A new AI tool can track poverty levels in African villages over time by scanning satellite images for signs of economic well-being. The tool searches the images for indicators of development, such as roads, agriculture, housing, and lights turned on at night. Deep learning algorithms find patterns in this data to measure the villages’ wealth. Researchers from Stanford University tested the tool on about 20,000 villages across 23 countries in Africa that had existing wealth data. They say that it successfully estimated the poverty levels of the villages over time. [Read: AI detects plastics in the oceans by analyzing satellite images] Identifying these patterns of growth can show why…
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