Related papers: Predicting Livelihood Indicators from Community-Ge…
Up-to-date poverty maps are an important tool for policy makers, but until now, have been prohibitively expensive to produce. We propose a generalizable prediction methodology to produce poverty maps at the village level using geospatial…
Informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. In order to deliver effective economic and social aid, non-government organizations (NGOs), such as the United Nations Children's Fund…
Rural-urban classifications are essential for analyzing geographic, demographic, environmental, or socioeconomic processes across the rural-urban continuum. However, existing county-level classifications may ignore the within-county…
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…
Designing socially active streets has long been a goal of urban planning, yet existing quantitative research largely measures pedestrian volume rather than the quality of social interactions. We hypothesize that street view imagery -- an…
Accurate local-level poverty measurement is an essential task for governments and humanitarian organizations to track the progress towards improving livelihoods and distribute scarce resources. Recent computer vision advances in using…
In this project, we build a modular, scalable system that can collect, store, and process millions of satellite images. We test the relative importance of both of the key limitations constraining the prevailing literature by applying this…
The interactions of individuals with city neighbourhoods is determined, in part, by the perceived quality of urban environments. Perceived neighbourhood quality is a core component of urban vitality, influencing social cohesion, sense of…
Detecting and mapping informal settlements encompasses several of the United Nations sustainable development goals. This is because informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. Thus,…
In this paper, we use deep learning to estimate living conditions in India. We use both census and surveys to train the models. Our procedure achieves comparable results to those found in the literature, but for a wide range of outcomes.
Understanding the prevalence of key demographic and health indicators in small geographic areas and domains is of global interest, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where vital registration data is sparse and household…
The average household income is one of the most important indexes for decision making and the modelling of economic inequity and poverty. In this work we propose a practical procedure to estimate the average income using small area methods.…
Detecting and mapping informal settlements encompasses several of the United Nations sustainable development goals. This is because informal settlements are home to the most socially and economically vulnerable people on the planet. Thus,…
A substantial body of health research demonstrates a strong link between neighborhood environments and health outcomes. Recently, there has been increasing interest in leveraging advances in computer vision to enable large-scale, systematic…
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…
Benchmarking and monitoring urban design and transport features is critical to achieving local and international health and sustainability goals. However, most urban indicator frameworks use coarse spatial scales that only allow…
Urban walkability is a cornerstone of public health, sustainability, and quality of life. Traditional walkability assessments rely on surveys and field audits, which are costly and difficult to scale. Recent studies have used satellite…
Access to accurate, granular, and up-to-date poverty data is essential for humanitarian organizations to identify vulnerable areas for poverty alleviation efforts. Recent works have shown success in combining computer vision and satellite…
The rigorous evaluation of anti-poverty programs is key to the fight against global poverty. Traditional evaluation approaches rely heavily on repeated in-person field surveys to measure changes in economic well-being and thus program…
We describe a method to identify poor households in data-scarce countries by leveraging information contained in nationally representative household surveys. It employs standard statistical learning techniques---cross-validation and…