Related papers: Mapping urban socioeconomic inequalities in develo…
In the global move toward urbanization, making sure the people remaining in rural areas are not left behind in terms of development and policy considerations is a priority for governments worldwide. However, it is increasingly challenging…
Digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and Amazon Mechanical Turk have transformed the study of human behavior and provided access to new subject pools for academic research. In our study, we leverage the Facebook…
Many critical policy decisions, from strategic investments to the allocation of humanitarian aid, rely on data about the geographic distribution of wealth and poverty. Yet many poverty maps are out of date or exist only at very coarse…
It is commonly believed that patterns of social ties affect individuals' economic status. Here, we translate this concept into an operational definition at the network level, which allows us to infer the economic wellbeing of individuals…
Recent wide-spread adoption of electronic and pervasive technologies has enabled the study of human behavior at an unprecedented level, uncovering universal patterns underlying human activity, mobility, and inter-personal communication. In…
In many developing countries, timely and accurate information about birth rates and other demographic indicators is still lacking, especially for male fertility rates. Using anonymous and aggregate data from Facebook's Advertising Platform,…
Online advertising on platforms such as Google or Facebook has become an indispensable outreach tool, including for applications where it is desirable to engage different demographics in an equitable fashion, such as hiring, housing, civic…
The mapping of populations socio-economic well-being is highly constrained by the logistics of censuses and surveys. Consequently, spatially detailed changes across scales of days, weeks, or months, or even year to year, are difficult to…
Sustainable development is an imperative worldwide but metrics and data on poverty and quality of life have remained too coarse and abstract to characterize challenges adequately and guide practical progress. Nowhere is this challenge…
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…
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…
Socio-economic indicators provide context for assessing a country's overall condition. These indicators contain information about education, gender, poverty, employment, and other factors. Therefore, reliable and accurate information is…
The massive digital footprints generated by bike-sharing systems in megacities like Shanghai offer a novel perspective on the urban socio-economic fabric. This study investigates whether these daily mobility patterns can quantitatively map…
Censuses around the world are key sources of data to guide government investments and public policies. However, these sources are very expensive to obtain and are collected relatively infrequently. Over the last decade, there has been…
Every day, millions of users reveal their interests on Facebook, which are then monetized via targeted advertisement marketing campaigns. In this paper, we explore the use of demographically rich Facebook Ads audience estimates for tracking…
This study leverages large-scale travel surveys for over 200,000 residents across Boston, Chicago, Hong Kong, London, and Sao Paulo. With rich individual-level data, we make systematic comparisons and reveal patterns in social mixing, which…
Accurate and timely population data are essential for disaster response and humanitarian planning, but traditional censuses often cannot capture rapid demographic changes. Social media data offer a promising alternative for dynamic…
Given the rapid recent trend of urbanization, a better understanding of how urban infrastructure mediates socioeconomic interactions and economic systems is of vital importance. While the accessibility of location-enabled devices as well as…
Social media in scientific research offer a unique digital observatory of human behaviours and hence great opportunities to conduct research at large scale answering complex sociodemographic questions. We focus on the identification and…
Recent advances in deep learning have enabled the inference of urban socioeconomic characteristics from satellite imagery. However, models relying solely on urbanization traits often show weak correlations with poverty indicators, as…