Activities and services

Activities and services

Agenda

ABW Café Series: Objective data? A discussion on the ways gender bias can creep into the data pipeline
With Myrthe Blösser and Paulina von Stackelberg from FemData
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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
ABW 2024 Conference
Join the third edition of the annual Analytics for a Better World Conference!
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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! 
ABW Café Series: What Are Optimal Locations? Showcasing the Power of Optimization with Prof. Joaquim Gromicho
ABW Café Series
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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. 
ABW Café Series: ABW 2024 Strategy and Outlook with Robert Monné
ABW Café Series
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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!
Research Meetup 15 – Enhancing Flood Resilience and Sustainable Development in Vietnam
With Prof. Maria Paola Scaparra
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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.
Research meetup 14 – Got (optimal) milk?
Timothy Chan (University of Toronto)
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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.
ABW Conference 2023
ABW Second Annual Conference
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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!
Research meetup 13 – Cleaning Up Oceans from Plastic Faster with Optimization
Jean Pauphilet (London Business School)
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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.
Research meetup 12 – Supporting Brazilian Smallholder Farmers to Distribute their Produce through Institutional Markets
Andrea Tuni (Politecnico di Torino)
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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.
Research meetup 11 – Reshaping National Organ Allocation Policy
Nikos Trichakis (MIT)
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The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) is overhauling its organ allocation policies in a generational change, aiming for more efficient and equitable outcomes. We introduce a novel analytical framework to enable dynamic exploration of the efficient frontier of policy options. Jointly with OPTN, we applied our framework to the design of a new allocation policy for lungs, which was eventually approved for implementation. From 2023, all lungs in the U.S. will be allocated according to the said policy, projected to reduce waitlist mortality by >20% compared to current policy. (joint work with Ted Papalexopoulos, Dimitris Bertsimas, James Alcorn, Rebecca Goff and Darren Stewart)
Research meetup 10 – Learning and Planning Under Uncertainty for Wildlife Conservation
Lily Xu (Harvard University)
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Wildlife poaching fuels the multi-billion dollar illegal wildlife trade and pushes countless species to the brink of extinction. To aid rangers in preventing poaching in protected areas around the world, we have developed PAWS, the Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security. We present technical advances in multi-armed bandits and robust sequential decision-making using reinforcement learning, with research questions that emerged from on-the-ground challenges. We also discuss bridging the gap between research and practice, presenting results from field tests in Cambodia and large-scale deployment through integration with SMART, the leading software system for protected area management used by over 1,000 wildlife parks worldwide.
Analytics for a Better World – Launch Conference
Bringing together our key partners
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We are organising a launching conference to bring together our key partners, researchers and (potential) sponsors. Our aim is to inspire each other, share ABW’s vision and plans and explore opportunities for collaboration.
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