A Conversation with Robert Kirkpatrick, Director of United Nations Global Pulse

You are director of United Nations Global Pulse, an initiative to leverage real-time data and analytics to monitor impacts of international and local shocks. How did the idea of Global Pulse come about? What is your mission statement?

The initial idea of Global Pulse came about in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. There was a recognition that we live in a hyper-connected world where information moves at the speed of light, and crises and vulnerabilities can emerge quickly, but we’re still using two- to three-year-old statistics to make most policy decisions. It was clear that there were swathes of people being pushed below the poverty line almost overnight, and we needed to modernize our systems and capacities for absorbing real-time information for decision-making.

As a result, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon established Global Pulse in 2009 to act as an innovation lab and catalyst for the United Nations. We bring together global development experts, as well as experts from academia and the private sector, to explore how analysis of big data can reveal faster insights about human well-being and emerging vulnerabilities, in order to better protect populations from hunger, poverty, and disease.

So Global Pulse’s mission is to accelerate the use of data science for sustainable development and humanitarian action, to address systemic barriers to adoption, and to cultivate a robust innovation ecosystem.

As the New York Times wrote in its August 2013 profile of Global Pulse, the United Nations is often perceived as a “sprawling bureaucracy.” What makes the Global Pulse team unique? What qualities—personal and professional—do you seek in a team member?

Global Pulse is unique because we have an “intrapreneurial” approach. It requires risk-taking and innovation to discover and generate new tools, techniques, and methodologies to help the UN system and wider community leverage new sources of real-time information and insights in the service of humanitarian response and development work. This also requires a real blend of expertise from within and outside of the UN. Due to the experimental nature of our work, we are set up as a network of labs.

We have multidisciplinary teams working at our Pulse Labs in New York, Jakarta, and Kampala that include data scientists and analysts, social scientists, legal experts, and communications and partnerships specialists. Pulse Lab teams design, scope, and co-create projects with UN agencies and national institutions that provide sectoral expertise, and with private sector or academic partners who provide access to data or analytical and engineering tools.

When building a team, I look for “T-shaped people”—that is, people with a broad range of skills and a flexible attitude, as well as deep knowledge of one discipline, whether it is data science, design, partnership management, or legal and privacy matters.

From what range of sources do you derive the data used for your analyses? Which datasets do you consider to be the most unique or surprising? What are the challenges associated with data collection and analysis?

Global Pulse is interested in trends that reveal something about human well-being, which can be revealed from data produced by people as they go about their daily lives (sometimes known as “data exhaust”). Broadly speaking, we have been exploring two types of data in the Pulse Labs. The first is data that reflects “what people say,” which includes publicly available content from the open web, such as tweets, blog posts, news stories, and so forth. The second is data that reflects “what people do,” which can include information routinely generated for business intelligence and to optimize sales in a private sector company. An example of “what people do” data is anonymized mobile phone traffic information, which can reveal everything from footfall in a shopping district during rush hour to how a population migrates after a natural catastrophe.

A dataset that may be surprising is postal data (the traffic and volume of packages being shipped), which can be used as a proxy for GDP and economic activity in a country or region. We are beginning...