PhD student Emily Aiken and Prof. Blumenstock quoted in Economist article, “In poor countries, statistics are both undersupplied and underused”
“Emily Aiken of the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues have tested whether a machine-learning algorithm can identify the poorest households in 80 Afghan villages based on mobile-phone data, such as the duration of their calls, their network of... Read More →
Lab wins data.org “Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge” — one of 9 winners (out of 1350 applicants)!
Our work, a partnership between GiveDirectly and CEGA, was one of 8 awardees (out of 1350 applicants) of the data.org Inclusive Growth and Recovery Challenge. Read the press release here: https://www.mastercardcenter.org/press-releases/dataorg-challenge-awardees-announcement. hm
NPR article on our work in Togo
Read about our work on NPR: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/02/15/966848542/the-pandemic-pushed-this-farmer-into-deep-poverty-then-something-amazing-happene Shegun Adjadi Bakari, advisor to Togo’s president, consulted with Esther Duflo, who in 2019 won a Nobel prize for her experimental approach to alleviating poverty — using randomized control trials to see if programs... Read More →
Lab research featured on Wired
Wired Magazine covered our work in Togo in the article, “A Clever Strategy to Distribute Covid Aid—With Satellite Data” Lawson was proud to see government aid sent so fast, but as Covid-19 spread she also worried her program wasn’t able... Read More →
Funding from Social Science Research Council
Zoe Kahn received a “Just Tech” grant from the Social Science Research Council for her work, done with Emily Aiken and Joshua Blumenstock, “Covid-19 Social Impact Scenarios: Bridging the Knowledge Gap between Technical System Outputs and Policymaking.” Congrats Zoe! Full... Read More →
FastCompany covers lab research
Read about our recent work in the FastCompany article on our work with GiveDirectly in Togo Josh Blumenstock, associate professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, first wrote the paper on mapping poverty using satellite and mobile data in 2017, before... Read More →
Paper presented at KDD workshop on Humanitarian Mapping
Our work on “Privacy Guarantees for Personal Mobility Data in Humanitarian Response” will be presented at the KDD workshop on Humanitarian Mapping (https://kdd-humanitarian-mapping.herokuapp.com/). Full citation information below: Kohli, N., Aiken, E., and Blumenstock, J.E. (2020). Privacy Guarantees for Personal Mobility... Read More →
Paper accepted at ICML
Our paper, “Balancing Competing Objectives for Welfare-Aware Machine Learning with Imperfect Data”, was accepted for oral presentation at the International Conference on Machine Learning (IMCL 2020). Full citation below: Rolf, E., Simchowitz, M., Dean, S., Liu, L., Bj{\”o}rkegren, D., Hardt,... Read More →
NSF CAREER award announced
Lab director Blumenstock was recently awarded the prestigious NSF CAREER Award (Faculty Early Career Development Program). The grant provides 5 years of funding for a new research agenda focused on “Welfare-Centric Machine Learning”. Read more about the award here.
Forthcoming paper at ICTD 2020
Niall Keleher, Joshua Blumenstock, and co-authors had a paper accepted for publication at the The 11th International ACM/IEEE Conference on Information & Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD 2020), to be held in Guayaquil, Ecuador. ICTD is the premiere venue for... Read More →