‘St Albans Unlocked’ is blazing a trail with huge potential benefits for the health and wellbeing of local communities. Linda Chandler and Amanda Derrick are working with an app called Soundscape, developed by Microsoft to help people with visual impairments find their way from A to B. Soundscape (an app which is free to download) describes for users the location and key facts about the road crossings, buildings and other landmarks around them as they move about. But it needs these to be marked accurately on Open Street Map, on which the app is built. Volunteers in St Albans are adding data to OSM to ‘unlock’ the locality for Soundscape users. These need not only be people with visual impairments. The app could support anyone who finds getting around challenging (eg those with mild dementia), as well as being enjoyed by local residents and tourists alike. For local authorities, a solution to the problem of maintaining information about local assets, that engages communities and supports vulnerable locals, has got to be worth exploring further.

Neighbourhoods made accessible with crowd sourced data and map app that speaks

Two men, one an American Ai engineer and game designer living in Seattle and an English documentary film maker living in Dover, England in conversation about AI, documentaries, chess, human stupidity and the future of the human race.

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If, as Joe believes, human beings are machines, why are we bothering to build artificial intelligence. If we succeed all we will have done is create new humans. And there is a well know, tried and tested way of making new humans which is more fun and much cheaper. Meanwhile it seems that the best definition of artificial intelligence that we have is anything that computers can't do right now. Whereas the definition of human stupidity is everything that humans can do right now. If this sounds harsh this is the week when Embassy staff of many nations are being withdrawn from Ukraine

Are human beings machines?

.… the machines are coming. I have seen the future and it does not look anything like the past or the present. We are as children now, innocents at play in the garden of Eden. Aurelia Pinchbeck - The Character of Thimbles - 2021 A podcast conversation about atrificial intelligence, documentaries, human stupidity, chess and the future of the human race. Joe Tibbetts is an Englishman, a documentary film-maker. He lives on the White Cliffs of Dover with a fine view of the past across the English Channel. For more than a decade he has played a daily game of chess against TChess Pro one of the most highly rated and popular chess engines in the world.  Tom Kerrigan is an American, a computer programmer, app and game designer. He lives in Seattle with a fine view of the future across Union Bay. In April 2011 he launched Stobor, a chess engine. Stobor is his name for TChess Pro, his creation.

Ai plus human stupidity? Time to worry?

Madeleine Starr, Director of Business and Innovation at Carers UK explains how digital can help the UK’s 8.8 million unpaid carers - including the 5 million who juggle care with work It is not even about developing anything new, she says: ‘what I really want to see in the 2020s is the technologies that we already have out there that work so well embedded in frontline practice.’ She means technologies like activity monitoring that provide a 24/7 service that, combined with care visits, can be targeted, because the carer can use a dashboard to understand what a person’s experience has been overnight - eg if they have been up several times and lost sleep - so that they can tailor their next visit. Starr goes on to describe how Carers UK supports individual carers but also local authorities, who have duties to support carers under the Care Act, but who have in fact been carring out declining numbers of carer assessments since. Carers UK have developed a standalone platform for local authorities and employer subscribers that packages a range of information products with its own-developed app ‘Jointly’ that helps families manage and share caring responsibilities.

‘Really tangible benefits’ of digital support for unpaid care are here, now

A wide range of professionals from the world of planning and development convened at December’s MapLondon event to explore how cities might be made better through more data sharing and wider use of digital maps. The podcast, captured against the background hubbub of the event, features contributions from a range of speakers at the event in this order: 00:12 Sowyma Parthasarathy, Director, Arup 00:33 Theo Blackwell, Chief Digital Officer for London 00:54 Lisa Taylor, Director, Coherent Cities 01:15 Rebecca Lee, Senior Architect, Pollard Thomas Edwards 03:04 Euan Mills, Head of Digital Planning, Connected Places Catapult 04:02 Miranda Sharp, Innovation Director, Ordnance Survey 05:09 Sowyma Parthasarathy, Director, Arup 06:52 Theo Blackwell, Chief Digital Officer for London 07:43 Euan Mills, Head of Digital Planning, Connected Places Catapult 08:24 Lucy Webb, Head of Regeneration, Croydon Council 09:10 Sowyma Parthasarathy, Director, Arup 09:48 Alicia Francis, Director, Newman Francis 11:10 Lucy Webb, Head of Regeneration, Croydon Council 12:21 Alicia Francis, Director, Newman Francis 12:41 Euan Mills, Head of Digital Planning, Connected Places Catapult 13:06 Lisa Taylor, Director, Coherent Cities 13:52 Rebecca Lee, Senior Architect, Pollard Thomas Edwards

MapLondon event December 19: speakers discuss data, digital mapping, planning, and citizen engagement

Asmat Hussain, Corporate Director of Governance tells Rachael Tiffen of CIFAS what happened next after the High Court’s overturn of its 2014 mayoral election The former mayor was found guilty of corrupt and illegal practices, including vote-rigging, by an election court in 2015, so the council needed to rebuild trust with the authorities, staff and local residents. Asmat became Tower Hamlets’ statutory monitoring officer after the fraud had happened, along with a whole new leadership team including chief executive William Buckley and a new financial director. With commissioners in charge following a PriceWaterhouseCoopers investigation, the council developed a delivery plan, putting in place measures to ensure members’ decisions were made within the rules; greater transparency and openness around mayoral decisions; relaunch of whilstleblowing procedures; staff training and a website where members of the public can report concerns about fraud. Tower Hamlets underwent a Peer Review conducted by the LGA in June 2019, which concluded among more detailed findings that they were now ‘a normal council’. At the time of this interview, in November 2019, the council was just starting preparations for the December 2019 general election.

Neighbourhoods made accessible with crowd sourced data and map app that speaks

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