DPA Director Emmanuel Letouzé and Data Scientists Yasmine Hamdar and Enrique Bonilla attended the HumMingBird Project’s expert workshop titled, “Making the Most of Mobile Phone Data to Map Migration”, held on November 17th and 18th in Istanbul, Turkey. HumMingBird, whose motto is “enhanced migration measures from a multidimensional perspective,” is a Horizon 2020 research project that aims to improve the mapping and understanding of changing migration flows and seeks to analyze patterns, motivations and new geographies, and test new methods for forecasting emerging and future trends.
The first day of the conference was focused on various uses of mobile data to better understand and track migration, with Emmanuel Letouzé participating in the panel discussions titled, “Using mobile phone and remote sensing data to quantify weather-induced migration flows in Senegal” and “From low level data to migration theories.”
On the second day, the DPA team delivered a hands-on OPAL (Open Algorithms) workshop, which utilized a mock-up platform version of the OPAL model containing pre-computed synthetic mobile phone data, allowing participants to send queries in the platform and get real-time results.
The OPAL Project is a non-profit socio-technological innovation founded in 2017 by partners from the MIT Media Lab, Imperial College London, Orange, the World Economic Forum, and Data-Pop Alliance. The project is focused on developing a framework to securely leverage big data from private organizations based on technology and governance elements and thereby unlocking the potential of these types of data for the public good in a socially conscious and economically sustainable manner. To learn more about OPAL, email us at contact@opalproject.org or click the button below.
