Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Social Systems

Nathan Eagle

FSE-18, November 7–11, 2010, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.  ACM

ABSTRACT
Petabytes of data about human movements, transactions,
and communication patterns are continuously being gener-
ated by everyday technologies such as mobile phones and
credit cards. In collaboration with the mobile phone, in-
ternet, and credit card industries, Eagle and colleagues are
aggregating and analyzing behavioral data from over 250
million people from North and South America, Europe, Asia
and Africa. Eagle discusses projects arising from these col-
laborations that involve inferring behavioral dynamics on
a broad spectrum of scales from risky behavior in a group
of MIT freshman to population-level behavioral signatures,
including cholera outbreaks in Rwanda and wealth in the
UK. The research group is developing a range of large-scale
network analysis and machine learning algorithms that will
provide deeper insight into human behavior.

Big data, global development, and complex social systems.pdf