Abstract. The socioeconomic status of a population or an individual provides an understanding of its access to housing, education, health or basic services like water and electricity. In itself, it is also an indirect indicator of the purchasing power and as such a key element when personalizing the interaction with a customer, especially for marketing campaigns or offers of new products. In this paper we study if the information derived from the aggregated use of cell phone records can be used to identify the socioeconomic levels of a population. We present predictive models constructed with SVMs and Random Forests that use the aggregated behavioral variables of the communication antennas to predict socioeconomic levels. Our results show correct prediction rates of over 80% for an urban population of around 500,000 citizens.

The ubiquitous presence of cell phones in emerging economies has brought about a wide range of cell phone-based services for low-income groups. Often times, the success of such technologies highly depends on its adaptation to the needs and habits of each social group. In an attempt to understand how cell phones are being used by citizens in an emerging economy, we present a large-scale study to analyze the relationship between specific socio-economic factors and the way people use cell phones in an emerging economy in Latin America. We propose a novel analytical approach that combines large-scale datasets of cell phone records with countrywide census data to reveal findings at a national level. Our main results show correlations between socio-economic levels and social network or mobility patterns among others. We also provide analytical models to accurately approximate census variables from cell phone records with R 2 ≈ 0.82.

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The pervasiveness of feature phones in emerging economies has contributed to the advent of mobile learning applications for low-income populations. However, many of these tools lack the proper evaluation required to understand their educational impact. In this paper, we extend the state of the art by presenting the evaluation of a game-based mobile learning tool in both formal and informal settings at a low-income school in Lima, Peru. We show that EducaMovil improves knowledge acquisition in the formal environment of a classroom. In addition, use of the tool in more informal settings such as school breaks enhances the level of knowledge, as long as there is continuous engagement over time. We also demonstrate that EducaMovil can be used as a paperless complement to homework. Finally, we provide teachers with a set of guidelines for a successful deployment of EducaMovil at their schools.

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