Organized by DevLab@Penn/PDRI and co-sponsored by Perry World House, USAID’s Center for Democracy, Human Rights and Governance, USAID’s Innovation, Technology, and Research (ITR) Hub and Penn SAS’ Data Driven Discovery Initiative, this event will convene an excellent group of academics and practitioners to discuss the current state of big data and machine learning in the development sector. While the earlier conference provided a broad overview of topics, the goal of this conference is to dig more deeply into four issues of crucial importance to both the research and practitioner communities:
- The use of computational tools to detect corruption and provide a tool for accountability
- The use of big data from media to measure civic activity, political polarization and disinformation
- The use of large-scale, micro-level data and computational tools to study the causes, dynamics, and consequences of conflict
- The use of social media data to monitor and respond to humanitarian crises
The Big Data for Development and Governance Event will be held on October 20 & 21, 2022 at the Perelman Center for Political Science & Economics. In recognition that many development organizations and researchers are currently developing tools and techniques to work with big data, the first half-day of the conference will include workshop sessions on working with social media data, running digital experiments and training natural language processing models; these sessions will target technically-minded participants, but not those already proficient in such techniques. The second day will focus on the presentation of research on, and discussion of, the four key topics noted above. Full detailed two-day agenda and list of panelists can be viewed here.
To register for the event, RSVP to Diego Romero (djrom18@sas.upenn.edu) by Oct 17, 2022