In Flanders, an algorithm attempts to make school choice fairer

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In Flanders, an algorithm attempts to make school choice fairer

In Belgium, some schools don’t have enough capacity for all students who want to go there. In the Flemish part of the country, the government introduced an algorithm to assign places in schools, in the hope of giving every student the same chances. Belgium has a long tradition of free choice of school, but in […]

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In a quest to optimize welfare management, Denmark built a surveillance behemoth

Udbetaling Danmark was created in 2012 to streamline the payment of welfare benefits. Its fraud control algorithms can access the personal data of millions of citizens, not all of whom receive welfare payments. In the mid-2000s, Denmark’s government embarked on an ambitious reorganization of local administration. The number of municipalities was cut from 271 to […]

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A city is automating homes to reduce energy consumption

The city of Tartu installed automated systems in old housing blocks. Using nudges, sensors, and automated decision-making, it hopes to reduce energy consumption by two-thirds. SmartEnCity is a Europe-wide project that aims to transform cities to become carbon neutral. Tartu, a small campus town in Estonia and home to around 100,000 people, is one of […]

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How to unionize when your boss is an algorithm, and you’re self-employed

A group of Finnish couriers launched the Justice4Couriers campaign in 2018. Although they are technically self-employed, they must obey the whims of their platform’s algorithm. They are fighting back. “You like to cycle, so it must be a good job for you!” This is the response that Miran Hamidulla, a Finnish student of political history […]

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Between care and control: 200 years of health data in France

The French “Health Data Hub” will soon offer health data on all French citizens to AI startups that request it. It is the latest step in a project that began 200 years ago, aimed at centralizing health data. It is a project that has oscillated between care and control, but which has veered mostly towards […]

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Can AI mitigate the climate crisis? Not really.

Several institutions have claimed that AI will contribute to solving the climate crisis, but the evidence is scant. On the contrary, AI has a track record of helping emit more greenhouse gases. “Artificial Intelligence (AI) will change our lives by … contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation.” So began the White Paper on AI […]

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Broken Horizon: In Greece, research into automation fails to find applications

Greek researchers have led hundreds of research projects involving automation, but very few found their way into real-life uses. Opinions differ as to where the innovation pipeline is clogged. “Roborder” is a European research project. If its name sounds fancy or dystopian, wait for the tagline: “Autonomous swarms of heterogeneous robots for border surveillance”. Roborder […]

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In Italy, an appetite for face recognition in football stadiums

Right before the pandemic, the government and top sports authorities were planning a massive deployment of face recognition and sound surveillance technologies in all Italian football stadiums. The reason? To help fight racism. At the beginning of 2020, just as the whole world was grappling with increasing evidence of the discriminatory and racist outcomes of […]

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How Dutch activists got an invasive fraud detection algorithm banned

The Dutch government has been using SyRI, a secret algorithm, to detect possible social welfare fraud. Civil rights activists took the matter to court and managed to get public organizations to think about less repressive alternatives. In its fight against fraud, the Dutch government has been cross-referencing personal data about citizens in various databases since […]

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Pre-crime at the tax office: How Poland automated the fight against VAT fraud.

In their fight against fraud, Polish tax authorities use STIR, an algorithm that sifts through the data of millions of entrepreneurs. The government claims success, but dozens of companies have been hit, some say wrongly. “We have broken the group of VAT fraudsters”, “We have detected the artificial vegetable oil trading being a carousel fraud”, […]

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Automated verification of prescriptions helped crackdown on medical fraud

Portugal’s national health service introduced a centralized, automated system to verify medical prescriptions in 2016. One year later, it flagged 20 million euros of fraud. Which doctors give more medical prescriptions? Which ones prescribe more expensive medicines? How many doctors have more than 100 packages dispensed from the same pharmacy, on the same day? How […]

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Slovenian police acquire automated tools first, legalizes them later

The Slovenian police legalized its use of face recognition five years after it started to use it. Despite formal safeguards, no institution can restrain the Interior ministry. When Slovenian journalists or activists ask officials whether the police, the secret service, and the army are using any technological tools for mass surveillance, they are often reluctant […]

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In Spain, the VioGén algorithm attempts to forecast gender violence

As part of a program to curb feminicides, Spain built VioGén, an algorithm that assesses the risk faced by victims of gender violence. It remains a work in progress. In the early morning of 24 February 2018, Itziar P., a psychologist living in the Spanish city of Castellón, went to a police station to report […]

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Central authorities slow to react as Sweden’s cities embrace automation of welfare management

Trelleborg is Sweden’s front-runner in automating welfare distribution. An analysis of the system’s source code brought little transparency – but revealed that the personal data of hundreds was wrongly made public. Trelleborg is a city of 40,000 in Sweden’s far south. Three years ago, it became the first municipality to introduce fully automated decision-making in […]

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Swiss police automated crime predictions but have little to show for it

A review of 3 automated systems in use by the Swiss police and judiciary reveals serious issues. Real-world effects are impossible to assess due to a lack of transparency. Precobs has been used in Switzerland since 2013. The tool is sold by a German company that makes no mystery of its lineage with “Minority Report”, […]

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Brexit: How EU nationals navigate the automated checks of the “settled status” program

The British Home Office deployed a mobile app so that EU citizens can apply for permission to stay in the UK. Some are confident about the partly automated process; others live Kafkaesque experiences. Pablo Duro, a 28-year-old Spaniard, is a PhD student and member of staff at Manchester Metropolitan University. He started his research work […]

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