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The availability of detailed mobility traces and mobile phone communication data for large populations has already had a significant impact on research in behavioral science. Some researchers consider such datasets as an opportunity to refine the analysis of human behavior [5], while others question the usefulness of such datasets to draw conclusions on collective human behavior [1,2,5].Digital traces left by mobile phone users often reveal sensitive private individual information. It is therefore natural to limit access to such data. Limited access to data of scientific interest is however a potential source of a "new digital divide" in the scientific community, as described in [2]. In order to improve the availability of large mobile phone datasets and to foster research in this area, the Orange Group decided to provide anonymized datasets from Ivory Coast for the purpose of scientific research. With around five million customers, Orange has a significant market share in Ivory Coast, whose total population is estimated to be 20 million individuals. In addition to the scientific benefit, the project intends to foster development in Ivory Coast by establishing new collaborations with African scientists and by providing behavioral data that has not yet been collected by the national statistics agency [3].2. Other datasets on Ivory Coast. Researchers participating in the D4D challenge are encouraged to combine the D4D mobile phone datasets with other datasets and source of information. These sources include the following.African Development Bank Group. The African Development Bank (AfDB) Groups mission is to help reduce poverty, improve living conditions for Africans and mobilize resources for the continents economic and social development. With this objective in mind, the institution aims at assisting African countries in their efforts to achieve sustainable economic development and social progress. http://www.afdb.org/en/ African Economic Outlook. Economic, social and political developments of African countries, with the expertise of the African Development Bank, the OECD Development Centre, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the United Nations Development Programme and a network of African think tanks and research centres. http://www.africaneconomicoutlook.org/en/ Africa and Middle East Telecom News. Africa and Middle East Telecom-Week' tracks the fixed, broadband and mobile phone markets in Africa and Middle East. http://www.africantelecomsnews.com/ Africa Renewal on Line. The Africa Renewal magazine is produced by the United Nations organism and provides up-to-date information and analysis of the major economic and development challenges facing Africa today. It works with the media in Africa and beyond to promote the work of the United Nations, Africa and the international community to bring peace and development to Africa.

Urban landscapes present a variety of socio-topological environments that are associated to diverse human activities. As the latter affect the way individuals connect with each other, a bound exists between the urban tissue and the mobile communication demand. In this paper, we investigate the heterogeneous patterns emerging in the mobile communication activity recorded within metropolitan regions. To that end, we introduce an original technique to identify classes of mobile traffic signatures that are distinctive of different urban fabrics. Our proposed technique outperforms previous approaches when confronted to ground-truth information, and allows characterizing the mobile demand in greater detail than that attained in the literature to date. We apply our technique to extensive real-world data collected by major mobile operators in ten cities. Results unveil the diversity of baseline communication activities across countries, but also evidence the existence of a number of mobile traffic signatures that are common to all studied areas and specific to particular land uses.

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The D4D-Senegal challenge is an open innovation data challenge on anonymous call patterns of Orange's mobile phone users in Senegal. The goal of the challenge is to help address society development questions in novel ways by contributing to the socio-economic development and well-being of the Senegalese population. Participants to the challenge are given access to three mobile phone datasets. This paper describes the three datasets. The datasets are based on Call Detail Records (CDR) of phone calls and text exchanges between more than 9 million of Orange's customers in Senegal between January 1, 2013 to December 31, 2013. The datasets are: (1) antenna-to-antenna traffic for 1666 antennas on an hourly basis, (2) fine-grained mobility data on a rolling 2-week basis for a year with bandicoot behavioral indicators at individual level for about 300,000 randomly sampled users, (3) one year of coarse-grained mobility data at arrondissement level with bandicoot behavioral indicators 1 at individual level for about 150,000 randomly sampled users