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Globally, two billion people and more than half of the poorest adults do not use formal financial services. Consequently, there is increased emphasis on developing financial technology that can facilitate access to financial products for…

Personal electronic devices including smartphones give access to behavioural signals that can be used to learn about the characteristics and preferences of individuals. In this study, we explore the connection between demographic and…

Targeted advertising on online social platforms has become increasingly relevant in the political marketing toolkit. Monitoring political advertising is crucial to ensure accountability and transparency of democratic processes. Leveraging…

Communication-enabled devices routinely carried by individuals have become pervasive, opening unprecedented opportunities for collecting digital metadata about the mobility of large populations. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology…

Political advertising on social media has become a central element in election campaigns. However, granular information about political advertising on social media was previously unavailable, thus raising concerns regarding fairness,…

Economic policy research frequently examines population well-being, with a particular focus on the relationships between unequal living conditions, low educational attainment, and social exclusion. Sample surveys, such as EU-SILC, are…

The advent of WWW changed the way we can produce and access information. Recent studies showed that users tend to select information that is consistent with their system of beliefs, forming polarized groups of like-minded people around…

A National Agenda for Intelligent Infrastructure is not complete without explicit consideration of the needs of rural communities. While the American population has urbanized, the United States depends on rural communities for agriculture,…

Measuring socioeconomic deprivation of cities in an accurate and timely fashion has become a priority for governments around the world, as the massive urbanization process we are witnessing is causing high levels of inequalities which…

Measuring and forecasting migration patterns, and how they change over time, has important implications for understanding broader population trends, for designing policy effectively and for allocating resources. However, data on migration…

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have made them a popular information-seeking tool among end users. However, the statistical training methods for LLMs have raised concerns about their representation of under-represented…

We quantify Facebook's ability to build shadow profiles by tracking individuals across the web, irrespective of whether they are users of the social network. For a representative sample of US Internet users, we find that Facebook is able to…

Studies of human mobility increasingly rely on digital sensing, the large-scale recording of human activity facilitated by digital technologies. Questions of variability and population representativity, however, in patterns seen from these…

Crowdfunding has emerged as a widespread strategy for startups seeking financing, particularly through reward-based methods. However, understanding its economic impact at both micro and macro levels requires thorough analysis, often…

Urbanization represents a huge opportunity for computer applications enabling cities to be managed more efficiently while, at the same time, improving the life quality of their citizens. One of the potential application of this kind of…

Humanitarian actions require accurate information to efficiently delegate support operations. Such information can be maps of building footprints, building functions, and population densities. While the access to this information is…

This paper explores the relationship between the inner economical structure of communities and their population distribution through a rank-rank analysis of official data, along statistical physics ideas within two techniques. The data is…

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…

Being able to assess the impact of government-led investment onto socio-economic indicators in cities has long been an important target of urban planning. However, due to the lack of large-scale data with a fine spatio-temporal resolution,…

Knowledge of population distribution is critical for building infrastructure, distributing resources, and monitoring the progress of sustainable development goals. Although censuses can provide this information, they are typically conducted…