my Marge was in the middle of a
nationwide census its first one in 30
years suddenly the advanced technology
backbone of the entire census completely
failed any guesses
this technology pencils the country had
run out of pencils an emergency
international procurement of 170,000
pencils was made an entire workforce was
hired just that they could sharpen
pencils fast enough so that the census
could be completed on time and when the
data from the Census finally came in the
country was in for a big shock mine ma
had previously thought its population
with 60 million people when the data
came in turned out there were only 51
million people in Myanmar the government
had been planning every budget every
intervention for 9 million people 15
percent of its population that just did
not exist sounds like a story from the
early 1900’s right after all today we
live in the world of unprecedented big
data the world of Facebook Twitter
Google this was the year 2014 2014 the
same year the Germany use big data to
win the FIFA World Cup it’s crazy how
big data is used today to solve some
kinds of problems and not others as a
college student in Singapore I interned
at Goldman Sachs where I saw how
real-time data was used every second to
make both important and not so important
decisions in the finance world but
whatever other was worth like health
care education environment crime data
just isn’t used in the same way and so
my co-founder Warren and I founded
social cops to empower our world leaders
with the information that they need in
real time to make some of the most
complex decisions facing our world we
move to India after we graduated and
spent an entire you’re doing pilots to
try and understand
it was so easy to use data and football
but not in decisions that mattered we
found that the single biggest bottleneck
was the data itself in most places in
the developing world data is still
recorded on registers like these most of
this data will never make it to a
digital format even if this data does
make a to a digital format
it’s often thought like this
unstructured local language impossible
to extract and even if the data somehow
does make it to a consumable format it’s
often stored in siloed disconnected
systems that just never talk to each
other for example the district of Nagpur
alone in Maharashtra has 32 different
health data systems and just when you
think that it can’t get worse it does
the first time that we match two
datasets at a village level in India
imagine this table with village names
table with village names join the two
tables sounds really simple right we got
a 15 percent match why because in a
country like India one data set would
call Mumbai Mumbai the other Bombay one
data set would spell pomper now with OB
the other pompona with appeal matching
these data sets together is a complete
nightmare it was as a search to a
solution to some of these problems that
a data Intelligence Platform at social
Cox was born we believe that if we could
somehow bring together all of these data
sets and showcase it to decision-makers
in an easy intuitive fashion it would
help them make more accurate data-driven
decisions now well as an organization
our focus is to empower leaders and
decision-makers behind each of these
decisions each of these data points are
people people whom we may somehow
sometimes never know people like Sunita
Sunita is a 35 year old woman mother
go cooks for her children morning and
night her equipment this this is a Chula
traditional firewood that’s used in many
parts of rural India cooking on a Chula
is equal to smoking 400 cigarettes and
other but the only alternative for
Sunita is to leave her remote tribal
village walk 20 kilometres to the
nearest LPG gas centre pick up a 14 kilo
gas cylinder put it on her head and walk
back to her home it was in order to
ensure that Sunita and millions of women
like her get easy access to clean
cooking fuel that the Ministry of
Petroleum and the three oil companies in
India decided to open the next 10,000
LPG centers to identify where these LPG
centers should be opened they partnered
with us now we have to consider several
things on one side these LPG centers
were operated by a small entrepreneurs
and so they needed to be profitable and
sustainable on the other hand we needed
to ensure that every one of the 1.2
billion people living in India get
access to an LPG Center within 10
kilometers of their homes now usually
this decision would take over two years
involve thousands of field officers and
hands on maps like these we wanted to
transform the way this decision was made
through a data Intelligence Platform we
started by bringing together the data
that we already had we partnered with
the oil companies and pulled together
data from scattered internal data
systems about sales and profitability
and supply demand a number of consumers
but typical market data would only care
about profitability it would never put
an IP G center near Sunita’s home and so
we mapped every one of India six hundred
and forty thousand villages every dot on
the screen is a village in India we
project together with six hundred
external data sources about population
as
infrastructure LPG penetration and just
when we thought that we had all the data
we needed we realized we didn’t we
didn’t actually know the exact locations
of the existing LPG centers and so
within a month seventeen thousand
distributors across India downloaded our
Android app submitted their location
coordinates and map every LPG Center in
the country and with that we finally had
all the data that we needed but it
wasn’t enough now we actually had to
make these data sets talk to each other
this is where the intelligence of a
platform kicked in so it knows that Palm
Bay changes name to Mumbai in 1995 and
pompona is often spiritus you know
pumper now by many people using all
these intelligent algorithms we were
finally able to bring all of this data
together and make a talk to each other
and now the last step do we actually
open their Fiji centers I’m zooming into
the district’s under guard one of 640 in
India the one that Sunita lives in these
are all the LPG distribution centers in
the district these are all the villages
in Sondergaard now some of these
villages already have access to LPG
centers these are the ones that we need
to provide access to now where is the
ideal LPG center ideally a place that is
centrally accessible a marketplace that
Sunita already travels to it should have
maybe a bank or an ATM good electricity
good infrastructure a good road so that
the truck could easily go in and out it
was all of these factors that our
algorithm used to compute volumes of
data and pinpoint the exact final
locations to open LPG centers and that’s
how a Center was commissioned in the
village guru India just four kilometers
this is a picture Sunita when she got a
TV in her house for the first time she
for the past three years at social cops
we’ve had a chance to leverage our data
intelligence platform and transform the
way organizations make decisions from
anvil strategic plans to real-time
course corrections today a Union
Minister is using a platform to track a
national program every day every morning
on his tablet an FMCG company is
prioritizing 2,000 locations out of
200,000 to run an ice cream campaign a
philanthropic foundation is targeting an
eight million dollar investment in
agriculture and district collectors
across India supported by the Tata
trusts are targeting government benefits
to citizens who need them the most
imagine a world a world where we can
capture criminals at the scene of crime
not yours later a world where we could
predict if a child is going to drop out
of school before even she knows it a
world where we can reroute cars in real
time to prevent the traffic congestion
that we all hate so much a world where
we can eradicate a disease as it breaks
out not thousands of deaths later a
world where data is not just used to
incorrectly predict the next president
but where we use data to truly improve
the lives of billions of people thank you