10 of the most exciting technology projects in Vodafone - Day 3

This week we are revealing some of the most exciting technology projects taking place in Vodafone right now. Today we’ll be looking at two projects that benefit from processing significant amounts of data:

5) DreamLab by Alyssa Jones, Head of Vodafone Australia Foundation

The Vodafone Foundation’s DreamLab app is aiding cancer research.

The DreamLab app was first launched in Australia to help the Garvan Institute for Medical Research to harness the collective processing power of smartphones while they’re charging (usually at night, while the user is asleep).

Research being undertaken by the Garvan Institute into the causes of cancer requires huge amounts of data processing power. The app has enabled researchers to process data twice as fast.

The Vodafone Foundation’s longer-term vision is to extend the potential for DreamLab by promoting it in various Vodafone markets in order to grow a large international base of ‘dreamers’ providing significant computing power, so that researchers all over the globe undertaking cancer research can take advantage of this resource.

6) Big data for public health - Nuria Oliver, Vodafone’s Group Director of Research in Data Science

The analysis of ‘big data’ (large-scale, anonymised data sets) is profoundly changing the world. Aside from applications within our own company, Vodafone’s data scientists are also working on projects analysing how big data can be used to provide decision support to tackle problems of societal importance.

We recently worked with King’s College London to predict the wellbeing of individuals in the UK based upon where they live and work. The project maintained the highest privacy and security standards in line with our global privacy policy.

We used data from the Office for National Statistics, which surveys wellbeing through four measures: life satisfaction; sense of worth; happiness; and anxiety level. We also used Foursquare data and large, anonymised mobile usage data sets.

Our machine learning-based predictive models indicated that people with the highest wellbeing are likely to live near pubs and those with the lowest wellbeing near offices and fried chicken restaurants.

A better understanding of wellbeing can assist people as they make life choices. Imran Khan, the student from King’s College London who initiated the research project, has now joined Vodafone as a data scientist and in the future, we would like to expand this study to analyse human behavioural factors that play a role on wellbeing.