ECR Event

The pre-conference workshop on Monday 22 June will focus on grant writing and communicating research to non-academics.

The grant writing session will walk ECRs through the process of writing a successful funding application, and will speak to questions around how to tailor writing to specific funder, and Call, priorities.

The communicating research session will provide attendees with the opportunity to pitch ideas to, and receive feedback from, a diverse range of practitioners in a Dragon’s Den style session.

In preparation for the Dragon’s Den, ECRs should draw on their current or future research plans and prepare—in advance of the workshop—a 3-minute pitch to present to a panel of practitioners. The pitch should not exceed 3 minutes, and will be followed by:

• Q&A from the audience (i.e., other ECRs)
• Feedback from the panel of 4/5 practitioners

The post-conference workshop on Wednesday 24 June (PM) and Thursday 25 June (AM), will combine conceptual foundations with hands-on experience in the use of satellite and digital trace data to detect and interpret patterns of mobility, illicit economic activity, and territorial control in fragile and conflict-affected environments, with clear applications to national security research and policy.

Dr Xiao Hui Tai will draw on her research to show how labour markets, conflict, and illicit economies intersect in ways that matter for security and stability. Seasonal migration plays a critical role in sustaining rural livelihoods, yet in conflict zones these labour flows are often assumed to collapse under violence. Focusing on Afghanistan in the 8-year period prior to the Taliban’s takeover in 2021, Dr Tai will demonstrate how new data can overturn this assumption. Using satellite imagery, she infers the timing and scale of the opium poppy harvest, which employs a large number of seasonal workers in relatively well-paid jobs. She then combines this with nationwide mobile phone records to characterize how migration relates to this harvest, and examine whether and how violence and civil conflict disrupt this migration. The findings challenge conventional wisdom: on average, districts with high levels of poppy cultivation receive significantly more seasonal migrants than districts with no poppy cultivation. These labour flows are surprisingly resilient to idiosyncratic violent events at the source or destination, including extreme violence resulting in large numbers of fatalities. However, seasonal migration is affected by longer-term patterns of conflict, such as the extent of Taliban control in origin and destination locations. This work offers new insights into how insurgent governance, illicit economies and civilian mobility interact, and illustrates how satellite and digital trace data can open otherwise inaccessible conflict environments to rigorous analysis.

This workshop will walk through the use of satellite imagery to estimate the timing of agricultural activity. The use of satellite imagery has proliferated in academic research, seeing wide-ranging research applications, from the use of nighttime lights to track economic activity and urban growth, to the monitoring of war destruction, displacement, and pollution. In this workshop, participants will be introduced to Google Earth Engine, a powerful cloud computing platform with a multi-petabyte catalogue of satellite imagery. Participants will learn how to extract useful statistics from these satellite-based data, and incorporate the data into their R workflow. They will also learn about the manipulation and visualization of spatial data in R.

The second part of the workshop will discuss the use of location-based data to infer the spatio-temporal trajectories of individuals. Location-based data at a device level are becoming increasingly commonplace. These contain timestamped GPS locations, collected in the form of call detail records or GPS pings from location-aware mobile device applications. These are an intermittent stream of data that often need to be interpolated and processed into a structured data set that can be used for downstream analysis, including tracking migration. This part of the workshop will walk through common data manipulation steps in R to process and analyse such location-based data.

Attendees at the Satellite imagery workshop will need to bring their own laptop with R installed for the practical element, and should have a reasonable knowledge of R to ensure they can take part.

Dr Xiao Hui Tai is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Davis. She is interested in using large-scale, granular sources of data, and statistical and machine learning methods, to measure and study human behaviour. Her current research focuses on global public health and estimating the consequences of violent conflict.