The Orange D4D Senegal Challenge
- Details
- Written by Daouda Niang Diatta
The Orange D4D (Data for Development) Senegal Challenge.
The Orange "Data for Development" (D4D Senegal) challenge was an open innovation data challenge on anonymous call patterns of Orange’s mobile phone users in Senegal. The goal of the challenge was to help address society development questions in novel ways by contributing to the socio-economic development and well-being of the Senegalese population. Participants to the challenge are given access to four mobile phone datasets. The datasets are based on Call Detail Records (CDR) of phone calls and text exchanges between more than 9 million of Orange’s customers in Senegal between January 1, 2013 to December 31, 2013. In order to contribute to this challenge, an international research team, in which some NLAGA members have participated, have been built. The research project proposed by the team for this challenge is called SPOT (Spatial Planning and Optimization Technologies). It can be briefly described
as a set of mathematical optimization techniques and algorithms exploiting the datasets for taking better urban planning decisions. It can be traced to two previous projects dealing with similar topics :
- DAMA : funded by PREDIT (France, see http://tra2014.traconference.eu/papers/pdfs/TRA2014_Fpaper_20017.pdf)
- ORTRANS : funded by Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF, see https://www.auf.org/actualites/un-projet-finance-par-lauf-remporte-le-prix-D4D/)
After an open and hard competition, SPOT has been picked out as one of the winner of the data crossing prize of the challenge. On behalf of the D4D selection committee, it has been selected for a presentation at Boston on April the 10th, 2015 during a special session on the results obtained for this challenge at the NetMob (Analysis of Mobile Phone Datasets and Networks) Conference 2015 at the MIT MediaLab.
For additional details about this prize, see :
- the D4D challenge website : http://www.d4d.orange.com/fr/Accueil
- the SPOT article : https://www.dropbox.com/s/lxa9fe4dx0kkpmc/SPOT_D4D_SENEGAL_REPORT_V1.pdf?dl=0
- the netmob conference website : http://www.netmob.org/
The SPOT team is composed of :
- Serigne Gueye (SPOT project leader) : University of Avignon (UAPV), Laboratoire d'Informatique d'Avignon (LIA), France.
- Babacar M. Ndiaye (Task 6 coordinator of the NLAGA project) : UCAD, LMDAN, Senegal .
- Didier Josselin : UMR Espace – Equipe Avignon, France.
- Michael Poss : CNRS, LIRMM, Avignon, France
- Roger M. Faye : UCAD, ESP Dakar, LTI, Senegal.
- Philippe Michelon : UAPV, LIA, France.
- Cyrille Genre-Grandpierre : UMR Espace – Equipe, Avignon, France.
- Francesco Ciari : Institute for Transport Planning and Systems (IVT), Zurich, Switzerland.
- Mouhammadou A.M.T Baldé : UCAD, LMDAN, Senegal.
- Diaraf Seck (NLAGA project leader) : UCAD, LMDAN, Senegal.