Unlike other initiatives, which have mostly focused on pilots to demonstrate the value of Big Data to better understand humanitarian disasters, Magic Box goes one step further. It combines real-time data sms gateway finland sourced from the private sector with other existing public data sets relating to climate, GIS (UNICEF’s Geographic Information System), and socioeconomic and epidemiological data. By unlocking the value of this real-time data, UNICEF can optimise its response to public health emergencies and natural disasters – protecting children and saving lives in an increasingly unpredictable world.
Figure 1: Unicef demo showing mobile communications in Colombia.
By means of an Application Programming Interface (API), companies are able to share their anonymised and aggregated datasets in the Magic Box platform, where, once combined with public data sets, provides insights for emergencies.
At the Mobile World Congress, we will be demonstrating the first pilot of this partnership, where mobile network data from Colombia will be used to show how data can be analysed to improve the management of humanitarian disasters, providing alarms, and supporting critical response and recovery monitoring. The natural disasters include an earthquake, a landslide and a flood. They were analysed for this first project, using mobile usage data per antenna (e.g. number of calls, megabytes and SMS) and mobility data to understand human movement. You can see a short taster of the demo here:
Our VP for Big Data for Social Good, Richard Benjamins, stated: “ So far we have seen a wide range of pilots which show that Big Data can be a force for good, however, we now need to shift from pilots and ‘one-offs’ to real operative systems which provide a continuous data feed.
