
Fighting Poverty with Satellite Images and Machine Learning Wizardry - jonbaer
http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/satellites/fighting-poverty-with-satellite-data-and-machine-learning-wizardry
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cuchoi
The abstract of the paper was more informative than the article:

"Reliable data on economic livelihoods remain scarce in the developing world,
hampering efforts to study these outcomes and to design policies that improve
them. Here we demonstrate an accurate, inexpensive, and scalable method for
estimating consumption expenditure and asset wealth from high-resolution
satellite imagery. Using survey and satellite data from five African
countries—Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, and Rwanda—we show how a
convolutional neural network can be trained to identify image features that
can explain up to 75% of the variation in local-level economic outcomes. Our
method, which requires only publicly available data, could transform efforts
to track and target poverty in developing countries. It also demonstrates how
powerful machine learning techniques can be applied in a setting with limited
training data, suggesting broad potential application across many scientific
domains."

[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6301/790](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6301/790)

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gcr
This seems quite relevant to the work that Orbital Insight is doing.

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Aelinsaar
Finally, a way to assess poverty from space, ironically increasing the
distance between the observers and the observed by several literal orders of
magnitude.

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jostmey
I guess people just don't want to believe that poverty can exist in their
neighborhood. They have to believe it is somewhere far away on the other side
of the planet.

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Houshalter
First world poverty is bad, but it's nothing compared to the worst of third
world poverty. By any measure the poor of the first world are significantly
better off than the third world. Income, life expectancy, access to luxuries
like clean and running water to artificial lighting, etc.

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eli_gottlieb
And Third World poverty is kept at bay in the First World only by ever-
vigilant effort amongst government and civil society.

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Houshalter
To some extent yes. I think even without social programs they would still be
better off, as there are no social programs in the third world. Wages are just
vastly higher in the first world, even for the poorest. Third worlders live on
a dollar a day or less. Social programs help a lot of course.

