LIRNEasia is currently hosting Dr Ayumi Arai from the University of Tokyo’s Center for Spatial Information Science. She is also a Research Fellow with LIRNEasia collaborating on our big data for development research in Sri Lanka. We took the opportunity to organize a lecture for her yesterday (14th July 2016) for the senior staff of the Department of Census and Statistics (DCS) Sri Lanka, as preamble to a longer discussion with the department to collaborate with LIRNEasia and our partners on big data and official statistics in Sri Lanka. Dr Arai’s talk was on her ongoing Dynamic Census research work in Bangladesh which utilizes mobile network big data and official statistics to provide spatio-temporal insights on the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the population at high granularity and high frequency. The slides from her talk are available HERE.
A special seminar on big data was recently organized as part of the 46th UN Statistical Commission meetings, which were held at the UN from 3-6 March 2015. ITU, which was participated in the seminar, mentioned LIRNEasia’s ongoing research on leveraging mobile network big data for development. LIRNEasia’s Team Leader for big data research, Sriganesh Lokanathan, was the main author on big data in ITU’s Measuring the Information Society 2014 report, which formed the foundation for ITU’s presentation at the event.