Title:Using technology ‘to improve the world’

Georgetown has launched a new approach for modeling forced displacement out of the Massive Data and Displacement (MaDD) project. By investigating search trends and social media clues, the MaDD project aims to identify indirect indicators of forced migration to help relief agencies and organizations prepare for or prevent humanitarian disasters before they unfold.

The School of Foreign Service’s Institute for the Study of International Migration and the McCourt School of Public Policy’s Massive Data Institute (MDI), in partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, are collaborating to execute MaDD’s multidisciplinary research.

“We are striving to understand forced displacement globally in a timely way to provide useful evidence to governments, states, and agencies who can develop policies and plans around the possibility of [forced mass-migration] happening so that people don’t have to fully leave their homes,” says Katharine Donato, the Donald G. Herzberg Professor of International Migration at Georgetown, who co-leads the program in partnership with fellow professors and Sonneborn Chairs for Interdisciplinary Collaboration Lisa Singh and Ali Arab.

The MaDD project first studied internal displacement in Iraq, showing a strong correlation between Twitter use data, newspaper data, and the International Organization for Migration internal displacement data.

“Our hybrid approach blends conventional and organic data into a modeling framework designed to understand and forecast forced displacement,” says Ali Arab, professor and director of graduate studies for the College of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

MaDD researchers now consider indirect indicators of forced migration in timely data from social media, Google trends, newspapers, and other sites to create statistical models, data sets, and new migration theories.

“One of my favorite parts of this project is engaging students,” says Lisa Singh, computer science professor in the College of Arts & Sciences and professor and director of the MDI in the McCourt School of Public Policy. “Having them think about the connection between computer science, data science, and migration has been profoundly fun. It has helped [students] think about how they can use technology to improve the world they live in.”

At Georgetown, more than 20 students and four postdocs have worked with MaDD studying forced mass-migration, gaining hands-on research skills.

The project team understands that using social media posts and other organic data sets has limitations, biases, and ethical concerns. “The only thing we can do well, I think—as academics and researchers—is reflect on what the ethical implications are of what we’re doing and make it harder for those who might use [our data] for purposes that are negative,” says Donato.

“Our research is a great example of how we’re using innovative new computer science to improve our understanding of forced displacement and hopefully improve the lives of those who are being displaced,” says Singh.