This week Global Pulse’s research team will be geeking out at the 2014 Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference (otherwise known as "KDD"), a conference which brings together thousands of researchers and practitioners from data science, large-scale data analytics, and big data. This year’s conference is highly relevantly themed “Data Mining for Social Good,” with dedicated workshops and panel discussions. (Follow along with us on Twitter, at @UNGPDataScience.)
Over four days of the conference, there will be presentations of over 200 research papers, from all over the world. We waded through and picked a few of the studies we think have real-world applicability in sustainable development and humanitarian contexts, and asked the researchers to spend five minutes telling us in their own words, why their research matters.
This week we'll be posting "Research Bites" about several of the papers in the Pulse Lab Diaries section of our website, including:
- Inferring User Demographics and Social Strategies in Mobile Social Networks
- A Real Time Decision Support System for Earthquake Crisis Management
- Prediction of Human Emergency Behavior and Mobility Following Large-Scale Disaster
- Targeting Direct Cash Transfers to the Extremely Poor
- Inferring Gas Consumption and Pollution Emission of Vehicles throughout a City
The researchers will be on hand to answer questions, so in the spirit of bridging the gap between theory and practice, we invite our UN, NGO and other global development practitioner colleagues to comment on each of the blogposts and get into dialogue with the scientists.
Image: The figure shows population mobility of the greater Tokyo area during the 2011 earthquake. Source: Xuan Song, Quanshi Zhang, Yoshihide Sekimoto and Ryosuke Shibasaki.
