sharing Economy, Blockchains and Crowdsourcing
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Panel Chair: Araz Taeihagh, NUS
Abstract submission deadline: 30 January 2019
Platforms significantly increase the ease of interactions and transactions in society. In the public sector, platforms are a way to improve public service delivery and solve increasingly “wicked” problems that characterize societies today (Head 2008; Hautamäki & Oksanen 2018; Janssen & Estevez 2013; Layne & Lee 2001; Bertot et al. 2010). Aided with information technology, public agencies can derive insights from a critical mass of citizens through platforms and improve citizen participation, transparency, policy design, and political legitimacy (Prpić et al. 2015; Taeihagh 2017; Voorberg et al. 2015; Bason 2010; Needham 2008; Christensen et al. 2015).
Platforms will transform public sector innovation, but how they are implemented and managed can introduce various risks. Platforms can diminish accountability, reduce job security for individuals, widen the digital divide and inequality, undermine privacy, and can be manipulated by crowds (Taeihagh 2017b; Loukis et al. 2017; Hautamäki & Oksanen 2018). Fragmentation among multiple platforms and the difficulty of attracting sufficient of citizen participation may also undermine platforms’ effectiveness (Hautamäki & Oksanen 2018; Janssen & Estevez 2013). Furthermore, countries without strong governance mechanisms and property rights to attract the required capital investments may face challenges in building platforms (Taeihagh 2017b). Currently, studies have yet to evaluate the extent to which platforms improve public service outcomes (Voorberg et al. 2015).
More recently, governments have experimented with blockchain-enabled platforms in areas such as e-voting, digital identity and storing public records (Cheng et al. 2017; Swan 2015; Wolfond 2017; Hou 2017). Blockchain's distributed, open and immutable nature offers many benefits for governments, including greater transparency, reduced corruption, greater efficiency and increased citizen participation (Ølnes et al. 2017). However, governments need to mitigate blockchain’s emerging risks such as security vulnerabilities, privacy concerns, and conflicts resulting from governance challenges (Li et al. 2017; Trump et al. 2018; Mattila & Seppälä 2018). Also, more research into the organisational changes in the public sector to accommodate blockchain-enabled applications and platforms is required (Ølnes et al. 2017).
This panel welcomes papers that explore IT-mediated platforms’ implications for the public sector. Key research questions to be addressed are:
• Theoretical, conceptual or empirical studies that evaluate the effects of IT-mediated platforms on public service delivery and analyse how these platform activities affect the perceived political legitimacy of governments.
• Examining the different types of challenges and risks that arise from adoption/implementation of IT-mediated platforms for public service delivery and the governance strategies to address these risks.
• Analysis of the roles of different actors in influencing policy outcomes through participation in platforms and at different stages of policy making.
• Theoretical and conceptual analysis of how IT-mediated platforms contribute to policy learning to improve public service delivery.
• Examining the different types of platform governance structures in blockchain, their risks and unintended consequences (e.g. coordination challenges), and the organisational, administrative and institutional changes in the public sector to accommodate blockchain-enabled platforms.
• Single and comparative case studies across different countries, sectors and types of IT-mediated platforms (e.g. blockchain, sharing economy, crowdsourcing
Abstract submission deadline (up to 500 words) 30 January 2019
Singapore, 1 February 2019
On behalf of the organizing committee, we are pleased to announce that the call for abstracts for the Third Annual Meeting of the Singapore-based Public Policy Network has been extended to December 1, 2018. Based on the model of similar successful public policy networks around the world, the Singapore PPN provides a venue for faculty at Singapore’s post-secondary institutions interested in topics of public policy or comparative politics to present their work and engage in discussions with colleagues from around the region.
The 2019 workshop will be held on February 1, 2019 at the School of Social Sciences (SOSS) at Singapore Management University (SMU).
Although based in Singapore, the workshop is open to papers on all topics within the policy sciences and also more broadly to comparative politics and is not restricted to only those directly related to Singapore. Proposals for papers may deal with any issue of interest to scholars looking at local, national and international events in the region and elsewhere, or with theoretical, conceptual or methodological subjects related generally to policy studies.
