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Mobile phones pervade our daily lives and play ever expanding roles in many contexts. Their ubiquitousness makes them pivotal in empowering disabled people. However, if no inclusive approaches are provided, it becomes a strong vehicle of…
This work presents an approach for combining household demographic and living standards survey questions with features derived from satellite imagery to predict the poverty rate of a region. Our approach utilizes visual features obtained…
Coronary artery disease, heart failure, angina pectoris and diabetes are among the leading causes of morbidity and mortality over the globe. Susceptibility to such disorders is compounded by changing lifestyles, poor dietary routines, aging…
In developing countries, building codes often are outdated or not enforced. As a result, a large portion of the housing stock is substandard and vulnerable to natural hazards and climate related events. Assessing housing quality is key to…
With increasing availability of smartphones with GPS capabilities, large-scale studies relating individual-level mobility patterns to a wide variety of patient-centered outcomes, from mood disorders to surgical recovery, are becoming a…
Loneliness does not only have emotional implications on a person but also on his/her well-being. The study of loneliness has been challenging and largely inconclusive in findings because of the several factors that might correlate to the…
Psychological support hotlines are an effective suicide prevention measure that typically relies on professionals using suicide risk assessment scales to predict individual risk scores. However, the accuracy of scale-based predictive…
According to the latest World Economic Forum report, about 70% of the African population depends on agriculture for their livelihood. This makes agriculture a critical sector within the African continent. Nonetheless, agricultural…
Studies have shown that children can be exposed to smart devices at a very early age. This has important implications on research in children-computer interaction, children online safety and early education. Many systems have been built…
Mobile device proficiency is increasingly important for everyday living, including to deliver healthcare services. Human-device interactions represent a potential in cognitive neurology and aging research. Although traditional pen-and-paper…
In this paper we present the first population-level, city-scale analysis of application usage on smartphones. Using deep packet inspection at the network operator level, we obtained a geo-tagged dataset with more than 6 million unique…
With exponential growth in the human population, it is vital to conserve natural resources without compromising on producing enough food to feed everyone. Doing so can improve people's livelihoods, health, and ecosystems for the present and…
More than one billion people live in slums around the world. In some developing countries, slum residents make up for more than half of the population and lack reliable sanitation services, clean water, electricity, other basic services.…
Public earthquake early warning systems have the potential to reduce individual risk by warning people of an incoming tremor but their development has been hampered by costly infrastructure. Furthermore, users' understanding of such a…
Machine learning algorithms, in conjunction with user data, hold the promise of revolutionizing the way we interact with our phones, and indeed their widespread adoption in the design of apps bear testimony to this promise. However,…
People vary in their ability to make accurate predictions about the future. Prior studies have shown that some individuals can predict the outcome of future events with consistently better accuracy. This leads to a natural question: what…
Despite their importance for urban planning, traffic forecasting, and the spread of biological and mobile viruses, our understanding of the basic laws governing human motion remains limited thanks to the lack of tools to monitor the time…
With the increasing usage of smartphones, there is a corresponding increase in the phone metadata generated by individuals using these devices. Managing the privacy of personal information on these devices can be a complex task. Recent…
Quantifying the improvement in human living standard, as well as the city growth in developing countries, is a challenging problem due to the lack of reliable economic data. Therefore, there is a fundamental need for alternate, largely…
We used a large database of 9 billion calls from 20 million mobile users to examine the relationships between aggregated time spent on the phone, personal network size, tie strength and the way in which users distributed their limited time…