Voyage Viewer: Empowering Human Mobility at a Global Scale

Abstract

The challenge of refugee relocation is fertile ground to pose a new direction in the quest for extended human intelligence: developing systems that leverage big data, and the power of social learning to provide personalized visual analytics for big life decisions. To probe into this new avenue, this paper presents Voyage Viewer, a novel open-access multi-stream data dashboard called Voyage Viewer. It helps individuals make their own relocation and migration decisions given personalized queries and visualizations, which stands in contrast to previous top-down approaches that use algorithms to match individuals and places, as is the case for some refugee relocation programs. Voyage Viewer hopes to foster social learning between community members to improve the match between migrants and their potential new communities so that both can reap the benefits of the move.