News Emily Aiken

New paper published in Scientific Reports on differentially private mobility data for humanitarian response.

Upcoming talks @ CMU Africa: Panel on AI in Africa (Nov. 14 at 4:30pm, virtual), panel on AI ethics at DevFest Kigali (Nov 16 at 3:30pm), and public research talk for CMU students (Nov. 25 at 12:30pm).

New paper, led by Zoe Kahn, on perspectives on privacy and mobile phone data in rural Togo accepted at CSCW (2025).

I will give a talk at the workshop on digital technologies and sustainable development at Oxford on Oct. 2.

I have accepted a postdoc fellowship at CMU Africa (2024-2025) and an assistant professorship at UC San Diego (starting January 2026, jointly appointed in data science and public policy)!

I will give a talk at the Oxford Economics Research Jamboree on June 20.

I finished my PhD at the UC Berkeley School of Information!

I will give a talk on data-driven and community-based poverty targeting in Bangladesh at PacDev '24.

I will give a research talk and be on a panel at the NeurIPS workshop on computational sustainability.

I was selected as a rising star in data science by the University of Chicago.

I will give a talk at NEUDC '23 on updating proxy-means tests.

Two posters at EAAMO '23 (updating proxy-means tests and fairness in satellite-based poverty prediction). I am also co-organizing a tutorial on AI for social impact.

I will present our work on impact evaluation with digital data at the World/Bank Georgetown poverty conference honoring Martin Ravallion.

Three new working papers out, on (1) estimating cash impacts with digital data, (2) constructing differentially private mobility matrices, and (3) updating proxy-means tests.

I'm attending COMPASS '23! Our paper on proxy means test updating is in Session 6 (4:50pm on Thursday) and I'll be presenting my dissertation research in the doctoral consortium.

I will give a talk on impact evaluation from digital data at the HBS Workshop on the Future of AI and Economics on July 31.

I am co-organizing a session on digital data at the World Bank/GIZ Global Forum on Adaptive Social Protection.

I will be at ICLR '23. Find our work presented at the workshop on Practical ML for Development (10:15am on Friday) and the workshop on ML for Remote Sensing (3pm on Friday).

Our paper on fairness in satellite-based poverty mapping was accepted at IJCAI '23!

I coauthored a policy review paper for GIZ on digital data in social protection. We will present the report in a public webinar on April 25.

Two workshop papers accepted at ICLR 2023: An oral presentation on our work on fairness in satellite-based poverty prediction at ML for Remote Sensing and an oral presentation on active learning at Practical ML for Development.

Our paper on phone-based hybrid approaches to ultra-poverty targeting in Afghanstian was published in the Journal of Development Economics.

I wrote an article for UNDP's Policy in Focus magazine on mobile phones and cash transfers in Togo.

Our short paper on adaptive sampling for poverty prediction was accepted to the NeurIPS workshop on AI for humanitarian assistance and disaster response (AI+HADR '22).

I will present our work on impact evaluation from digital data at CODE@MIT and the UPenn Big Data for Development and Governance Conference.

I will present our work on fairness in satellite-based poverty mapping at the KDD Workshop on Humanitarian Mapping.

Our paper on phone sharing won the best paper award at COMPASS '22!

We had a paper and a poster accepted at COMPASS '22.

I will give a talk and a tutorial on satellite-based poverty mapping at MeasureDev 2022.

We released cider, an open source python library for poverty targeting with satellite imagery and phone data. Cider was reviewed by the UN Center for Humanitarian Data.

Our paper was selected for the cover of the March 29 print issue of Nature!

Our paper on AI targeting of humanitarian aid in Togo was published in Nature! We also wrote a feature on our work for The Conversation, and it was covered in an article for Berkeley's Divison of Computing, Data Science, and Society.

Our work on AI targeting of COVID-19 cash transfers with the government of Togo and GiveDirectly recieved a Paris Peace Forum award and a South by Southwest Innovation Award.

I will give a keynote at the NeurIPS workshop on AI for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response (AI+HADR 2021).

I received a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship for 2022-2024!

I presented our work on targeting aid with mobile phone data at IPA's Methods and Measurement Conference and CEGA's Evidence to Action Conference.

Our paper on targeting humanitarian aid in Togo was selected for presentation at TCD/CEPR Workshop in Development Economics 2021.

Our paper on targeting humanitarian aid in Togo was selected for presentation at NBER Economics of AI 2021.

Our work on targeting cash transfers in Togo was covered in Wired, NPR, BBC, FastCompany, and Reuters.

I presented our work on targeting cash transfers in Togo at Good Tech Fest 2021 with Han Sheng Chia from GiveDirectly.

Our work on targeting aid with mobile phone data in Afghanistan was covered in The Economist.