Describing Patterns of Socio-Economic Development at Fine Spatial and Temporal Resolutions

Abstract

Our vision is to describe, at fine spatial and temporal scales, the nuances of socio-economic development taking place as measured through a mix of data sources including censuses and surveys, satellite data, agricultural commodity prices, and qualitative data from mass media and participatory media networks. Towards this goal, we intend to build a system that automatically pools data together from diverse data sources, detects noteworthy facts and trends from the data, describes them automatically in natural language, and surveys a large community of users to probe the observations in more detail.