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Humanitarian actions require accurate information to efficiently delegate support operations. Such information can be maps of building footprints, building functions, and population densities. While the access to this information is…
Broadband connectivity is a tool for catalyzing socio-economic development and reducing the societal inequalities. Recent studies have investigated the supporting role of broadband in addressing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).…
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…
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are helping tackle a growing number of societal challenges, demonstrating technology's increasing capability to address complex issues, including those outlined in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable…
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) bring together the diverse development community and provide a clear set of development targets for 2030. Given a large number of actors and initiatives related to these goals, there is a need to have a…
Reliable data about the stock of physical capital and infrastructure in developing countries is typically very scarce. This is particular a problem for data at the subnational level where existing data is often outdated, not consistently…
Agricultural research is essential for increasing food production to meet the requirements of an increasing population in the coming decades. Recently, satellite technology has been improving rapidly and deep learning has seen much success…
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…
The utility of aerial imagery (Satellite, Drones) has become an invaluable information source for cross-disciplinary applications, especially for crisis management. Most of the mapping and tracking efforts are manual which is…
This work presents an approach for combining household demographic and living standards survey questions with features derived from satellite imagery to predict the poverty rate of a region. Our approach utilizes visual features obtained…
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,…
Poverty mapping is a powerful tool to study the geography of poverty. The choice of the spatial resolution is central as poverty measures defined at a coarser level may mask their heterogeneity at finer levels. We introduce a small area…
Machine learning-based estimates of poverty and wealth are increasingly being used to guide the targeting of humanitarian aid and the allocation of social assistance. However, the ground truth labels used to train these models are typically…
The recent advances in machine learning and the availability of free and open big Earth data (e.g., Sentinel missions), which cover large areas with high spatial and temporal resolution, have enabled many agriculture monitoring…
Climate change has caused reductions in river runoffs and aquifer recharge resulting in an increasingly unsustainable crop water demand from reduced freshwater availability. Achieving food security while deploying water in a sustainable…
Improving global school connectivity is critical for ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education. To reliably estimate the cost of connecting schools, governments and connectivity providers require complete and accurate school…
In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly accepted the 2030 Development Agenda, which has included 92 paragraphs, and the Paragraph 91 defined 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) and 169 associated targets. The goal of this…
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…
Many areas of the world are without basic information on the socioeconomic well-being of the residing population due to limitations in existing data collection methods. Overhead images obtained remotely, such as from satellite or aircraft,…
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,…