Artificial intelligence in local government services: Public perceptions from Australia and Hong Kong

Despite the exponential growth in the popularity of artificial intelligence (AI), our knowledge on the public perception of AI, especially in the context of local government services, is still limited. To bridge this gap, this study aims to provide empirical evidence and insights into public perceptions concerning the use of AI in local government services. Our methodological approach involves collecting data via an online survey from the residents of three major Australian cities—i.e., Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane—and Hong Kong (n = 850), and performing statistical analyses. We found that: (a) Ease of using AI is significantly and positively influenced by attitude towards AI; (b) Attitude towards AI significantly and positively influences perceived usefulness of AI in local government services; (c) AI is seen useful in resource management and to improve delivery of service, reduction of cost to provide urban-service, improvement of public safety, and monitoring the effectiveness of strategies to manage environmental crisis, and; (d) AI is more positively perceived by Australians in comparison to Hong Kongers, indicating the impact of contextual and cultural differences. The research findings inform local government authorities—e.g., urban policymakers, managers, and planners—on their AI policy, planning and implementation decisions.     

面向市民的电子政务公共服务评价:以长江三角洲为例

市民是电子政务服务的主要对象,如何为市民提供高效、优质、规范、透明和全方位的公共服务,是电子政务的本质和宗旨。本文选择了与民生有关的生育、婚姻、户籍、文化教育、社会保障、公用事业、医疗卫生、交通出行共8项指标,采用电子政务公共服务成熟度方法,对长江三角洲各主要城市面向市民的电子政务公共服务进行了评价。结果表明：目前长江三角洲城市电子政务已处于公共服务型阶段,但公共服务的广度和深度都有待拓展和提高。     

E-Government evaluation of delivering public services to citizens among cities in the Yangtze River Delta

Delivering public services to citizens via the Internet is the basic goal of E-government. Although websites are becoming essential elements of public e-services in local public administration in China, little is known about their efficiency and effectiveness. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the actual status of Web-enabled public services to citizens in municipal e-government implementation in the Yangtze River Delta. Eight categories of public services to citizens delivered through the Internet have been identified in the websites of the 14 local municipal governments. These public services include birth, marriage, domicile register, education, social security, public utility, health and traffic. Using the methodology of service maturity, this study evaluates the quality and usage of public e-services to citizens in the Yangtze River Delta. The results of this study show that almost all city governments are shifting from the traditional bureaucratic paradigm to the e-government public service paradigm, albeit with significant differences in public e-services level in these cities. At present, e-government public services to citizens in almost all the cities studied are mostly limited to on-line presentations of government information with a low degree of development of interaction and on-line transaction. The municipal governments and policymakers in the near future will have to strengthen the interactivity of their websites with citizens and improve the on-line transaction level in order to deliver citizen-centric public e-services.     

E-Government evaluation of delivering public services to citizens among cities in the Yangtze River Delta

Delivering public services to citizens via the Internet is the basic goal of E-government. Although websites are becoming essential elements of public e-services in local public administration in China, little is known about their efficiency and effectiveness. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the actual status of Web-enabled public services to citizens in municipal e-government implementation in the Yangtze River Delta. Eight categories of public services to citizens delivered through the Internet have been identified in the websites of the 14 local municipal governments. These public services include birth, marriage, domicile register, education, social security, public utility, health and traffic. Using the methodology of service maturity, this study evaluates the quality and usage of public e-services to citizens in the Yangtze River Delta. The results of this study show that almost all city governments are shifting from the traditional bureaucratic paradigm to the e-government public service paradigm, albeit with significant differences in public e-services level in these cities. At present, e-government public services to citizens in almost all the cities studied are mostly limited to on-line presentations of government information with a low degree of development of interaction and on-line transaction. The municipal governments and policymakers in the near future will have to strengthen the interactivity of their websites with citizens and improve the on-line transaction level in order to deliver citizen-centric public e-services.     

Staffing intelligence services: a survivor's guide

相似文献   

Bringing public services experience to technical services: Improvements in practice

Service to our users is the principal basis for a library's existence and as users' expectations increase, libraries must continually change their organization's policies, procedures and workflows to meet these expectations. In order to achieve this in the Acquisitions Monographs Unit at Texas A&M University (TAMU) Libraries, Library Administration utilized a public service librarian who has a strong user oriented background to provide a fresh look at established procedures. This librarian examined TAMU Libraries Acquisition Monographic policies, procedures and workflows from a user perspective and found some of them to be out of date. Then the librarian researched other businesses and libraries best practices which she then adopted and modified to fit the needs of her unit. These “New Best Practices” could be transferable to any library facing similar organizational needs.     

