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...
A computer system is much more than just code: it consists of technology, its users and the processes that they follow. User experience (UX) covers all aspects of users’ interaction with products and services and how they are perceived, learnt and used. UX design prioritizes human values and relationships in the development of technology, to derive maximum value from our interactions with it. It...
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 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...
Our international development colleagues sometimes describe the Global Pulse tech work as “that weird stuff over there.” I suspect we do a little more than that, and that it’s worth explaining the tech every so often.
With that, these are the five big things going on with Global Pulse technology at the moment, and how to get involved in them:
Hunchworks
This is one of the most exciting projects...
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...
How do you find indicators for changes human well-being in “big data”? How do you know which “digital signals” are relevant enough to warrant further investigation? These questions are at the core of Global Pulse’s research.
The video below, from Global Pulse’s 8 November briefing to the UN General Assembly, provides a succinct overview of five research projects we completed with our partners (...