But the office in Manhattan is not dedicated to the latest app. It is the base camp of the United Nations Global Pulse team — a tiny unit inside an institution known for its sprawling bureaucracy, not its entrepreneurial hustle. Still, the focus is on harnessing technology in new ways — using data from social networks, blogs, cellphones and online commerce to transform economic development and humanitarian aid in poorer nations.

“We work hard, play hard and tend to stay well-caffeinated,” said Robert Kirkpatrick, who leads the group. “This is an exercise in entrepreneurship.”

The efforts by Global Pulse and a growing collection of scientists at universities, companies and nonprofit groups have been given the label “Big Data for development.” It is a field of great opportunity and challenge. The goal, the scientists involved agree, is to bring real-time monitoring and prediction to development and aid programs. Projects and policies, they say, can move faster, adapt to changing circumstances and be more effective, helping to lift more communities out of poverty and even save lives.

Research by Global Pulse and other groups, for example, has found that analyzing Twitter messages can give an early warning of a spike in unemployment, price rises and disease. Such “digital smoke signals of distress,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said, usually come months before official statistics — and in many developing countries today, there are no reliable statistics.

Finding the signals requires data, though, and much of the most valuable data is held by private companies, especially mobile phone operators, whose networks carry text messages, digital-cash transactions and location data. So persuading telecommunications operators, and the governments that regulate and sometimes own them, to release some of the data is a top task for the group. To analyze the data, the groups apply tools now most widely used for pinpointing customers with online advertising.

“We’re trying to track unemployment and disease as if it were a brand,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said.

Global Pulse is small, employing 11 people in New York. Seven more people work at a laboratory in Jakarta, Indonesia, that opened last fall. And Global Pulse is hiring for another lab in Kampala, Uganda, to open this fall.

The research labs are initially working on demonstration projects to show the potential of the technology. “But the larger role of Global Pulse is as a catalyst to foster a data ecosystem for development, bringing together the private sector, universities and governments,” said William Hoffman, an associate director who leads the data-driven development program at the World Economic Forum, which has worked with Global Pulse.

Its United Nations pedigree helps Global Pulse serve as an impresario for data-driven development efforts. “Global Pulse has been central in raising awareness,” said Alex Pentland, a data scientist and director of the Human Dynamics Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “And it is a trusted party in an area that is sensitive for many governments and companies.”

The group traces its origins to the 2008 financial crisis and concerns about how the economic pain would sweep through the developing world. But as Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations said in a speech, “Our traditional 20th-century tools for tracking international development cannot keep up.”

Global Pulse is intended as a 21st century answer to that problem. It was set up in 2009, as an innovation arm in the office of the secretary general. Mr. Kirkpatrick joined in early 2010, began assembling a team and emphasized tightly focused projects and rapid experimentation, while traveling the world to spread the data-for-development gospel at conferences and in private meetings.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/08/technology/development-groups-tap-big-data-to-direct-humanitarian-aid.html?partner=rss&emc=rss