Artificial intelligence for the public sector: results of landscaping the use of AI in government across the European Union

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly being used by public sector organisations. Previous research highlighted that the use of AI technologies in government could improve policy making processes, public service delivery and the internal management of public administrations. In this article, we explore to which extent the use of AI in the public sector impacts these core governance functions. Findings from the review of a sample of 250 cases across the European Union, show that AI is used mainly to support improving public service delivery, followed by enhancing internal management and only in a limited number assist directly or indirectly policy decision-making. The analysis suggests that different types of AI technologies and applications are used in different governance functions, highlighting the need to further in-depth investigation to better understand the role and impact of use in what is being defined the governance “of, with and by AI”.     

Ethics of robotized public services: The role of robot design and its actions

Public administrations invest heavily in the development of ‘smart’ public services, including autonomous public service robots. Since public service robots are designed to operate unsupervised, robots must interact in an ethically acceptable way with citizens. Robots are often designed to provide a comfortable interaction with citizens, which can be achieved by making the robot's appearance and actions more human-like. This raises the question whether a human-like design affects the ethicalness evaluation of a robot's actions. In a laboratory experiment with eye-tracking (n₁ = 156) and a representative, online vignette experiment (n₂ = 1339), we find that a more human-like robot design draws more visual attention than a robot with a less human-like design. However, the robot's appearance does not affect the ethicalness evaluation of the robot's behavior. In contrast, our results show that it is not the more human-like appearance that influences evaluations of ethicalness, but a robot's ethical actions influence the extent to which it is perceived as human. We frame our findings in the scientific and practitioner debates on ethical rule-setting for (public) service robots.     

Digitization or equality: When government automation covers some,but not all citizens

This paper presents an empirical study of automation in government digital systems. Previous studies have found that automated systems are not suited to cover all citizens equally and may cause administrative burdens on excluded citizens. The case presented in this study is the automated system for awarding child benefits in Norway. Based on data from the national registry, most recipients are awarded the benefit automatically. However, some citizens are not covered by the automation and must apply manually. The theoretical framing of the study combines modern and classic views of how citizens access public services by combining theory from recent literature on administrative burdens and the older theory of access. The data analysis is done with process mining, an innovative method of sorting and understanding data. The findings support previous findings of how registry data and automated computer systems in government can create inequality in service quality. Furthermore, the findings also show that low-income citizens are disproportionally required to apply manually. The study addresses questions concerning why automated systems fail to cover all citizens and the potential challenges generated by this exclusion when governments rely on computer systems in delivering welfare programmes. These are important considerations, as government digitalisation is increasingly innovating with automated systems to deliver public services.     

Artificial intelligence behind the scenes: PubMed's Best Match algorithm

This article focuses on PubMed''s Best Match sorting algorithm, presenting a simplified explanation of how it operates and highlighting how artificial intelligence affects search results in ways that are not seen by users. We further discuss user search behaviors and the ethical implications of algorithms, specifically for health care practitioners. PubMed recently began using artificial intelligence to improve the sorting of search results using a Best Match option. In 2020, PubMed deployed this algorithm as the default search method, necessitating serious discussion around the ethics of this and similar algorithms, as users do not always know when an algorithm uses artificial intelligence, what artificial intelligence is, and how it may impact their everyday tasks. These implications resonate strongly in health care, in which the speed and relevancy of search results is crucial but does not negate the importance of a lack of bias in how those search results are selected or presented to the user. As a health care provider will not often venture past the first few results in search of a clinical decision, will Best Match help them find the answers they need more quickly? Or will the algorithm bias their results, leading to the potential suppression of more recent or relevant results?     

Proactivity in digital public services: A conceptual analysis

Public organizations are looking for new ways to use digital technologies to increase the efficiency of their internal processes and improve their interactions with clients, whether citizens or businesses. In response, scholars suggest that public organizations be proactive in digital public services such that the organizations approach their clients, rather than the other way around. In the most extreme form of proactivity, clients do not have to do anything to receive a public service. Although various examples of proactive public services are in use, how proactivity changes the conceptual understanding of digital public services remains unclear. Therefore, we derive the changes that proactivity causes in a conceptualization of digital public service by means of a conceptual analysis through the lens of a seminal theoretical work on proactivity. The results indicate that proactivity can ensure equal accessibility to a subset of public services, rely on more comprehensive integration of IT systems on the back end, and change how value is co-created in the service process. We formulate the changes as propositions that future work can investigate empirically and discuss proactive digital public services as a way to reduce clients' administrative burden. We contribute to theory by clarifying the conceptual changes in digital public services that proactivity invokes and call for joint research by scholars of public administration, information systems, and service management to relate the research streams of administrative burden and proactive digital public service.     

