Documento 1: Estado del arte y análisis comparativo de estrategias nacionales de Big Data Document 1: State of affairs and comparative analysis of national Big Data Strategies This study provides an analysis of the main characteristics of the existing government strategies related to Big Data, while clarifying the operational concept of Big Data used throughout this project. Documento 2: Buenas prácticas sobre … Read More
How to use Big Data? Leading experts’ roadmap to data-driven innovation projects
This position paper highlights overall takeaways and recommendations in the areas of privacy protection, responsible data governance, transparency and accountability for unleashing big data-driven innovation, including: (1) putting ‘privacy by design’ into action: privacy-preserving technical procedures and standards for data sharing and use; (2) focusing on responsibility in data use: establishing internal responsible data governance standards and (3) Keeping transparency, … Read More
Understanding Patterns of Human Mobility At Different Timescales
The main objective of this paper is to discuss whether and how the future of algorithms can be crafted such that their development and deployment—from their design to their use, including control, evaluation, auditing, governance—be based on and foster core democratic values such as accountability, transparency, participation, and collaboration. In doing so, we will focus on algorithms affecting public life … Read More
Algorithmic accountability – Applying the concept to different country contexts
Drawing from interviews with global experts, topic workshops and content research, this scoping paper aims to provide the reader with an understanding of algorithmic decision-making processes and the challenges they pose to our existing understanding of accountability across different contexts. It offers a map of existing technical and governance mechanisms for both identifying and addressing algorithmic harms and bias, as … Read More
Understanding the Relationship Between Short and Long Term Mobility
Populations are highly mobile, both in terms of long term movements of individuals relocating their place of residence as well as shorter term mobility such as commuting, seasonal travel and recreational trips. Working with call detail record data from Namibia and Senegal, we study population migration and its link to short term movement. We compare the short term mobility estimates extracted … Read More
Characterizing and Analyzing Urban Dynamics in Bogota (From the Paper Series: “Big Data to Address Global Development Challenges”)
Using open data and mobile phone records, we explore this link with a spatial regression model that analyzes the environmental and the social conditions to which each part of the city is exposed. We found that physical characteristics of the city connected to higher urban diversity better explain the emergence of crime than traditional socio-economic conditions and, together, physical characteristics … Read More
Big Data – Predicting and Preventing Climate-Related Shocks
Big Data as a socio-technological phenomenon has the potential to generate new insights on the functioning and interaction of human and natural ecosystems. In particular, Big Data can improve our understanding of how societies deal with shocks related to climate change, and inform policies and actions to foster adaptive mechanisms. However, such positive effects will not occur automatically and investments … Read More
Fair, Transparent and Accountable Algorithmic Decision-making Processes
The combination of increased availability of large amounts of fine-grained human behavioral data and advances in machine learning is presiding over a growing reliance on algorithms to address complex societal problems. Algorithmic decision-making processes might lead to more objective and thus potentially fairer decisions than those made by humans who may be influenced by greed, prejudice, fatigue, or hunger. However, … Read More
Socio-Physical Vulnerability to Flooding in Senegal
Each year thousands of people and millions of dollars in assets are affected by flooding in Senegal; over the next decade, the frequency of such extreme events is expected to increase. However, no publicly available digital flood maps, except for a few aerial photos or post – disaster assessments from UNOSAT, could be found for the country. This report tested … Read More
Mining Case Law to Improve Countries’ Accountability To Universal Periodic Review
The United Nations (UN) Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a process established by the Human Rights Council aiming to monitor and improve the human rights situation in each UN member state. In this study, we hypothesize that leveraging text mining and machine-learning algorithms is a viable strategy for monitoring gender discrimination in sentencing practices of Fiji’s judiciary system, which has … Read More