July 30, 2014
LIDS alum Kush Varshney is the winner of the KDD “Best Social Good Paper”. Kush and his collaborator volunteered with the nonprofit organization GiveDirectly which operates in Kenya and Uganda and aims to help people living in extreme poverty. In this volunteer project, they created an algorithm that uses satellite images to help staff more efficiently identify villages in need. For more details, please see the announcement, read their paper "Targeting Direct Cash Transfers to the Extremely Poor", or watch their presentation: