Albert Ali Salah

Date: 16:00 – 17:00, Thursday, 16.03.2022
Location: MS Teams ICS Colloquium, Minnaertgebouw 2.02

Title: Data collaboratives and Big Data for social good
Abstract:

New sources of human behavior data can empower humanitarian projects, but they need to be carefully handled, properly anonymized and aggregated. In this talk, I will discuss the potential benefits and risks of data collaboratives for social good. Data collaboratives are public-private partnerships for data sharing and both legal and ethical aspects are very important for these initiatives. I will give examples from the Data for Refugees (D4R) Challenge, which was a non-profit challenge initiated to improve the conditions of the Syrian refugees in Turkey by providing a special database to the scientific community for enabling research on urgent problems concerning refugees, including health, education, unemployment, safety, and social integration. Collected from 1 million telecommunications customers over a one year period, the mobile CDR database shows the activity and movement of refugees and citizens over the entire country. I will also describe the Hummingbird Horizon2020 project that started in 2019, which uses similar mobile data to investigate irregular migration, and our collaboration with DT One, focusing on mobile airtime top-up credit transfers.