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High quality census data are not always available in developing countries. Instead, mobile phone data are becoming a trending proxy to evaluate population density, activity and social characteristics. They offer additional advantages for…

Reliable data about the stock of physical capital and infrastructure in developing countries is typically very scarce. This is particular a problem for data at the subnational level where existing data is often outdated, not consistently…

In the globalized economic world, it has become important to understand the purpose behind infrastructural and construction initiatives occurring within developing regions of the earth. This is critical when the financing for such projects…

In many regions of the world, sparse data on key economic outcomes inhibits the development, targeting, and evaluation of public policy. We demonstrate how advancements in satellite imagery and machine learning can help ameliorate these…

Determining the poverty levels of various regions throughout the world is crucial in identifying interventions for poverty reduction initiatives and directing resources fairly. However, reliable data on global economic livelihoods is hard…

In many rural areas of low- and middle-income countries, weekly gatherings of buyers and sellers are the most tangible manifestation of the market economy. Knowing these markets' whereabouts and activity over time could provide insights in…

The digital divide restricting the access of people living in developing areas to the benefits of modern information and communications technologies has become a major challenge and research focus. To well understand and finally bridge the…

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…

Mobile sensing data has become a popular data source for geo-spatial analysis, however, mapping it accurately to other sources of information such as statistical data remains a challenge. Popular mapping approaches such as point allocation…

Detailed knowledge of the energy needs at relatively high spatial and temporal resolution is crucial for the electricity infrastructure planning of a region. However, such information is typically limited by the scarcity of data on human…

Governments spend billions of dollars subsidizing the adoption of different goods. However, it is difficult to gauge whether those goods are resold, or are valued by their ultimate recipients. This project studies a program to subsidize the…

Reliable statistical information is important to make political decisions on a sound basis and to help measure the impact of policies. Unfortunately, statistics offices in developing countries have scarce resources and statistical censuses…

In many developing nations, a lack of poverty data prevents critical humanitarian organizations from responding to large-scale crises. Currently, socioeconomic surveys are the only method implemented on a large scale for organizations and…

Nighttime lights satellite imagery has been used for decades as a uniform, global source of data for studying a wide range of socioeconomic factors. Recently, another more terrestrial source is producing data with similarly uniform global…

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…

Traditional sources of population data, such as censuses and surveys, are costly, infrequent, and often unavailable in crisis-affected regions. Mobile phone application data offer near real-time, high-resolution insights into population…

Internet access is essential for economic development and helping to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals, especially as even basic broadband can revolutionize available economic opportunities. Yet, more than one billion people still…

Surprisingly a number of Earth's waterways remain unmapped, with a significant number in low and middle income countries. Here we build a computer vision model (WaterNet) to learn the location of waterways in the United States, based on…

Do today's communication technologies hold potential to alleviate poverty? The mobile phone's accessibility and use allows us with an unprecedented volume of data on social interactions, mobility and more. Can this data help us better…

Internet connectivity in schools is critical to provide students with the digital literary skills necessary to compete in modern economies. In order for governments to effectively implement digital infrastructure development in schools,…