March 28, 2024

Searching Big Data for ‘Digital Smoke Signals’

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

E.U. Telecommunications Operators Seek to Rush Through Price Rises

BERLIN — The price of broadband and phone services in Europe is poised to rise as the Continent’s big operators win large rate increases from their national regulators before the implementation of a new law that gives the European Commission more influence over setting of rates.

In Germany, Italy and Spain, the former monopolies, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia and Telefónica, have sought increases of as much as 25 percent over three years in the fees they charge other operators to rent access to their land line networks.

The fees, called wholesale access charges, average €6.67, or $9.63, a customer a month in Europe, according to a survey by Cullen International, a research group in Brussels. They can reach more than €10 in countries like Germany, where wholesale charges are typically passed on to consumers through higher retail prices.

Smaller operators have complained that the increases, all sought before May 25, when the European Commission gains new power to challenge national rate decisions, will further limit competition in these markets. Smaller operators typically lease part of the market leader’s land line network to deliver nationwide service.

Larger operators say the increases are needed to reflect their operating costs, and to prepare for the transition to faster fiber optic networks, which they have started building to replace the copper-based networks that make up the bulk of the European telecommunications grid.

“The net effect of these increases has been to preserve the dominance of the former monopolies,” said Vicky Hanley-Emilsson, a policy adviser with the European Competitive Telecommunications Association, a group based in Brussels that represents smaller operators.

The last-minute increases are part of a broader debate over how much Europe’s telecommunications operators will be able to charge rivals for access to new, super-fast fiber optic networks. Big operators are urging the European Commission to set the fees at a level that will ensure the profitability of the newer networks.

Brian Williamson, the director of Plum Consulting, a London firm hired by the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association, or ETNO, which represents Europe’s biggest operators, said operators were concerned that new pricing rules being devised in Brussels could make the new networks commercially unviable and slow their construction.

“It might be that the regulation won’t prevent any investment, but there is a question about how far the private sector will go, and that depends on the ultimate regulation and the nature of investment put in place,” Mr. Williamson said.

A slow pace of investment would hinder the European Commission’s goal of bringing broadband service with download speeds of at least 30 megabits a second to all European Union residents by 2020. Neelie Kroes, the E.U. commissioner responsible for telecommunications, is working on a plan to set fees that encourage investment while protecting small rivals. A key part of the discussion is the commission’s policy on access charges for the old copper networks during the upgrade to fiber, which is expected to take several years. Large operators say access prices to the older networks should not be aggressively lowered, or consumers will have no incentive to pay for faster fiber services.

“Driving down copper prices would discourage investment, firstly, by encouraging customers to stay on copper,” said Luigi Gambardella, the chairman of ETNO, adding that it would also have hurt fiber by distorting retail price levels for ultra-fast broadband products.

Smaller operators say the fees for copper networks, whose investment costs were recouped decades ago, remain artificially high, and recent rate increases will only give big operators less incentive to build new networks.

The Spanish regulator is proposing to raise wholesale access charges to Telefónica’s grid by 7 percent, to €8.32 a month. Carmen González, the director of a group representing small Spanish operators, said that some of her members were worried that the increase would squeeze them out of the market.

In Italy, Fastweb, a broadband operator owned by Swisscom, estimates that the Italian regulator’s decision last October to grant a 25 percent increase in access charges to Telecom Italia over the next three years would cost Fastweb €12 million a year.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/11/technology/11iht-telecom11.html?partner=rss&emc=rss