Abstract: Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks provide advertisers with “audience estimates” on how many of their users match certain targeting criteria. These estimates are usually used for budget planning and include targeting criteria such as (i) countries a user has lived in, (ii) their gender, and (iii) the type of mobile device they use. In this talk I report on how we work with UN agencies and other partners to use this type of information to monitoring international migration, track digital gender gaps and map poverty. I’ll also discuss some observations around sudden fluctuations in the number of daily active users which seem to be related to temporary country-level blocks of these platforms.

Ingmar Weber is the research director of the Social Computing Group at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI). His interdisciplinary research looks at what online user-generated data can tell us about the offline world and society at large. Prior to joining QCRI, Dr Weber was a researcher at Yahoo Research Barcelona. He holds a BA & Ma from Cambridge and did his PhD at the Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science. He's an ACM Distinguished Speaker and a IEEE and AAAI Senior Member.