Mapping Money Movement: Generating Geo-demographics with New Methods
Understanding population level money flows around a city has significant potential to drive both policy implications and economic activity. An example of the former is the detection of vulnerable sub-populations while an example of the […]
Crowd Sourcing ground-truth demographics for machine learning
The collection of geo-demographic data for understanding cities has typically been undertaken by census and other large scale surveys. Providing the basis for a wide range of activity including city planning, market intelligence and policy […]
Automated Road Quality Surveys: Superior and Cost Effective
In collaboration with DFiD and the Department of Roads (DoR) Zanzibar, N/LAB is investigating methods combining remote sensing (drone/satellite imagery) and applied machine learning methods to automate the assessment of low volume road conditions. Traditionally […]
Deep Learning and Aerial Imagery for Land Use Classification
Land use classification is a critical information to monitor a territory, support its development and plan its evolution. Aerial imagery is generally used as the base media to derive a land use classification by manual […]
Generating Geo-demographic Data from CDR Data: Mobility
Understanding mobility at a population level provides a key role in urban planning. Traditionally undertaken by transport surveys, a key outcome is city wide Origin-Destination (OD) Matrices. While providing known utility, these traditional approaches are […]
Big Data for Resilience – Flooding in Dar es Salaam
Dar es Salaam suffers from biannual flooding caused by various factors including climate change and rapid unplanned urban growth. Receiving a ESRC-NERC-DFID grant for “Big Data for Flood Resilience in East Africa”, this project investigates […]
Transport – Road Conditions
Leveraging recent deep learning advances with high resolution drone imagery, the team has developed state-of-the-art techniques for the automatic detection of buildings and roads from aerial imagery. N/LAB is now focusing on the extension of […]
Community Mapping
Maps are crucial in emerging countries to make decisions, but often do not exist. Community mapping is a participatory process where community members map their neighbourhoods, making maps openly available in the process. In emerging […]
Refined Limit on the Predictability of Human Movement
It has been recently claimed that human movement is ‘highly predictable’ upper bound of 93% predictability shown. However, knowing an upper bound is only useful if it is relatively tight, i.e. it is close to the […]
Behaviour as Event Series: Novel Methods for Prediction and Analysis
Data streams whose events occur at random arrival times rather than at the regular, tick-tock intervals of traditional time series are highly prevalent, particularly in human behavioural data. Continuous, irregular and often highly sparse, these event […]