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When an individual purchases a home, they simultaneously purchase its structural features, its accessibility to work, and the neighborhood amenities. Some amenities, such as air quality, are measurable while others, such as the prestige or…
Earth observation (EO) data such as satellite imagery can have far-reaching impacts on our understanding of the geography of poverty, especially when coupled with machine learning (ML) and computer vision. Early research used computer…
Progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is hampered by a persistent lack of data regarding key social, environmental, and economic indicators, particularly in developing countries. For example, data on poverty --- the first…
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.
While measuring socioeconomic indicators is critical for local governments to make informed policy decisions, such measurements are often unavailable at fine-grained levels like municipality. This study employs deep learning-based…
Despite recent progress in computer vision, fine-grained interpretation of satellite images remains challenging because of a lack of labeled training data. To overcome this limitation, we propose using Wikipedia as a previously untapped…
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…
We provide systematic evidence on the potential for estimating household well-being from mobile phone data. Using data from four countries - Afghanistan, Cote d'Ivoire, Malawi, and Togo - we conduct parallel, standardized machine learning…
Recently, mobile operators in many developing economies have launched "Mobile Money" platforms that deliver basic financial services over the mobile phone network. While many believe that these services can improve the lives of the poor, a…
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…
Poverty is a serious issue that harms humanity progression. The simplest solution is to use one-shirt-size policy to alleviate it. Nevertheless, each region has its unique issues, which require a unique solution to solve them. In the aspect…
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…
Object detection in high-resolution satellite imagery is emerging as a scalable alternative to on-the-ground survey data collection in many environmental and socioeconomic monitoring applications. However, performing object detection over…
Up-to-date, granular, and reliable quality of life data is crucial for humanitarian organizations to develop targeted interventions for vulnerable communities, especially in times of crisis. One such quality of life data is access to water,…
We develop a machine learning based tool for accurate prediction of socio-economic indicators from daytime satellite imagery. The diverse set of indicators are often not intuitively related to observable features in satellite images, and…
Crop maps are crucial for agricultural monitoring and food management and can additionally support domain-specific applications, such as setting cold supply chain infrastructure in developing countries. Machine learning (ML) models,…
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…
Readability assessment is the process of identifying the level of ease or difficulty of a certain piece of text for its intended audience. Approaches have evolved from the use of arithmetic formulas to more complex pattern-recognizing…
Ending poverty in all its forms everywhere is the number one Sustainable Development Goal of the UN 2030 Agenda. To monitor the progress towards such an ambitious target, reliable, up-to-date and fine-grained measurements of socioeconomic…
Image classification is an essential part of computer vision which assigns a given input image to a specific category based on the similarity evaluation within given criteria. While promising classifiers can be obtained through deep…