8 years to publish our paper that there's 1.18 billion people energy poor, 60% more than expected, lost in the dark every night. Poverty happens *somewhere*, and being good at "What is where" matters.
8 years ago, at the The World Bank we used space images at night to actually see who has lights across India when the satellites pass after sunset, for every single village every single night. 600k villages over 20 years. It was a feat of (R) data processing, and for development outcomes in much harder development context. We also went the extra step to make it a data visualization and an API. It was a significant product that governments asked for, that we built and gave, and that was praised as practical innovation https://lnkd.in/gN3UtkCh .
The team, under Brian Min, kept working so long that as I moved jobs to build the Planetary Computer I was able to fund again part of the work and offer the PC as a better compute infrastructure.
🚨 Turns out the team found 1.18 billion are energy poor, 60% more people without access to electricity than official figures of the Bank. Last week it got published https://lnkd.in/g8sCfZi2 [link gives free access until July 13th].
If I had time, I would love to see how much faster and better a Clay model trained with these outputs could help us maintain a steady monitoring of poverty of access to electricity... I always mention Clay because I strongly believe so much value would come if "What is where" would be as easy as searching websites on the internet. Specially when all the data needs for this paper and so many others, can be done fully with
8 years ago, at the The World Bank we used space images at night to actually see who has lights across India when the satellites pass after sunset, for every single village every single night. 600k villages over 20 years. It was a feat of (R) data processing, and for development outcomes in much harder development context. We also went the extra step to make it a data visualization and an API. It was a significant product that governments asked for, that we built and gave, and that was praised as practical innovation https://lnkd.in/gN3UtkCh .
The team, under Brian Min, kept working so long that as I moved jobs to build the Planetary Computer I was able to fund again part of the work and offer the PC as a better compute infrastructure.
🚨 Turns out the team found 1.18 billion are energy poor, 60% more people without access to electricity than official figures of the Bank. Last week it got published https://lnkd.in/g8sCfZi2 [link gives free access until July 13th].
If I had time, I would love to see how much faster and better a Clay model trained with these outputs could help us maintain a steady monitoring of poverty of access to electricity... I always mention Clay because I strongly believe so much value would come if "What is where" would be as easy as searching websites on the internet. Specially when all the data needs for this paper and so many others, can be done fully with
#opendata. Clay's goal is to be that engine both for open and not open data.
This work was partly funded under the now closed WB Innovation Labs with Trevor Monroe and Adarsh (AD) Desai working with the Energy team with Kwawu Mensa and geo team Keith Garrett, Ben Stewart and others. Research done by Brian Min, Zachary O'Keeffe et al (as the paper says). The now closed (8 years is a long time in Internet time, but the GH repo remains) but then refreshingly fast and intuitive site was done by Development Seed. Some of the outputs funded and data hosted on the Planetary Computer https://lnkd.in/gqbJvRTD
This work was partly funded under the now closed WB Innovation Labs with Trevor Monroe and Adarsh (AD) Desai working with the Energy team with Kwawu Mensa and geo team Keith Garrett, Ben Stewart and others. Research done by Brian Min, Zachary O'Keeffe et al (as the paper says). The now closed (8 years is a long time in Internet time, but the GH repo remains) but then refreshingly fast and intuitive site was done by Development Seed. Some of the outputs funded and data hosted on the Planetary Computer https://lnkd.in/gqbJvRTD