Orange’s « Data for Development » Challenge rewards the research center U897 !

The ERIAS “Computer research applied to health” emerging team from the research center U897 “Epidemiology and biostatistics” is the winner of the Practical application prize, in the Method category, awarded by an international jury of experts selected by Orange for the 2^nd edition of its challenge “Data for Development” (D4D) dedicated this year to Senegal*.

Frantz Thiessard, the team director, and Gayo Diallo, team member and associate professor in Computer Science at university of Bordeaux (Institute of Public Health), went to Cambridge, near Boston on April 10^th to receive their prize with all the other winners, from the well-known MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) during the D4D session which closed the international NetMob conference 2015, dedicated to mobile phones data analysis.
The study, jointly conducted by  University of Bordeaux with Aalto University (Finland), University Tunis El Manar (Tunisia) and Old Dominion University (VMACS laboratory, USA), addresses the issue of using Big Call Detail Records (CDR) data as a tool in the service of public health policies.
Crossing the location of 40 hospitals in 14 areas in Senegal with the analysis of data extracted from one year Orange users’ mobility dataset in Senegal, the study helped to identify the areas in which the absence of a nearest hospital can result in death or serious sequelae in case of Stroke or Myocardial Infarction. The application developped appears as a strong help for public health authorities in Senegal and feed the reflection about the investments priorisation.
With this prize, the ERIAS research group takes over from a IBM Ireland team awarded in the same category during the last 2013 D4D edition.

*D4D Challenge Senegal was launched under the patronage of the Senegalese Ministry of Higher education and Research, and ran from 2014 to April 2015. Anonymised data were made available to over 150 research laboratories. Organised around five themes (health, agriculture, transportation / urban planning, energy and national statistics), the Challenge aims to help organisations to produce solutions for the purpose of societal development and the welfare of the populations.