Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Social Systems
Event details
| Date | 23.06.2010 |
| Hour | 09:30 |
| Speaker | Prof. Nathan Eagle, MIT |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Petabytes of data about human movements, transactions, and
communication patterns are continuously being generated by everyday
technologies such as mobile phones and credit cards. This
unprecedented volume of information facilitates a novel set of
research questions applicable to a wide range of development issues.
In collaboration with the mobile phone, internet, and credit card
industries, my colleagues and I are aggregating and analyzing
behavioral data from over 250 million people from North and South
America, Europe, Asia and Africa. I will discuss a selection of
projects arising from these collaborations that involve inferring
behavioral dynamics on a broad spectrum of scales; from risky behavior
in a group of MIT freshman to population-level behavioral signatures,
including cholera outbreaks in Rwanda and wealth in the UK. Access to
the movement patterns of the majority of mobile phones in East Africa
also facilitates realistic models of disease transmission as well as
slum formations. This vast volume of data requires new analytical
tools - we are developing a range of large-scale network analysis and
machine learning algorithms that we hope will provide deeper insight
into human behavior. However, ultimately our goal is to determine how
we can use these insights to actively improve the lives of the
billions of people who generate this data and the societies in which
they live. Prof. Eagle's homepage
Practical information
- General public
- Free