Related papers: A framework to determine micro-level population fi…

Identifying current and future informal regions within cities remains a crucial issue for policymakers and governments in developing countries. The delineation process of identifying such regions in cities requires a lot of resources. While…

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…

Major decisions from governments and other large organizations rely on measurements of the populace's well-being, but making such measurements at a broad scale is expensive and thus infrequent in much of the developing world. We propose an…

Rapid globalization and the interdependence of humanity that engender tremendous in-flow of human migration towards the urban spaces. With advent of high definition satellite images, high resolution data, computational methods such as deep…

Worldwide geolocalization aims to locate the precise location at the coordinate level of photos taken anywhere on the Earth. It is very challenging due to 1) the difficulty of capturing subtle location-aware visual semantics, and 2) the…

The expansion of global electricity distribution systems necessitates the deployment of massive infrastructure. Assessing its implications from a spatial and material perspective requires an understanding of the core drivers of a…

The share of the world population living in cities with more than one million people rose from 11% in 1975 to 24% in 2025 (our estimates). Will this trend towards greater concentration in large cities continue or level off? We introduce two…

In an impending urban age where the majority of the world's population will live in cities, it is critical that we improve our understanding of the strengths and limitations of existing city designs to ensure they are safe, clean, can…

Access to motorable roads is a critical dimension of urban infrastructure, particularly in rapidly urbanizing regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, many urban communities, especially those in informal settlements, remain disconnected…

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 Yet many poverty maps are out of date or exist only at very coarse…

Fine-grained population maps are needed in several domains, like urban planning, environmental monitoring, public health, and humanitarian operations. Unfortunately, in many countries only aggregate census counts over large spatial units…

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…

This paper addresses the interesting problem of processing and analyzing data in geographic information systems (GIS) to achieve a clear perspective on urban sprawl. The term urban sprawl refers to overgrowth and expansion of low-density…

Reliable subnational population estimates are essential for applications, yet remain difficult where censuses are sparse, outdated or spatially coarse. Existing population-mapping workflows rely on hand-built geospatial covariates, such as…

This study presents a novel demographics informed deep learning framework designed to forecast urban spatial transformations by jointly modeling geographic satellite imagery, socio-demographics, and travel behavior dynamics. The proposed…

Gentrification--the transformation of a low-income urban area caused by the influx of affluent residents--has many revitalizing benefits. However, it also poses extremely concerning challenges to low-income residents. To help policymakers…

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,…

We present a semi-supervised approach that disaggregates refugee statistics from administrative boundaries to 0.5-degree grid cells across 25 Sub-Saharan African countries. By integrating UNHCR's ProGres registration data with…

Ambitious global goals have been established to provide universal access to affordable modern contraceptive methods. The UN's sustainable development goal 3.7.1 proposes satisfying the demand for family planning (FP) services by increasing…

Urban development has been a defining force in human history, shaping cities for centuries. However, past studies mostly analyze such development as predictive tasks, failing to reflect its generative nature. Therefore, this study designs a…