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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 This is particular a problem for data at the subnational level where existing data is often outdated, not consistently…
Policy makers often make decisions based on parameters such as GDP, unemployment rate, industrial output, etc. The primary methods to obtain or even estimate such information are resource intensive and time consuming. In order to make…
Small farms contribute to a large share of the productive land in developing countries. In regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where 80\% of farms are small (under 2 ha in size), the task of mapping smallholder cropland is an important part…
Geographic routing is becoming the protocol of choice for many sensor network applications. The current state of the art is unsatisfactory: some algorithms are very efficient, however they require a preliminary planarization of the…
The increasing share of renewable energy sources on distribution grid level as well as the emerging active role of prosumers lead to both higher distribution grid utilization, and at the same time greater unpredictability of energy…
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,…
In the era of social media and big data, the use of visual evidence to document conflict and human rights abuse has become an important element for human rights organizations and advocates. In this paper, we address the task of detecting…
Large-scale power failures are induced by nearly all natural disasters from hurricanes to wild fires. A fundamental problem is whether and how recovery guided by government policies is able to meet the challenge of a wide range of…
The power grid is going through significant changes with the introduction of renewable energy sources and incorporation of smart grid technologies. These rapid advancements necessitate new models and analyses to keep up with the various…
Living in a changing climate, human society now faces more frequent and severe natural disasters than ever before. As a consequence, rapid disaster response during the "Golden 72 Hours" of search and rescue becomes a vital humanitarian…
COVID19s widespread distribution is wreaking havoc on peoples lives all over the world. This pandemic has also had a significant impact on energy consumption. Its influence can be seen in the power systems operation and the market as well.…
Multi-Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Networks is a promising solution to providing wireless coverage to ground users in challenging rural areas (such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices in farmlands), where the traditional cellular networks…
International remittances represent a vital source of disaster adaptation finance for households around the world, yet their responsiveness to environmental disasters remains poorly quantified. We reveal a previously unmeasured global…
Employment outcomes of resettled refugees depend strongly on where they are placed inside the host country. Each week, a resettlement agency is assigned a batch of refugees by the United States government. The agency must place these…
Surprisingly a number of Earth's waterways remain unmapped, with a significant number in low and middle income countries. Here we build a computer vision model (WaterNet) to learn the location of waterways in the United States, based on…
Unplanned power outages cost the US economy over $150 billion annually, partly due to predictive maintenance (PdM) models that overlook spatial, temporal, and causal dependencies in grid failures. This study introduces a multilayer Graph…
Wildfires cause major losses worldwide, and the frequency of fire-weather conditions is likely to increase in many regions. We study the allocation of suppression resources over time on a graph-based representation of a landscape to slow…
Pedestrian tracking has long been considered an important problem, especially in security applications. Previously,many approaches have been proposed with various types of sensors. One popular method is Pedestrian Dead Reckoning(PDR) [1]…
The energy sector is experiencing a paradigm shift with the swift adoption of distributed energy sources, renewables, electric vehicles, and an evolving consumer-utility relationship. This necessitates the strategic integration of advanced…
Choosing the placement of wildlife crossings (i.e., green bridges) to reconnect animal species' fragmented habitats is among the 17 goals towards sustainable development by the UN. We consider the following established model: Given a graph…