Opportunities and Requirements for Leveraging Big Data for Official Statistics and the Sustainable Development Goals in Latin America

May 16 2016

Este documento se realizó en el marco de un proyecto apoyado por el Banco Mundial e implementado por Data-Pop Alliance en asociación con el Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística de Colombia – DANE. Data-Pop Alliance es una coalición sobre Big Data y el desarrollo creada conjuntamente por la Iniciativa Humanitaria de Harvard, el MIT Media Lab y el Instituto de … Read More

Book chapter – “The Evaluation of Complex Development Interventions in the Age of Big Data

Mar 07 2016

Recognizing that complexity calls for innovative, conceptual, and methodological solutions, this unique book offers practical guidance to policymakers, managers, and evaluation practitioners on how to design and implement complexity-responsive evaluations that can be undertaken in the real world of time, budget, data, and political constraints. Introductory chapters present comprehensive, non-technical overviews of the most common evaluation tools and methodologies, and … Read More

Applications and Implications of Big Data for Demo-Economic Analysis:The Case of Call-Detail Records

Jul 15 2016

This dissertation analyzes and discusses various applications and implications of BigData for demo-economic analysis, focusing on the analysis of cell-phone data collected by telecommunication operators for billing purposes, commonly referred to as call-detail records, or CDRs, which include the time and duration of calls, the location of the emitter and receiver, etc. This is done by placing the resulting opportunities … Read More

Big Data for Climate Change Resilience

Oct 16 2015

This paper (in progress) outlines the Data–Pop Alliance’s ongoing research on Big Data, climate change and environmental resilience. The paper dives deeply into the conceptualization of climate change resilience, both specific and general; addresses Big Data contributions to understanding the components of climate risk; and identifies gaps and challenges to Big Data applications to climate resilience decision-making. Finally, authors offer … Read More

Event Paper – “Big Data and Privacy: Understanding the Possibilities and Pitfalls of the Data Revolution in Germany

Nov 16 2015

As the first event paper in the digitising Europe’s series, this event paper captures the major key themes emerging from our events in Berlin in November 2015. The Berlin workshop and public forum focused on the possibilities and pitfalls
of using Big Data analytics for economic growth and public good. Bringing together German academic institutions, think tanks, businesses and other thought-leaders, … Read More

Beyond Data Literacy: Reinventing Community Engagement and Empowerment in the Age of Data

Sep 16 2015

This paper attempts to delineate the broad contours of “data literacy” through analysis of its history, definition, expectations, application, and promotion. The paper thus defines “data literacy” as “the desire and ability to constructively engage in society through and about data” and argues that promotion of “data literacy” should be via and for social inclusion.

Big Data for Climate Change and Disaster Resilience: Realising the Benefits for Developing Countries

Sep 16 2015

This report explores the opportunities, challenges and required steps for leveraging this new ecosystem of Big Data to monitor and detect hazards, mitigate their effects, and assist in relief efforts. Ultimately the goal is to build resilience so that vulnerable communities and countries as complex human ecosystems not only ‘bounce back’ but also learn to adapt to maintain equilibrium in … Read More

Moves on the Street: Classifying Crime Hotspots Using Aggregated Anonymized Data on People Dynamics

Sep 16 2015

This paper highlights the potential societal benefits derived from big data applications with a focus on citizen safety and crime prevention. Authors detail a case study tackling the problem of crime hotspot classification, that is, the classification of which areas in a city are more likely to witness crimes based on past data. In the proposed approach demographic information is … Read More

Group Privacy in the Age of Big Data

Oct 16 2015

This paper attempts to define what is a group and what is privacy in order to determine how a privacy right might attach to groups distinctly from the individual privacy rights of its members, and what might be the content of such a group privacy right. The challenge faced by group privacy is to enable the positive uses of Big … Read More

Big Data and Development: An Overview

Sep 15 2020

This paper describes the fundamental nature of Big Data as an ecosystem and how it engages with society. Although Big Data has promising applications to real-world problems, it is met with warnings and risks–the most severe being risk to individual privacy, identity and security. In response to these challenges and risks, the paper explores the future of Big Data and … Read More

White Paper: The Law, Politics and Ethics of Cell Phone Data Analytics

Apr 15 2015

This paper examines Call Detail Records (CDRs) and their expanding role in providing insight into human behavior, movements, and social interactions. As a result of their growing application, certain ethical and legal questions need to be addressed. The paper summarizes current legal frameworks, explores structural socio-political parameters and incentives structuring the sharing of CDRs, proposes guiding ethical principles and discusses … Read More

Quantifying the Data Deluge and the Data Drought

Apr 15 2015

This paper investigates how the world’s Big Data capacity can be understood in terms of the world’s storage capacity and the telecommunication capacity to access this storage (‘the cloud’). This paper follows the methodology of what has become the standard reference in estimating the world’s technological information capacity: Hilbert and López (2011).

Official Statistics, Big Data, and Human Development

Mar 15 2015

This paper aims to contribute to the ongoing and future debate about the relationships between Big Data, official statistics and development. This paper argues that Big Data needs to be seen as an entirely new ecosystem comprising new data, new tools and methods, and new actors motivated by their own incentives. The emergence of this new ecosystem provides both a … Read More

Big Data & SDGs Note for Global Sustainable Development Report

Feb 15 2015

This paper focuses on the intersection of Big Data and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the spectrum of ways and channels through which Big Data as an entirely new ecosystem could impact—contribute to or hamper—human progress as called for and measured by the SDGs. Applications of Big Data to SDGs have the potential to advocate for causes, shape incentives and … Read More

Eradicating Global Poverty: A Noble Goal, but How do We Measure It?

Jun 25 2013

All agree that eradicating absolute poverty should remain at the forefront of a new goal on poverty, but opinions differ as to what constitutes extreme poverty and how we should measure it. Proposals to broaden the definition of poverty include incorporating relative poverty, a poverty line high enough to reflect poverty in rich countries too, and a measure of multidimensional … Read More

AFD Paper – “CDRs & Poverty and Population Analysis – Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal”

Mar 16 2016

This paper considers Big Data’s potential to partly fill some key data gaps and complement or even replace official statistics. Data-Pop Alliance offers the specific case of Côte d’Ivoire, using Call Records (CDRs) from Orange in conjunction with two other datasets, the WorldPop dataset, which provides population data derived from satellite imagery, and the recently released 2013 Demographic and Health … Read More

Big Data and Mobility: Migration and Transportation

Dec 15 2015

This paper discusses the linkages between Big Data and mobility—specifically migration and transportation. Its main objective is to give its readers—World Bank staff, policymakers, researchers, development project managers and other professionals—an overview of the main features and parameters of this nexus, as well as provide examples and discuss key considerations—technical, ethical, institutional, etc.—for developing projects, programs and other activities in … Read More