Related papers: Mapping the uncertainty of 19th century West Afric…

Intra-African conflicts during the collapse of the kingdom of Oyo from 1817 to 1836 resulted in the enslavement of an estimated 121,000 people who were then transported to coastal ports via complex trade networks and loaded onto slave ships…

Ancient and medieval harbours connected via navigable and terrestrial routes could be interpreted as elements of complex traffic networks. Based on evidence from three projects in Priority Programme 1630 (Fossa Carolina, Inland harbours in…

This chapter seeks to frame the elemental and invisible problems of AI and big data in the African context by examining digital sites and infrastructure through the lens of power and interests. It will present reflections on how these sites…

Multiple systems estimation is a key approach for quantifying hidden populations such as the number of victims of modern slavery. The UK Government published an estimate of 10,000 to 13,000 victims, constructed by the present author, as…

This paper is a contribution to interweaving two lines of research that have progressed in separate ways: network analyses of international trade and the literature on African trade and development. Gathering empirical data on African…

We investigate the classical active pure exploration problem in Markov Decision Processes, where the agent sequentially selects actions and, from the resulting system trajectory, aims at identifying the best policy as fast as possible. We…

Epidemic dynamics in a stochastic network of interacting epidemic centers is considered. The epidemic and migration processes are modelled by Markov's chains. Explicit formulas for probability distribution of the migration process are…

As machine learning and data science applications grow ever more prevalent, there is an increased focus on data sharing and open data initiatives, particularly in the context of the African continent. Many argue that data sharing can…

The steady growth of digitized historical information is continuously stimulating new different approaches to the fields of Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science. In this work, we use Natural Language Processing techniques to…

Predicting forced displacement is an important undertaking of many humanitarian aid agencies, which must anticipate flows in advance in order to provide vulnerable refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) with shelter, food, and…

Whether in search of better trade opportunities or escaping wars, humans have always been on the move. For almost a century, mathematical models of human mobility have been instrumental in the quantification of commuting patterns and…

In supervised learning, we fit a single statistical model to a given data set, assuming that the data is associated with a singular task, which yields well-tuned models for specific use, but does not adapt well to new contexts. By contrast,…

Migration patterns are complex and context-dependent, with the distances migrants travel varying greatly depending on socio-economic and demographic factors. While global migration studies often focus on Western countries, there is a…

Multiple systems estimation strategies have recently been applied to quantify hard-to-reach populations, particularly when estimating the number of victims of human trafficking and modern slavery. In such contexts, it is not uncommon to see…

We study the sequential decision-making problem of allocating a limited resource to agents that reveal their stochastic demands on arrival over a finite horizon. Our goal is to design fair allocation algorithms that exhaust the available…

Markov Population Models are a widespread formalism used to model the dynamics of complex systems, with applications in Systems Biology and many other fields. The associated Markov stochastic process in continuous time is often analyzed by…

This article presents how ship trajectories have been built from historical sources dealing with maritime trade in the 18th century. It first summarizes the method for building the routes, and qualifying the uncertainty level linked to each…

The quantification of modern slavery has received increased attention recently as organizations have come together to produce global estimates, where multiple systems estimation (MSE) is often used to this end. Echoing a long-standing…

We study a class of multi-stage stochastic programs, which incorporate modeling features from Markov decision processes (MDPs). This class includes structured MDPs with continuous action and state spaces. We extend policy graphs to include…

We explore a simple mathematical model of network computation, based on Markov chains. Similar models apply to a broad range of computational phenomena, arising in networks of computers, as well as in genetic, and neural nets, in social…