Abstracts of up to 300 words, with paper title and author’s affiliation and contact details should be submitted via email to:
[email protected]
Please note that submissions now close on Dec 1, 2018. (Deadline extended)
Participants to the workshop are responsible for their travel to the event venue.
More information on the PPN is available on its website at:
http://www.publicpolicynet.com
We hope you will join us for a stimulating set of presentations in February, 2019.
Ishani Mukherjee, SMU
Araz Taeihagh, NUS
Michael Howlett, SFU
Meng-Hsuan Chou, NTU
PPN-Singapore Organizing Committee
_____________________________________
Key dates
September 15, 2018 Call for papers opens
December 1, 2018 Call for papers closes
December 15, 2018 Announcement of accepted papers
January 15, 2019: Registration opens
February 1, 2019: PPPN-Singapore 2019
Research Workshop on (Re) Imagining Policy Tools: New Directions in Theory and Practice
Yonsei University Seoul
March 15-16, 2019
Convenors:
M Ramesh and Araz Taeihagh, National University of Singapore,
Michael Howlett, Simon Fraser University, Canada,
M. Jae Moon, Yonsei University, Korea
The recent proliferation of interest in policy design years has reignited interest in the analysis of policy tools. Not only are new tools and new tool hybrids such as nudging and co-production being (re)discovered and new areas of application of old tools being found, such as crowd-sourcing and co-design, but older tools are also being used in new contexts, such as advisory commissions and information provision. It is time to survey and compare these developments and (re)contextualize them within the existing literature on substantive and procedural policy instruments and policy design.
The workshop will address and provide information on topics including:
1. The extent of “newness” of policy tools like nudges and crowd-sourcing vis a vis more traditional tools like information provision and public participation;
2. The nature and uses of “procedural tools” in general and their role in contemporary policy designs;
3. Issues around “policy mixes”, including those related their nature as well as issues concerning their evolution and processes such as sequencing, layering, stretching and patching;
4. “Tool calibrations” in all their various dimensions, including their design implications and how they affect policy change;
5. The nature of the “mechanisms” that tools activate in order to affect target behaviour: that is, better understanding why tools actually 'work' and why they are complied with;
6. Empirical evidence on administrator, public and political behaviour around choices of policy tools;
7. The nature of tool’ “volatility” or the likelihood and ease with which a tool or mix can be gamed/violated by targets or implementors and its design implications;
8. The relationship between tools and “platforms”: that is, specific kinds of ‘meta-tools’ which are open-ended and multi-functional and provide the foundation for the use of other more directed tools.
Proposals from all disciplines, approaches and perspectives are welcome, so long as they shed new light on critical aspects of policy tools. Novelty, creativity, and rigour will be the main criteria for selecting proposals. High quality papers will be selected for publication as a special issue in an international journal, to be identified after proposals have been reviewed.
A limited number of travel grants to cover the cost of economy-class travel and accommodation will be provided.
Please send proposals (500 words) along with authors’ names, institutional affiliations, Email, and list of relevant publications to IlJoo Park at [email protected] no later than November 30, 2018.
The Governance of Emerging Disruptive Technologies
Convenors: Araz Taeihagh, Michael Howlett, M Ramesh, National University of Singapore and Simon Fraser University, Canada
Recent emerging technologies -- such as autonomous vehicles, autonomous weapon systems, blockchain technology, ridesharing, the Internet of Things – have triggered changes that are threatening existing markets, social and political orders. The heightened pace of these emerging technological innovations poses serious challenges to governments, which must cope with the disruptive speed and scope of the transformations occurring in many areas of social life.
While these new technologies offer opportunities for improvements to economic efficiency and quality of life, they also generate many unexpected consequences and pose new forms of risks. Government responses to emerging/disruptive technologies must consider citizen’s safety, privacy, and security as well as protection of their livelihood and health. But regulating and governing these technologies is challenging due to the high level of technological and economic uncertainty that surrounds them and their deployment. This situation is aggravated in most instances as the beneficiaries of these technologies – the investors, producers and users – do not bear the costs of their risks, transferring them instead to the society at large or to governments. And this situation is made even more difficult as many traditional policy tools – such as regulations, taxes, and subsidies – may not be as effective in new areas as in more established sectors because their use requires more information and stability than is often available to governments as new technologies and business models proliferate.
