Related papers: Mapping urban socioeconomic inequalities in develo…
Digital platforms, including social networks, are major sources of economic information. Evidence suggests that digital platforms display different socioeconomic opportunities to demographic groups. Our work addresses this issue by…
While much effort has been devoted to understand the role of intra-urban characteristics on sustainability and growth, much remains to be understood about the effect of inter-urban interactions and the role cities have in determining each…
Online social media are information resources that can have a transformative power in society. While the Web was envisioned as an equalizing force that allows everyone to access information, the digital divide prevents large amounts of…
The relationship between urban mobility, social networks and socioeconomic status is complex and difficult to apprehend, notably due to the lack of data. Here we use mobile phone data to analyze the socioeconomic structure of spatial and…
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 use data from the Facebook Advertisement Platform to study patterns of demographic disparities in usage of Facebook across countries. We address three main questions: (1) How does Facebook usage differ by age and by gender around the…
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…
Social media content shared today in cities, such as Instagram images, their tags and descriptions, is the key form of contemporary city life. It tells people where activities and locations that interest them are and it allows them to share…
Human mobility has been traditionally studied using surveys that deliver snapshots of population displacement patterns. The growing accessibility to ICT information from portable digital media has recently opened the possibility of…
An intriguing open question is whether measurements made on Big Data recording human activities can yield us high-fidelity proxies of socio-economic development and well-being. Can we monitor and predict the socio-economic development of a…
This study provides the first confirmation that individual employment status can be predicted from standard mobile phone network logs externally validated with household survey data. Individual welfare and households vulnerability to shocks…
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…
Urban areas serve as melting pots of people with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, who may not only be segregated but have characteristic mobility patterns in the city. While mobility is driven by individual needs and preferences, the…
Being able to assess the impact of government-led investment onto socio-economic indicators in cities has long been an important target of urban planning. However, due to the lack of large-scale data with a fine spatio-temporal resolution,…
We quantify Facebook's ability to build shadow profiles by tracking individuals across the web, irrespective of whether they are users of the social network. For a representative sample of US Internet users, we find that Facebook is able to…
Eradicating poverty is the first goal in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. However, aporophobia -- the societal bias against people living in poverty -- constitutes a major obstacle to designing, approving and implementing…
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…
Urban socioeconomic modeling has predominantly concentrated on extensive location and neighborhood-based features, relying on the localized population footprint. However, networks in urban systems are common, and many urban modeling methods…
Urbanization represents a huge opportunity for computer applications enabling cities to be managed more efficiently while, at the same time, improving the life quality of their citizens. One of the potential application of this kind of…
Urban population grows constantly. By 2050 two thirds of the world population will reside in urban areas. This growth is faster and more complex than the ability of cities to measure and plan for their sustainability. To understand what…