Research Dive Alumni Meet Up Across Four Cities
Since the start of our Research Dive for Development in 2016, Pulse Lab Jakarta has organised a total of five research dives, each themed according to a specific development and humanitarian topic. Fashioned as a three-day, hackathon style event that takes place at the Lab, more than 100 participants to date from diverse professional backgrounds have joined us.
For this first reunion, we decided to do things differently… our team split up and ventured out to meet with past participants on their own turf in Bandung, Jakarta, Surabaya and Yogyakarta. Coordinated to all take place on the same day, dozens of alumni met up in these four locations to share updates on past and ongoing research, reminisce on their research stints at the Lab, as well as learn about some of Pulse Lab’s own research projects currently on the horizon.
The Research Dive initiative was conceptualised to broaden research engagement within the Big Data ecosystem, particularly among analysts, academics and practitioners. Based on our tally, participants from 85 universities, 12 government institutions and 5 research institutions/NGOs have taken part. We were also pleased to partner with private sector data partners, such as OLX Indonesia, Twitter, and PT Jasa Marga (Indonesia Highway Corp.), who were all generous to share selected anonymised datasets for us to research.
As its name suggests, a Research Dive centers on inviting participants to work as part of a small team, to immerse themselves into exploring different datasets, to conduct analyses using various approaches, and to uncover useful insights that may be used to inform policy discourse on the respective topics. Themes from the past dives include: computational linguistics and natural language processing (2016); image mining for disaster (2016); statistics for the Sustainable Development Goals (2017); trade and competitiveness (2017); and transportation (2017).
As customary, a technical report is produced for each Research Dive, which includes technical papers on methodologies, findings and recommendations put together by the teams. We are especially proud of some participants who have submitted their papers to national/international journals and conferences — the five papers listed below have so far been accepted. Hats off to those teams!
For Research Dive alumni who were unable to attend the meetups, we thought we’d share a few photographs from the reunion and our presentation slidedeck (it provides a recap of the event since its inception, along with details on past projects and upcoming initiatives).
Here are a few more snaps from the reunion:
This year, Pulse Lab Jakarta will continue its tradition of hosting Research Dives. The team at the Lab is in discussions with the UN Country Team, the Government of Indonesia and other stakeholders to identify priority topics for such research exploration. If you’re interested in becoming a data philanthropy partner and sharing your data to be analysed for social good, do contact us at plj@un.or.id.
Pulse Lab Jakarta is grateful for the generous support from the Government of Australia.
