Finding correlations between objects detected in Street View images and socio-economic outcomes in an urban environment. Wandering through the streets of London, we often have quite a good intuition for whether a certain part of the city is well-off or not. Whether it’s the number of fancy cars, people in suits, or the density of Waitrose supermarkets, we find that …

My most treasured memories of childhood go back to the times my friends and I played in our backyards or on our streets. During the summer, we played outdoors every single day. We made up our plays, rode our bikes, played hopscotch, and made new friends. Watching cartoons was limited to a maximum of one hour per day. However, things …

By Abosede Sarah Alli and Jacob Doku Tetteh The 2019 Planetary Health Alliance (PHA) Annual Meeting held at Stanford University, California, USA brought together about 500 participants from more than 40 countries united by a common goal of building a strong, global and interdisciplinary community mobilized for urgent and equitable planetary health action. The PHA is a consortium of over …

We’ve just returned from Xiamen, an island off the coast of Southern China, where we attended the 2019 International Conference on Urban Health (ICUH), “People-Oriented Urbanisation: Transforming Cities for Health and Well-Being”. The conference brought more than 300 experts from 50 countries together and focused on cities as the main drivers for tackling the global sustainable development agenda. ICUH is …

Through my involvement with the Pathways to Equitable Healthy Cities project and internship through the Queen Elizabeth Scholars program, I was able to travel to both Accra and Nairobi this past summer to explore the topics of health equity and population health in two different urban health contexts. Pathways Meeting and Thesis Work in Accra, Ghana At the end of …

At the end of August this year I visited Kenyatta University in Nairobi. Partly because I’ve always wanted to travel to Kenya, partly because I was co-organising a workshop there and most of all, because, for anyone interested in Data Science, Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Africa, The Deep Learning Indaba is the place to be. An indaba …

Today I arrived home to find my five-year-old deeply engaged in a new activity. This endeavor required creativity, physical strength, balance, concentration, goal-setting and persistence. It does not have a formal name, is not a part of any physical education program, required no special equipment and was his own, unprompted innovation. Observing, I could see how it could contribute to …

What is co-production? There are many definitions of co-production of knowledge, a term that is not new yet has recently climbed agendas to become a buzzword in the research and development world. Co-production means collaboration between researchers from different disciplines, policymakers and people affected by the research to jointly identify issues, suggest solutions and implement them. It is based on …

“It is so loud sometimes I cannot hear myself think”: that is what one Accra resident tells me in response to the noise in their neighborhood when the team and I approach them to discuss installing air and noise pollution monitoring equipment on their property. Focus on noise pollution in sub-Saharan African (SSA) cities as a public health risk is …

In our fast urbanising world, an estimated 4.2 billion people live in cities. Although those of us who live in cities are generally wealthier and healthier than those living in rural areas, in large cities like London the rich and the poor end up living side by side in very different conditions. These different living conditions determine people’s quality of …