Benefits sought by citizens and channel attitudes for multichannel payment services: Evidence from Italy

Together with the digitalization of government services, a considerable amount of countries, and Italy in particular among them, are considering the introduction of several online and offline access point to its services in order to increase the penetration of provision systems not requiring an interaction at the PA office. This study, through a two-step empirical exercise run in Italy, intends to understand the benefits sought by citizens and the channel attitudes in order to understand whether and how this orientation by policy makers, with respect to payment services, may be effective. Thanks to a suited sampling, the study sets the basis for a segmentation of the citizens in terms of benefits sought and discusses the channel attitudes within each segment identified. By analyzing the characteristics of the segments, the study presents implications for policy makers and public servants and provides a conceptual background for grounding further research on multichannel service provision.     

The rise of the machines: Artificial intelligence meets scholarly content

Key points

• New forms of human/machine dialogue are emerging as robots understand vast amounts of content rather than simply indexing content as strings of characters.
• Recognizing strings of characters as entities (e.g. = names = authors) allows for meaningful associations between entities and reasoning over these relationships.
• Web‐scale adoption of the Semantic Web approach has been slow because it is too complex to implement and does not scale.
• User intent, discovered through conversational models of human–computer interaction, allows for a deeper understanding of exactly what researchers are looking for.
• Personal agents hold the promise of finding information that we will find useful before we have started to look for it.
• Publishers can use Academic Knowledge APIs to interpret academic user queries and find rich information from the Microsoft Academic Graph.

     

Electronic services in the public sector: A conceptual framework

Electronic services provided by governmental organizations, here referred to as public e-services, are frequently discussed in the e-government literature. There is, however, little consensus on the meaning of the concepts used to describe and discuss these e-services, and hence, the literature is full of synonymous terms and concepts. This paper is conceptual and presents efforts to understand e-services in the public sector domain by unpacking the public e-service concept into three dimensions; as being (1) a service, (2) electronic, and (3) public (as contrasted to being private). Based on a hermeneutic analysis, these dimensions are discussed in a number of combinations, illustrating that a multi-dimensional take on public e-services must be adopted in order to capture the complexity of governmentally supplied e-services and contribute to theory development, as well as practical utility.     

Mapping the challenges of Artificial Intelligence in the public sector: Evidence from public healthcare

The nascent adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the public sector is being assessed in contradictory ways. But while there is increasing speculation about both its dangers and its benefits, there is very little empirical research to substantiate them. This study aims at mapping the challenges in the adoption of AI in the public sector as perceived by key stakeholders. Drawing on the theoretical lens of framing, we analyse a case of adoption of the AI system IBM Watson in public healthcare in China, to map how three groups of stakeholders (government policy-makers, hospital managers/doctors, and Information Technology (IT) firm managers) perceive the challenges of AI adoption in the public sector. Findings show that different stakeholders have diverse, and sometimes contradictory, framings of the challenges. We contribute to research by providing an empirical basis to claims of AI challenges in the public sector, and to practice by providing four sets of guidelines for the governance of AI adoption in the public sector.     

Responding to information needs of the citizens through e-government portals and online services in India

Providing government information, services, products and transactions electronically has the potential benefit of accessibility for a wider audience, political and administrative transparency, and improved service delivery. By using e-government websites, citizens can conveniently access government information and services and gain greater opportunities to participate in democratic processes. The present study aims to evaluate National Portal of India, which provides single window access to 601 e-government portals and websites in India. A total of 1576 online services are provided by these portals responding to information needs of the citizens. Ranking of the state and union territory portals has been done based on the number of online services they provide. The paper also focuses on the digitization of documents, acts, rules and schemes of central and state government departments and their availability and accessibility through government portals.     

Responding to information needs of the citizens through e-government portals and online services in India

Providing government information, services, products and transactions electronically has the potential benefit of accessibility for a wider audience, political and administrative transparency, and improved service delivery. By using e-government websites, citizens can conveniently access government information and services and gain greater opportunities to participate in democratic processes. The present study aims to evaluate National Portal of India, which provides single window access to 601 e-government portals and websites in India. A total of 1576 online services are provided by these portals responding to information needs of the citizens. Ranking of the state and union territory portals has been done based on the number of online services they provide. The paper also focuses on the digitization of documents, acts, rules and schemes of central and state government departments and their availability and accessibility through government portals.