For the April ABW Café, Senior Epidemiologist Victor del Rio Vilas will provide examples of approaches to processes and systems mapping in public health settings to aid decision making.

In honor of International Women's day happening this month, in this edition of the ABW Café we will hear about the presence of gender bias into the data pipeline from the founders of

The ABW annual conference is back!  After the success of last year's edition, we are happy to announce that the ABW annual conference will happen again this year on May 14th, 2024! 

For the second event of the ABW Café Series, we will hear more about the power of optimization from Prof. Joaquim Gromicho! The event will be held online on Zoom. 

In our inaugural addition on the 31st of January, we will hear from our managing director, Robert Monné, as he shares the ABW 2024 Strategic Plan and Outlook. This will be an opportunity to learn more about ABW’s mission, strategic plan, and outlook for 2024. Come see how you can get involved in 2024!

This talk with Prof. Maria Paola Scaparra from the University of Kent presents the findings of the GCRF-OSIRIS project, which aims at mitigating the social and economic impacts of floods in Vietnam cities through the identification of cost-efficient, long-term investments in structural flood protection measures.

Human donor milk is considered the ideal nutrition for millions of infants that are born preterm each year. The macronutrient content of donor milk is directly linked to infant brain development but can vary substantially across donations, which is why multiple donations are typically pooled together to create a final product. We propose a data-driven framework combining machine learning and optimization to predict macronutrient content of deposits and then optimally combine them in pools, respectively. In collaboration with our partner milk bank, we collect a data set of milk to train our predictive models. We rigorously simulate milk bank practices to fine-tune our optimization models. Finally, we conduct a yearlong trial implementation, where we observe the current nurse-led pooling practices followed by our intervention. Pools created by our approach meet clinical macronutrient targets approximately 31% more often than the baseline, while taking 60% less recipe creation time.

We are delighted to invite you to our upcoming conference on the impact of Analytics for a Better World (ABW), and to celebrate our upcoming 1 year anniversary. You're more than welcome to join us on 24 May 2023 for an inspiring and insightful event that will be held both onsite in Amsterdam and virtually. Our conference will bring together a group of inspiring speakers and panelist from our main stakeholders: nonprofits, researchers, and companies. Throughout the day, we will share our impact and progress with Analytics for a Better World and our plans for the coming years. We will also discuss the analytics impact projects that we and our network executed, along with the impact from the ABW Academy's fellowship that attracted many nonprofits from all over the world. Additionally, we will introduce our new sponsors and partners who contribute to ABW. Click here for the detailed programme of the day!

Over 8 million tons of plastic are poured in the seas every year, damaging entire ecosystems from the coastlines up to the open waters. Because of marine currents, a large fraction of this plastic then accumulates in specific areas of the oceans, such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) in the Pacific ocean. The Ocean Cleanup is a Dutch nonprofit whose mission is to clean up 90% of ocean plastic pollution. They have developed a technology similar to a fishing net to capture floating and have been operating in the GPGP since mid 2021. In collaboration with the Ocean Cleanup, we designed an efficient dynamic optimization algorithm to find routes in the GPGP that maximize the amount of plastic collected, while taking into account weather (wave height, wind speed) and plastic dynamics. Simulation showed that our optimization-based strategy nearly doubles the average plastic collection yield, thus accelerating the race to plastic-free oceans.

Smallholder farmers are among the most vulnerable communities in developing countries due to poverty and social exclusion, lacking a stable income due to inconsistent access to markets. Aiming to tackle rural poverty, Brazilian government established institutional markets for smallholder farmers to supply their produce to schools through a non-competitive bidding mechanism. Participation of farmers to these institutional markets remains still limited due to challenges in the evaluation of the profitability of participating to each call of the bidding mechanism and in the planning and coordination of the distribution activities. A decision support system (DSS) was developed to guide farmers on the different stages of the institutional markets participation, including the definition of the optimal strategies for bidding and contract acceptance, as well as the optimisation of the distribution activities through a Heterogeneous Fleet Split Delivery Vehicle Routing Problem, aiming to maximise the profits for farmers. The DSS was applied to the case study of Canudos settlement (Goiás state) and is progressively being embedded in Progressive Web Apps to maximise its real-life impact. The proposed approach has a significant social impact for 1.5 million vulnerable smallholder farmers in Brazil and can substantially improve their living conditions by providing security of income and reducing poverty, thus strengthening inclusive agricultural growth.