Stories
Below is a collection of inspiring / empowering / feel-good articles we have stumbled across where people or organisations are using data for good causes. We hope they inspire you to think about how you are/could be utilising your data or at the very least make you hopeful for the future!
If you come across an interesting article/topic/organisation send it through to us at connect@data4good.com.au and it could be featured on this page or in our next newsletter!
*Words are not all ours, authors are credited in individual articles.
Outside the US, the definition of poverty is income of $1.50 a day or less per individual. In the United States the definition of poverty is income less than $34 per day per individual or a family of four with income less than $69 per day.
Microsoft Australia and professional learning organisation, Education Changemakers, are calling on teachers and local high school students to enter a new national competition – the AI for Good Challenge – to learn about artificial intelligence (AI) and engage with it confidently and ethically, by developing ideas for AI solutions to help tackle real world social and environmental challenges.
After poaching surged recently, the South African government turned to techniques more often used to study consumers to help identify–and shut down–the networks that connect illegal guns, poachers, and rhino horn buyers.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here, and it’s already changing the shape of many industries and seeping into daily life. In our previous article, we’ve explored how AI (Artificial Intelligence) is helping open up the digital world for people with disabilities.
The fear of losing everything in a natural disaster sits in the back of our minds no matter where we live. The same diverse physical geography that gives us sunny beaches and crisp mountain air also generates devastating storms and wildfires. Climate change is only making things worse.
Maria Uriarte, a professor in the department of ecology, evolution and environmental biology at Columbia University, is trying to understand how Hurricane Maria in 2017 altered plant life in Puerto Rico.
"In sub-Saharan Africa, there are more people with mobile phones than access to electricity, as people are willing to commute to get a signal and/or charge their phones. By using mobile data we were able to identify the approximate size of rural villages and access to education and health facilities."
"...when people prepare to leave home, they sell their goats and the market price falls, signalling a coming surge in population movement - a measure that now feeds into the prediction system."
"It's a straightforward vision: To make the world a witness to what happens in courtrooms around the world... We decided this was a problem that technology could solve."
In regards to how a country measures itself against the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, "synergies are difficult to identify and can lead to governments investing in policies that didn't actually produce the results they are measuring."
Five stories of how organizations are tackling global health issues with big data analytics
How wildlife will react to climate change is an open question, but one of the first studies to compare the responses of tropical mammals to warmer habitats suggests the answer won’t be as simple as “move to a cooler place.”