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35 million missed calls. That's the number of calls that 75-year old social justice leader Anna Hazare received from people across India who supported his efforts to fight corruption. Two weeks earlier, he had invited India to join his movement by ... Continue reading →
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We've all seen prompts like this: More than 100 million of these ReCAPTCHAs get filled out every day on sites like Facebook, Twitter and CNN. Google uses them to simultaneously filter out spam and digitize Google Books and archives of ... Continue reading →
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After the Category 5 Tornado in Oklahoma, map editors at Waze used the service to route drivers around the damage. While Uber increased their car service fares during Hurricane Sandy, they could have modified their App to encourage the shared ... Continue reading →
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Derrick Herris puts it best: "It might be provocative to call into question one of the hottest tech movements in generations, but it's not really fair. That's because how companies and people benefit from Big Data, Data Science or whatever ... Continue reading →
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My colleague Kalev Leetaru recently co-authored this comprehensive study on the various sources and accuracies of geographic information on Twitter. This is the first detailed study of its kind. The detailed analysis, which runs some 50-pages long, has important implications ... Continue reading →
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Crowds--rather than sole individuals--are increasingly bearing witness to disasters large and small. Instagram users, for example, snapped 800,000 #Sandy pictures during the hurricane last year. One way to make sense of this vast volume and velocity of multimedia content--Big Data--during ... Continue reading →
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My colleague Fernando Diaz has continued working on an interesting Wikipedia project since he first discussed the idea with me last year. Since Wikipedia is increasingly used to crowdsource live reports on breaking news such as sudden-onset humanitarian crisis and ... Continue reading →
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That was the unexpected question that my World Bank colleague Johannes Kiess asked me the other day. I was immediately intrigued. So I did some preliminary research and offered to write up a blog post on the idea to solicit ... Continue reading →
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Humanitarian organizations and emergency management offices are increasingly interested in capturing multimedia content shared on social media during crises. Last year, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) activated the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) to identify and geotag ... Continue reading →
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Over 400 million tweets are posted every day. But accessing 100% of these tweets (say for disaster response purposes) requires access to Twitter's "Firehose". The latter, however, can be prohibitively expensive and also requires serious infrastructure to manage. This explains ... Continue reading →
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