User:Vipul/United Nations Global Pulse

The United Nations Global Pulse is an initiative of the United Nations that attempts to "bring real-time monitoring and prediction to development and aid programs."

History and activities
The United Nations Global Pulse was launched in 2009 as an information initiative by the Executive Office of the United Nations Secretary-General. In August 2013, the New York Times reported that Global Pulse had its main laboratory in New York City, with a staff of 11 there, plus a staff of 7 in their lab in Jakarta, Indonesia, and a planned new lab in Kampala, Uganda. The website lists the following three objectives of the initiative:


 * 1) Increasing the number of Big Data for Development (BD4D) innovation success cases
 * 2) Lowering systemic barriers to big data for development adoption and scaling
 * 3) Strengthening cooperation between the big data for development ecosystem

The data sources that Global Pulse has investigated include:


 * 1) Online content: Public news stories, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, obituaries, birth announcements, job postings, e- commerce, etc.
 * 2) Data exhaust: Anonymized data generated through the use of services such as telecommunications, mobile banking, online search, hotline usage, transit, etc.
 * 3) Physical sensors - Satellite imagery, video, traffic sensors, etc.
 * 4) Crowdsourced reports - Information actively produced or submitted by citizens through mobile phone-based surveys, user generated maps, etc.

The director of the initiative is Robert Kirkpatrick and the deputy director is Makena Walker.

Media coverage
The United Nations Global Pulse has been discussed repeatedly in The Guardian  and Foreign Policy. It has also received in-depth coverage in the New York Times, O'Reilly Media, and United Nations Radio. It has also been mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article about Teradata and a TechCrunch article about a Drupal-based web platform.