2017 ICT4D Conference

Over the past 20 years, IDMC has reported on displacement situations in 169 countries and territories around the world.

IDMC aims to increase his coverage and improve the accuracy of his displacement estimates by leveraging innovative technologies, tools and working methods, in line with our mandate and as requested by the UN General Assembly.

In January, we launched the #IDETECT challenge on the UN Unite Ideas platform to analyse “big data” to detect disaster and conflict-related displacement reported in the news and on social media. After mining one or more huge datasets of news, such as The GDELT Project, the European Media Monitor and social media platforms, IDMC will use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to filter and extract displacement-related data for subsequent human validation and supervised machine learning.

#IDETECT represents only one way we are exploring how innovative technologies can enhance and improve data collection.

In 2016, we began working on a new and improved version of our disaster-related displacement risk model. The new model is based on an analysis of hundreds of thousands of reported disaster events since 1970 across more than 90 countries, as well as simulated displacement projections for rarely occurring major hazards that must be accounted for but for which there is little or no existing empirical data.

In the future, IDMC will work with partners and use a range of techniques to detect displacement and estimate patterns from proxy indicators when no direct observational data is available. For example, by analysing satellite imagery, IDMC will estimate the scale of displacement based on the number of homes destroyed or the extent of land inundated by the construction of a dam.

In today’s world many internally displaced people remain invisible: technology can help ensure that “no one is left behind”.