We are very pleased to announce the launch of our Guest Blog Series:
“Data Mining for Development: Methodological Innovations and Challenges”
The series will feature contributions from a diverse range of experts in academia, the private sector, civil society, and the development community. Each of them will touch on examples of visionary thinking and innovative approaches to data research, and...
The digital revolution of the first decade of this new century has brought many wonders, yet it has also has ushered in a bewildering array of unanticipated consequences. We now find ourselves in a volatile and hyperconnected world where risk has been globalized. Our tightly-coupled systems have become interdependent, creating feedback loops so complex that predictive analysis is of...
Global Pulse is predicated on the understanding that today “new data” is being generated as a by-product of people’s activities at a rate that is unprecedented in human history. That deluge of passively produced data may hold insights about how, for better or worse, people’s lives are impacted by shocks like volatility in food and fuel prices.
Part of Global Pulse’s approach is learning how to...
Last year, we launched a large-scale mobile phone based survey to ask people from five countries in different regions of the world how they are dealing with the effects of the global economic crisis. In June of this year we partnered with Visualizing.org to host “Giving Voice to the Vulnerable through Data and Design”: a challenge to visualize the voices of vulnerable populations in times of...
The purpose of Day Two of the RIVAF Conference (“Towards a Real-Time Understanding of Emerging Vulnerability“) was perhaps best described in Assistant Secretary-General for Planning and Policy Coordination Robert Orr’s address to the group. Global Pulse, he stated, is about both information and innovation.
First, Global Pulse is dedicated to developing better information streams that can inform...
On July 14th and 15th, Global Pulse hosted “Towards a Real-Time Understanding of Emerging Vulnerability,“ a conference for UN partners from 9 agencies and 8 countries to share research findings on how the world’s most vulnerable populations were affected by the economic crises in different sectors, and to explore whether (and how) we can do crisis impact assessments more rapidly in the future.
As...
The submission deadline is quickly approaching (July 25) for a data visualization challenge we are hosting with Visualizing.org, “Giving Voice to the Vulnerable through Data and Design,” and we are particularly excited to review the submissions. Everyone who submits a visualization that helps shed new light on the dataset will be making a huge contribution to the Global Pulse initiative, and here...
Global Pulse is looking for signals that could be used as proxy indicators for collective changes in human behaviors in response to the early impacts of crises. In addition to our hypothesis about mobile services as sensors, another potentially valuable type of data is that generated by information seeking behaviors - specifically, by what people search for online.
An individual search is a...
We are very excited to announce "Giving Voice to the Vulnerable Through Data and Design," a 6-week challenge with Visualizing.org, to visualize results from an SMS survey on how people are coping with the economic downturn in 5 countries.
Last year we worked with MobileActive.org to implement a mobile phone based survey gathering bottom-up information from everyday citizens in order to gain a...