Data-driven Humanitarian Mapping: Harnessing Human-Machine Intelligence for High-Stake Public Policy and Resilience Planning

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. 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. 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 address 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. As a part of the initiative, we host the second KDD workshop to continue fostering a global community of researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to advance a commonly shared data science research agenda for just humanitarian actions, resilience planning, and sustainable development. We envision the Data-driven Humanitarian Mapping will bring in new paradigms for equitable data science and policy decision-making while helping create a sustainable world.