Related papers: Predicting cell phone adoption metrics using satel…
Smartphones and other mobile devices are today pervasive across the globe. As an interesting side effect of the surge in mobile communications, mobile network operators can now easily collect a wealth of high-resolution data on the habits…
The United Nations Broadband Commission has committed the international community to accelerate universal broadband. However, the cost of meeting this objective, and the feasibility of doing so on a commercially viable basis, are not well…
Network capacity expansion is a critical challenge for telecom operators, requiring strategic placement of new cell sites to ensure optimal coverage and performance. Traditional approaches, such as manual drive tests and static…
Data volume grows explosively with the proliferation of powerful smartphones and innovative mobile applications. The ability to accurately and extensively monitor and analyze these data is necessary. Much concern in mobile data analysis is…
Building coverage statistics provide crucial insights into the urbanization, infrastructure, and poverty level of a region, facilitating efforts towards alleviating poverty, building sustainable cities, and allocating infrastructure…
High-resolution satellite-based crop yield mapping offers enormous promise for monitoring progress towards the SDGs. Across 15,000 villages in Rwanda we uncover areas that are on and off track to double productivity by 2030. This machine…
Background: While digital access has expanded rapidly in resource-constrained contexts, satisfaction with digital learning platforms varies significantly among students with seemingly equal connectivity. Traditional digital divide…
Many studies have predicted SocioEconomic Position (SEP) for aggregated spatial units such as villages using satellite data, but SEP prediction at the household level and other sources of imagery have not been yet explored. We assembled a…
High-resolution daytime satellite imagery has become a promising source to study economic activities. These images display detailed terrain over large areas and allow zooming into smaller neighborhoods. Existing methods, however, have…
Obtaining reliable data describing local poverty metrics at a granularity that is informative to policy-makers requires expensive and logistically difficult surveys, particularly in the developing world. Not surprisingly, the poverty…
Poverty statistics guide social policy, but in many low- and middle-income countries, censuses and household surveys that collect these data are costly, infrequent, quickly outdated, and sometimes error-prone. Satellite imagery offers…
Cloud providers are highly incentivized to reduce latency. One way they do this is by locating datacenters as close to users as possible. These "cloud edge" datacenters are placed in metropolitan areas and enable edge computing for…
Internet has significantly improved the quality of citizens across the world. Though the internet coverage is quite high, 40% of global population do not have access to broadband internet. This paper presents an analysis of a field survey…
The growth of urban areas intensifies the need for sustainable, efficient transportation infrastructure and mobility systems, driving initiatives to enhance infrastructure and public transit while reducing traffic congestion and emissions.…
Millions of people worldwide are absent from their country's census. Accurate, current, and granular population metrics are critical to improving government allocation of resources, to measuring disease control, to responding to natural…
We propose a generalizable framework for the population estimation of dense, informal settlements in low-income urban areas--so called 'slums'--using high-resolution satellite imagery. Precise population estimates are a crucial factor for…
Today, 95% of the global population has 2G mobile phone coverage and the number of individuals who own a mobile phone is at an all time high. Mobile phones generate rich data on billions of people across different societal contexts and have…
Satellite connectivity is gaining increased attention as the demand for seamless internet access, especially in transportation and remote areas, continues to grow. For fast-moving objects such as aircraft, vehicles, or trains, satellite…
Recent studies have shown the value of mobile phone data to tackle problems related to economic development and humanitarian action. In this research, we assess the suitability of indicators derived from mobile phone data as a proxy for…
The urban-rural divide is increasing in modern societies calling for geographical extensions of social influence modelling. Improved understanding of innovation diffusion across locations and through social connections can provide us with…