Can Satellites Learn to 'See' Poverty?

Night lights, therefore, appear to be an incredible resource. So much so that in countries with poor economic statistics, they can serve as a proxy for a regional wealth survey--except no one has to go house to house, running through a questionnaire. Yet research has also shown this not-a-survey will remain inexact: To a satellite at night, a few well-lit mansions and a dense but poorly lit shantytown can look nearly the same. A new paper from a team at Stanford, published last week in Science, applies a trendy technique to this tricky problem. In order to make night lights more discerning, engineers and computer scientists fed a convolutional neural net--a standard type of artificial intelligence program--a series of data sets.