Community health worker programs provide healthcare to those living outside the financial and physical reach of the standard health infrastructure. These programs are particularly prevalent in low resource regions. Frequently such programs involve community health workers making household visits across a significant geographical area. We suggest that this problem can be posed as a formal routing and scheduling problem, and to use techniques developed from solving the travelling salesman problem with time windows. In addition, household visits can generate a series of future follow up visits, a feature not often handled in the combinatorial scheduling and routing literature. We present the basic problem and outline potential research directions.

But whereas in the general Rwandan populace males tend Despite the increasing ubiquity of mobile phones in the developing to be much better educated (76.3% of males are literate, but world, remarkably little is known about the structure only 64.7% of females), among mobile phone users it is the and demographics of the mobile phone market. While a women who achieve higher levels of education: the median few qualitative studies have detailed social norms of phone woman completes secondary school, while the median man use in specific communities (Donner 2007; Burrell 2009), does not (t 4.79). Table 1 shows a few statistics on asset and a handful of quantitative researchers have begun to analyze ownership, with associated sampling error.

Data mining and machine learning technologies for business applications have evolved over the past two decades, and are regularly applied in contemporary organizations to everything from manufacturing to online advertising in fields ranging from health care to motor racing. Unfortunately, data mining techniques are not applied as often to problems in the developing world. Despite the fact that some industries, such as banks, airlines, courts, and telecommunications firms, necessitate data storage as part of their business process. We argue that data mining could be used to reduce infrastructure inefficiencies, which is one of the largest problems faced by Africa. We demonstrate that we can potentially reduce the infrastructure inefficiency of the Ethiopian telecommunications industry by ranking customers according to their likelihood of nonpayment using a data mining approach.

This position paper describes how the nascent area of AI for development can learn from the challenges and successes of its parents: artificial intelligence and information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D). AI suffered from overly ambitious beginnings and years of stumbling before finding its footing, and achieving impactful ICT4D has been an equally challenging endeavor. We describe the history and challenges of both AI and ICT4D research, and present three broad suggestions for AI-for-development researchers: (1) that they spend as much time as possible with the kind of site or the organization they are hoping to impact; (2) that they be ambitious but humble in their goals and expectations; and (3) that they put AI in the service of existing, well-intented, competent development organizations.

With the increased availability of rich behavioral data sets, we present a novel combination of tools to analyze to analyze this information.  Using criminal offense records as an example, we employ cross-correlation measures, eigenvalue spectrum analysis, and results from random matrix theory to identify spatiotemporal patterns.  Finally, with multivariate autoregressive models, we demonstrate a possible source of structure within the data.

Traffic monitoring systems usually make assumptions about the movement of vehicles, such as that they drive in dedicated lanes, and that those lanes rarely include non-vehicle clutter. Urban settings within developing countries often present extremely chaotic traffic scenarios which make these assumptions unrealistic. We show how a standard approach to traffic monitoring can be made more robust by using probabilistic inference, and in such a way that we bypass the need for vehicle segmentation. Instead of tracking individual vehicles but treat a lane of traffic as a fluid and estimate the rate of flow. Our modelling of uncertainty allows us to accurately monitor traffic flow even in the presence of substantial clutter.

A key challenge for policymakers in many developing countries is to decide which intervention or collection of interventions works best to improve learning outcomes in their schools. Our aim is to develop a causal model that explains student learning outcomes in terms of observable characteristics as well as conditions and processes difficult to observe directly. We start with a theoretical model based on the results of previous research, direct experience and experts’ knowledge in the field. This model is then refined through application of supervised learning methods to available data sets. Once calibrated with local data in a country, the model estimates the probability that a given intervention would affect learning outcomes.

We explore the prospect of inferring the epicenter and influences of seismic activity from changes in background phone communication activities logged at cell towers. In particular, we explore the perturbations in Rwandan call data invoked by an earthquake in February 2008 centered in the Lac Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Beyond the initial seismic event, we investigate the challenge of assessing the distribution of the persistence of needs over geographic regions, using the persistence of call anomalies after the earthquake as a proxy for lasting influences and the potential need for assistance. We also infer uncertainties in the inferences and consider the prospect of identifying the value of surveying the areas so that surveillance resources can be best triaged.

Cellular phones can be used as mobile sensors, continuously logging users’ behavior including movement, communication and proximity to others. While it is well understood that data generated from mobile phones includes a record of phone calls, there are also more sophisticated data types, such as Bluetooth or cell tower proximity logging, which reveal movement patterns and day-to-day human interactions. We explore the possibility of using mobile phone data to compare movement and communication patterns across cultures. The goal of this proof-of-concept study is to quantify behavior in order to compare different populations. We compare our ability to predict future calling behavior and movement patterns from the cellular phone data of subjects in two distinct groups: a set of university students at MIT in the United States and the University of Nairobi in Kenya. In addition, we show how Bluetooth data may be used to estimate the diffusion of an airborne pathogen outbreak in the different populations.

The gender divide in the access to technology in developing economies makes gender characterization and automatic gender identification two of the most critical needs for improving cell phone-based services. Gender identification has been typically solved using voice or image processing.   However, such techniques cannot be applied to cell phone networks mostly due to privacy concerns. In this paper, we present a study aimed at characterizing and automatically identifying the gender of a cell phone user in a developing economy based on behavioral, social and mobility variables. Our contributions are twofold: (1) understanding the role that gender plays on phone usage, and (2) evaluating common machine learning approaches for gender identification. The analysis was carried out using the encrypted CDRs (Call Detail Records) of approximately 10,000 users from a developing economy, whose gender was known a priori. Our results indicate that behavioral and social variables, including the number of input/output calls and the in degree/out degree of the social network, reveal statistically significant differences between male and female callers. Finally, we propose a new gender identification algorithm that can achieve classification rates of up to 80% when the percentage of predicted instances is reduced.