TOR109: Pop Data Alliance With Emmanuel Letouzé

It is no secret that we live in a truly connected world. I can speak from experience that it is possible to be online in every nook and cranny of the planet - from deep inside the Ugandan countryside, to the middle of war torn Syria to the Islands of Fiji. The opportunity to connect to "the net" anywhere, for whatever reason - business, social, and yes, even evil - is here, now. There are many consequences, externalities and unknowns associated with this connected reality - some of which we are painfully aware of, like trolling, and some we don't have the ability to image yet (for example, what happens when virtual reality becomes ubiquitous)?

One of the things we know, is that every time you use your mobile phone, swipe a credit card, surf the internet or basically any other activity that involves passing digital information across the internet, you leave a small, unique breadcrumb or fingerprint behind. If you were to capture and review these breadcrumbs for one individual, across any length of time, you would have the the ability to learn an astonishing amount about them. If we perform this exercise across communities and whole populations, who generate what we now call "big data," the learning and insights can be profound.

Today's guest on the 109th episode of the Terms of Reference podcast is Emmanuel Letouzé and Emmanuel has dedicated his career to thinking about how big data can be used to help those most in need. He is the Director and co-Founder of Data-Pop Alliance, a Visiting Scholar at MIT's Media Lab, a Fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, a Research Associate at ODI, and a Non-Resident Adviser at the International Peace Institute (IPI).

Emmanuel is the author of the UN Global Pulse’s White Paper, “Big Data for Development: Challenges and Opportunities”, where he worked as Senior Development Economist in 2011-12, and the lead author of the report “Big Data for Conflict Prevention” and of the 2013 and 2014 OECD Fragile States reports. He is also a regular speaker on Big Data and development issues. In 2006-09 he worked for UNDP in New York, including on the Human Development Report research team. In 2000-04 he worked in Hanoi, Vietnam, for the French Ministry of Finance as a technical assistant on public finance and official statistics.

As you'll hear us discuss towards the end of the interview, Emmanuel is also a political cartoonist.