To enhance the benefits from these novel technologies while minimizing the adverse risks they pose, governments around the world need to better understand the scope and depth of the risks posed and design and establish regulatory and governance structures which effectively deal with these challenges. The special issue addresses these and other relevant aspects of governing emerging disruptive technologies including policy design strategies for facilitating positive socio-technical transitions and policy capacity building to address the challenges these technologies bring.
We are interested in papers with wide implications and impact on theories of regulation, governance and public policy. We are interested not only in problem-focused papers but also papers that deal with the public/governmental/regulation and governance responses to these challenges. Key issues to be covered in the issue include:
• Detailed studies of the risks, uncertainties and unintended consequences new technologies pose to economies and societies;
• Comparative and case study examination of the diverse types of governance responses taken to date to address the risks posed by these technologies;
• Theoretically informed empirical studies of the new regulatory strategies, institutions and discourses emerging as a response to new technologies around the globe and their fit with current orthodoxies of regulatory governance;
• Analysis of the (in)efficacy of traditional approaches to regulating and governing disruptive technologies and of the experiences of government with new approaches;
• Examinations and analysis of the relations between new technologies with incumbent industries in various domains and the role of actors such as technological and instrument constituencies in improving or exacerbating policy and regulatory designs and governance.
The Call for Papers is open to all disciplines, approaches and perspectives and we welcome theoretical and empirical papers using diverse qualitative and quantitative methods and approaches to the topics listed above as well as upon other relevant issues related to the subject.
Please send proposals (500 words) along with authors’ names, institutional affiliations, and list of relevant publications to Araz Taeihagh at [email protected] no later than September 30, 2018.
Around the world, much is expected of sustainable urbanization. The idea that comfortable life with all basic amenities and more, that also preserves
the environment is simply too alluring to refuse. Concepts such as sustainable cities, eco cities, low carbon cities, intelligent cities, smart cities,
resilient cities, knowledge cities and compact cities all respond to this hope, but they oer little more than fairly hazy perspectives. When it comes to urban mobility, this begs the question which modern and innovative options do smart sustainable cities oer for their integrated transport systems? How are they governed and organized, which solutions do they adopt in terms of their infrastructure and rolling stock? What promising technologies and information systems do they utilize now or are they proposing for their future and how do they deal with them? And finally, how truly sustainable, low carbon and ecologically friendly are they and will they be in the coming decades?
Author Benefits
Open Access: free for readers, with article processing charges (APC) paid by authors or their institutions.
High visibility: indexed by the Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science), Ei Compendex, Scopus and other databases.
Rapid publication: manuscripts are peer-reviewed and a first decision provided to authors approximately 29 days aer submission; acceptance to publication is undertaken in 6 days (median values for papers published in this journal in first half of 2017).
Dear Colleagues:
On behalf of the organising committee, we are pleased to announce the call for papers for the Second Annual Meeting of the Singapore-based Public Policy Network. Based on the model of the Australian and other similar successful public policy networks around the globe, the Singapore PPN provides a venue for faculty at Singapore's post-secondary institutions interested in public policy to present their work and engage in discussions with colleagues from around the region.
This year's conference will be held on Monday 29th of January at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the Bukit Timah campus of the National University of Singapore.
Although based in Singapore, the conference is open to papers, roundtable and panel proposals on all topics within the policy sciences and is not restricted to subjects related to Singapore.
Proposals for papers and panels may deal with any issue or topic of interest to policy scholars dealing with local, national and international events in the region and elsewhere, or with theoretical, conceptual or methodological subjects related to policy studies.
Abstracts of up to 300 words, with paper title and author's affiliation and contact details should be submitted via email to:
[email protected]
Please note submissions close Nov 30, 2017.
More information on the conference and how to register is available on the PPN website at:
http://www.publicpolicynet.com
Please join us for a stimulating set of presentations in January.
Araz Taeihagh, SMU
Michael Howlett, NUS
Meng-Hsuan Chou, NTU
PPN Conference Organizing Committee
_____________________________________
Key dates
October 1, 2017 Call for papers opens
November 30, 2017 Call for papers closes
December 15, 2017 Announcement of accepted papers
January 1, 2018: Conference registration opens
January 29, 2018: PPN conference