In today’s world, where opinions are frequently taken as facts, and more often than not there is too much hype without substance, it is more important than ever to back new innovations with scientific evidence.
At Global Pulse, when we select our project portfolio, we choose either high-methodological impact or high-operational impact projects. For the former, we work with experts from Academia and with researchers from the private sector. New scientific methodologies are later developed into tools and applications for high-impact operations. Sometimes, our methodological work also helps set up a research agenda to guide and motivate researchers in the “data for development” community.
Research projects use multiple data sources such as satellite imagery, social media, financial transactions, mobile data or radio streaming; span across technical domains from network analysis to deep learning or to visual analytics; and support sustainable development, humanitarian action and human rights.
Global Pulse’s latest scientific articles
- Humanitarian applications of machine learning with remote-sensing data: review and case study in refugee settlement mapping. Quinn JA, et al, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences 2018 Sep 13;376(2128). pii: 20170363. doi:10.1098/rsta.2017.0363.
- Sequences of purchases in credit card data reveal lifestyles in urban populations.Di Clemente R et al, Nature Communications. 2018 Aug 20;9(1):3330. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-05690-8.
- The Effect of Extremist Violence on Hateful Speech Online. Olteanu A et al, In Proceedings International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Stanford, US, 2018 Jun arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.05704
- Identifying seasonal mobility profiles from anonymized and aggregated mobile phone data. Application in food security. Zufiria PJ, et al, PLoS One. 2018 Apr 26;13(4):e0195714. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0195714.
- Using big data for non-communicable disease surveillance. Balicer RD et al. Lancet Diabetes Endocrinol. 2017 Nov 13. pii: S2213-8587(17)30372-8. doi: 10.1016/S2213-8587(17)30372-8.
- Showing People Behind Data: Does Anthropomorphizing Visualizations Elicit More Empathy for Human Rights Data? Boy J, et al. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5462-5474.
- Nowcasting commodity prices using social media. Kim J et al, PeerJ Computer Science (2017). 3. E126. 10.7717/peerj-cs.126.
- Radio-browsing for developmental monitoring in Uganda. Menon R et al, 2017 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), New Orleans, LA, 2017, pp. 5795-5799.
Apply to Become a Data Fellow
In order to scale our collaboration with Academia, we are looking for data fellows to join our first cohort of UN Volunteers on Scientific Research on Data for Development and Humanitarian Response.
We are looking for candidates who are PhD students and Postdocs working in the fields of data science, artificial intelligence, data engineering, HCI, data visualization, computational social sciences, data privacy and ethics or any other relevant topic.
These remote volunteers will collaborate with Global Pulse on methodological projects at the intersection of the initiative’s project portfolio with their own skills and interests.
