The Connectivity Lab team at Facebook is working on communication technologies aimed at connecting people in rural areas who currently do not have access to the internet. Earlier this year we announced that we are working on high-resolution population maps in order to learn how people are aggregated in various parts of the world, which will help us design the best communication technologies for each region.
Today, we started sharing the population datasets publicly because we believe this data will be useful in many other ways, including for things like humanitarian aid planning, disaster response, and infrastructure planning. In this post, we'll explain the technology and the process behind arriving at these datasets.