Digital Data for Migration Research

Ingmar Weber, Research Director for Social Computing at the Qatar Computing Research Institute presents innovative digital data sources and 'big data' to monitor and model international migration, with real-time application to the Venezuelan exodus and the needs of UN agencies.

Comments by:
Alex de Sherbinin, Associate Director, Science Applications Division, CIESIN, Earth Institute at Columbia University

Dr. Weber will discuss different data sets and their relative strengths and weaknesses, including:
• proprietary data on geo-located IP addresses of Yahoo users
• "places lived" listed in public Google+ profiles
• multi-year geo-tagged tweets, and
• anonymous advertising data for Facebook ("used to live in country X") and LinkedIn ("studied in country X").

Speaker Biography:
Dr. Ingmar Weber is the Research Director for Social Computing at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI). His interdisciplinary research uses large amounts of online data from social media and other sources to study human behavior. Particular topics of interest include quantifying international migration using digital methods, tracking digital gender gaps, looking at political polarization and extremism, and precision public health. As an undergraduate, he studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge (1999-2003), before pursuing a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science (2003-2007). Dr. Weber currently serves as an ACM Distinguished Speaker.

References for published work can be found at https://ingmarweber.de/publications/

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This event is presented by the International Organizations and United Nations Studies Specialization, the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, the Columbia Data Science Society, the Columbia SIPA Technology and Policy Initiative, and the Technology, Media, and Communications Specialization.

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