UN Global Pulse & DataSift Announce Data Philanthropy Partnership

NEW YORK, NY and SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jul 2, 2014) -  United Nations Global Pulse and DataSift, the world's only independent provider of social data, today announced a global partnership that will allow the UN to gain real-time insights into the well-being of people all over the world.

Global Pulse's data scientists working in innovation labs in New York (US), Jakarta (Indonesia) and Kampala (Uganda) will use the DataSift platform to analyze data from millions of public social media posts to tackle issues such as disease outbreaks, unemployment and food security.

The partnership will help the Global Pulse Labs develop innovative use cases and address challenges around using social data analysis for global development and humanitarian issues.

Research projects utilizing the DataSift platform include:

• Examining attitudes toward immunization in order to improve the success of vaccination campaigns, and prevent the spread of deadly diseases.
• Utilizing social media data as a means to gain insights on global public opinion and priorities as related to the Millennium Development Goals.
• Understanding families' coping mechanisms when faced with rapid increases in the price of staple foodstuffs.

"The DataSift platform enables the real-time feedback, flexibility and scale Pulse Labs needs to understand social conversations to address a variety of issues," said Robert Kirkpatrick, Director of Global Pulse. "This has enabled us to create new techniques and methods that give development practitioners the valuable insights needed to improve the well-being of communities all over the world."

"The mission of the UN Global Pulse team is social good of the highest order and we are honored to partner with them," said Rob Bailey, CEO of DataSift. "DataSift is excited to be out front in this new era in applying big data tools and technologies to address global humanitarian issues."

To see a live example of Global Pulse and DataSift project work, please visit http://post2015.unglobalpulse.net/.

About DataSift
DataSift Inc. is the leading social data platform with more than 1,000 customers in 40+ countries. DataSift is driving a revolution in corporate decision-making by making it easy for applications to incorporate the use of real time and historical Social data intelligently and easily into data analysis. The DataSift platform enables companies to easily aggregate, filter and extract useful data from the billions of public social conversations on Twitter, other leading social networks and millions of other sources. DataSift powers hundreds of applications across a wide variety of industries including retail, telco, high tech, consumer packaged goods and agencies. DataSift has offices in San Francisco, New York, Canada, and Reading, U.K. For more information, visit www.datasift.com and follow us on Twitter @datasift.

About Global Pulse
Global Pulse is a special initiative of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon established in 2009. Global Pulse functions as an innovation lab for the United Nations system, accelerating discovery, development and adoption of big data innovation for sustainable development and humanitarian action. For more information, visit www.unglobalpulse.org or follow on Twitter @UNGlobalPulse.