Data collaboratives and using mobile phone data for social good

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. 

 

Focusing particularly on mobile phone data, and its use in migration and mobility research, 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. The project provided a special mobile phone database consisting of call detail records (CDR) to the scientific community for enabling research on urgent problems concerning refugees, including health, education, unemployment, safety, and social integration. Collected over one year from one million telecom users, the database provided quantitative insights into the activities and movements of refugees and citizens over the entire country, supporting a wide range of studies. 

I will next describe research performed in the HummingBird EU Horizon2020 project, which used an even larger mobile phone dataset to investigate internal migration patterns and analyse mobility of different population groups in the aftermath of the Türkiye-Syria earthquakes. 

 

For each of these case studies, the technical challenges of computer based analysis of human behavior are complemented by societal challenges to furnish solutions that are ethically and legally acceptable, as well as financially sustainable.