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The reliability of routine health data in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) is often constrained by reporting delays and incomplete coverage, necessitating the exploration of novel data sources and analytics. Geospatial Foundation…
Poverty maps are essential tools for governments and NGOs to track socioeconomic changes and adequately allocate infrastructure and services in places in need. Sensor and online crowd-sourced data combined with machine learning methods have…
Poverty mapping that displays spatial distribution of various poverty indices is most useful to policymakers and researchers when they are disaggregated into small geographic units, such as cities, municipalities or other administrative…
Poverty mapping is a powerful tool to study the geography of poverty. The choice of the spatial resolution is central as poverty measures defined at a coarser level may mask their heterogeneity at finer levels. We introduce a small area…
Identifying the most deprived regions of any country or city is key if policy makers are to design successful interventions. However, locating areas with the greatest need is often surprisingly challenging in developing countries. Due to…
This paper presents a computationally efficient model for optimizing real-time decisions in humanitarian aid delivery systems. Our formulation models a hierarchical system and is a mixed integer, probabilistic, non-linear and non-concave…
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations provide a blueprint of a better future by 'leaving no one behind', and, to achieve the SDGs by 2030, poor countries require immense volumes of development aid. In this paper, we…
In low- and middle-income countries, household surveys are the most reliable data source to examine health and demographic indicators at the subnational level, an exercise in small area estimation. Model-based unit-level models are favored…
Approximately half of the global population does not have access to the internet, even though digital connectivity can reduce poverty by revolutionizing economic development opportunities. Due to a lack of data, Mobile Network Operators and…
Post-disaster aid allocation in developing nations often suffers from systematic biases that disadvantage vulnerable regions, perpetuating historical inequities. This paper presents a fairness-aware artificial intelligence framework for…
The gamma distribution is a useful model for small area prediction of a skewed response variable. We study the use of the gamma distribution for small area prediction. We emphasize a model, called the gamma-gamma model, in which the area…
Small area estimation (SAE) entails estimating characteristics of interest for domains, often geographical areas, in which there may be few or no samples available. SAE has a long history and a wide variety of methods have been suggested,…
Model-based disease mapping remains a fundamental policy-informing tool in the fields of public health and disease surveillance. Hierarchical Bayesian models have emerged as the state-of-the-art approach for disease mapping since they are…
Poverty is a serious issue that harms humanity progression. The simplest solution is to use one-shirt-size policy to alleviate it. Nevertheless, each region has its unique issues, which require a unique solution to solve them. In the aspect…
Data from multiple prevalence surveys can provide information on common parameters of interest, which can therefore be estimated more precisely in a joint analysis than by separate analyses of the data from each survey. However, fitting a…
Malaria is an infectious disease affecting a large population across the world, and interventions need to be efficiently applied to reduce the burden of malaria. We develop a framework to help policy-makers decide how to allocate limited…
Many critical policy decisions, from strategic investments to the allocation of humanitarian aid, rely on data about the geographic distribution of wealth and poverty. Yet many poverty maps are out of date or exist only at very coarse…
Today, software-intensive systems are increasingly being developed in a globally distributed way. However, besides its benefit, global development also bears a set of risks and problems. One critical factor for successful project management…
Foundation models have made rapid advances in many domains including Earth observation, where Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) can help address global challenges such as climate change, agriculture, and disaster response. Previous work…
Every shot in basketball has an opportunity cost; one player's shot eliminates all potential opportunities from their teammates for that play. For this reason, player-shot efficiency should ultimately be considered relative to the lineup.…