Hit Send, Save Lives
Wherever we go, whatever we do, we leave a trail. Landfills, carbon emissions, by-products, fumes. The key to our future lies in reducing this waste and, critically, recycling it: creating tomorrow's energy from today's exhaust.
The same holds true in the cloud. When you click on a Web page, enter a search term, or send a text, you leave digital crumbs -- not your name or age, necessarily, but data about the time, your whereabouts, and hints of what you're after. Alone these bits and bytes mean little; but in the aggregate, and properly mined, this mass of "passive data" offers valuable insights into human wants and behavior. For those able to filter it -- think Amazon or Google -- data exhaust is big business.
Why not harness it to improve the planet? To Robert Kirkpatrick, the director of a United Nations initiative called Global Pulse, data exhaust represents an untapped, unnatural resource. Consider the Flu Trends project developed by Google.org, the nonprofit arm of the search giant. By monitoring when and where people enter key search terms like flu and fever, Google can accurately detect outbreaks of seasonal flu.
Global Pulse would widen the mandate. When droughts, famines, and natural disasters occur, people change where they go, whom they call, and the kinds of information they seek and trade. By filtering the data exhaust generated by social media and cell phone networks around the world, it should be possible to pick up what Kirkpatrick calls "digital smoke signals" -- patterns of behavior that augur a pending crisis.
Global Pulse was formed in 2009 at the direct request of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, just as the Greek economic crisis was blooming. The United Nations saw a need to gather data more quickly. "We live in a hyperconnected world," says Kirkpatrick. "We're seeing socioeconomic crises moving with the speed of natural disasters."
Meanwhile, real-time data are everywhere. Mobile phones are becoming the primary way to interact and exchange data, especially in developing countries (see "India Calling," Spring 2012). African farmers get the latest produce prices from the commodities exchange via text. People use their cell phones to wire money and socialize online. No wonder Indonesia, not Britain, is now the number two Facebook market in the world. All that chatter adds up to "hard, quantitative records, in time and space, of collective human behavior," Kirkpatrick notes. "They're looking for work; they're listing their symptoms on Twitter, what they paid for gas, food, medical care. That's content that's relevant to the work of the U.N. And people are generating it for free, all day long."
The challenge lies in gaining access to the data, and making sense of it. Web-search and call-data records are proprietary and often bound by privacy concerns; part of Kirkpatrick's job is to talk companies into unlocking some of it for the global good. The initiative is also forming partnerships with data-mining companies and academic researchers to develop new ways of recycling digital soot.
Global Pulse is very much in beta; its first projects are small, to provide proof of concept. One, conducted with MIT, scoured the Web for daily fluctuations in the price of bread at South American supermarkets to see whether the approach offers a reliable way to monitor inflation. (It does.) Another filtered keywords from tweets and other social media in Ireland and the United States, then compared them with official unemployment stats to gauge whether changes in online conversations forecast spikes in unemployment. (They do.)
Kirkpatrick glows at the prospect of mining data exhaust for informational gold. "This is a new field that touches on food security, women, health, poverty, education," he says. And the environment, he adds, inasmuch as "the environment is the container of the economy. If environmental pressures are causing people to migrate, pushing animals and people together to cause zoonotic outbreaks, or causing crops to fail and prompting people to make short-term trade-offs, that's all relevant, that's all human behavior."
Kirkpatrick has worked in Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He co-founded and led the Humanitarian Systems team at Microsoft, which develops software to make aid work more effective. At first glance, the United Nations doesn't seem like the logical place to find an innovative tech startup. Yet there it is, grafted onto the world's largest nongovernmental presence, perfectly situated to monitor the planet's pulse.
"It's a new approach," Kirkpatrick says. "It's nice to be in a place like the U.N. so we can test it out -- and, if it works, spread the word."
On Twitter and Facebook, maybe. Definitely via cell phone.