Proceedings of KDD 2020 Workshop on Data-driven Humanitarian Mapping: Harnessing Human-Machine Intelligence for High-Stake Public Policy and Resilience Planning

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of data science methodologies that combine human and machine intelligence to improve high-stakes public policy and resilience planning for vulnerable communities affected by global crises.

Contribution

It introduces the Data-driven Humanitarian Mapping Research Program aimed at creating ethical, fair, and effective data science tools for humanitarian efforts.

Findings

Proposes a new research program for data-driven humanitarian mapping

Highlights challenges of bias and ethics in data science for humanitarian use

Emphasizes the importance of human-machine collaboration in policy planning

Abstract

Humanitarian challenges, including natural disasters, food insecurity, climate change, racial and gender violence, environmental crises, the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, human rights violations, and forced displacements, disproportionately impact vulnerable communities worldwide. According to UN OCHA, 235 million people will require humanitarian assistance in 2021 . Despite these growing perils, there remains a notable paucity of data science research to scientifically inform equitable public policy decisions for improving the livelihood of at-risk populations. Scattered data science efforts exist to address these challenges, but they remain isolated from practice and prone to algorithmic harms concerning lack of privacy, fairness, interpretability, accountability, transparency, and ethics. Biases in data-driven methods carry the risk of amplifying inequalities in high-stakes policy decisions that impact the livelihood of millions of people. Consequently, proclaimed benefits of data-driven innovations remain inaccessible to policymakers, practitioners, and marginalized communities at the core of humanitarian actions and global development. To help fill this gap, we propose the Data-driven Humanitarian Mapping Research Program, which focuses on developing novel data science methodologies that harness human-machine intelligence for high-stakes public policy and resilience planning. The proceedings of the 1st Data-driven Humanitarian Mapping workshop at the 26th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, August 24th, 2020.