XVI Intellectual Property Annual Congress: Big Data and disruptive technologies as dynamic elements of law in today’s society
The Universidad Externado of Colombia, invited Cepei’s Data Coordinator, Fredy Rodríguez, to participate in an academic discussion around the following questions: How Big Data and other disruptive technologies have become the basis of our everyday life? Why does large-scale analysis and data management play a strategic role in the contemporary social and economic system? Under what modalities can intellectual property, legal protection of personal data and competition law interact with this massive data processing? What are the evaluation standards to appreciate the value of data?
ABOUT THE EVENT
Context
Objective
Metodology

The Intellectual Property Department of the Universidad Externado held its XVI Intellectual Property Annual Congress, which for the first time in 15 years was organized virtually due to COVID-19.

Rise a debate on the current legal models to deal with the transformations derived from the innovations used in business and in the challenges of our current society.

The topics were addressed through panels of national and international experts from academia, public sector, internet platform operators, intellectual property firms, companies, among others.
CEPEI’S CONTRIBUTION
Our Data Coordinator´s presentation explored migration issues. He addressed how migratory phenomena can be studied and understood through the collection of data from non-traditional data sources (big data) produced on social networks. A process known as sentiment analysis or opinion mining, where contents and emotions within text data are interpreted and classified in a massive and automatic way, to catalog them according to the positive or negative connotation of their language.
Rodríguez pointed out that big data collected from social networks complements official statistics, becoming a fundamental input for the analysis of phenomena such as migration. Likewise, he emphasized the importance of the context and the quality of the information in each tweet or post to guarantee an objective analysis.


HIGHLIGHTS OF THE INTERVENTION
International migration has always been a subject of debate between the sovereignty of a country and respect for the human rights of any person. There are complex aspects such as social discontent, cultural clashes, the redistribution of national resources or the lack of political will that create an inhospitable environment for both migrants and nationals. However, it is pertinent to remember the words of the United Nations former Secretary, Kofi Annan, in 2006: “Migration is an expression of a person’s will to overcome adversity and live a better life”.
In recent years, we have experienced an unprecedented migratory flow. According to the 2020 World Migration Report, of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 272 million international migrants were estimated in 2019. The migratory phenomenon is multidimensional and implies the commitment of all actors to “ Leave no one behind”. Therefore, the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals are directly linked to these. In fact, target 10.7 makes explicit reference to the importance of facilitating migration and mobility in an orderly, safe, regular, and responsible manner for people.
Given the magnitude of this phenomenon and the importance of creating inclusive, equitable and sustainable policies, data and sentiment analysis become an essential instrument to understand the challenges we face in this area, providing valuable elements to address the needs of migrants and the population in general.
In order to address the perception of the migratory flows that Colombia and Costa Rica have experienced from their neighboring countries Venezuela and Nicaragua in recent years, Cepei carried out a sentiment analysis on the opinions of Twitter users in Colombia and Costa Rica, who sought to identify, based on the sustainable development categories established by the United Nations (economic, social and environmental), which are the areas of greatest concern or interest of citizens, regarding migration. Check out the results of the analysis here.
Cepei, together with the Universidad de Costa Rica, also published the article Migration Crisis in Colombia and Costa Rica from a Sentiment Analysis Perspective, which presents a conceptualization of big data and sentiments analysis, as well as a contextualization of the migratory crisis in Venezuela and Nicaragua, identifying the causes of this phenomenon, data, policies and results in the receiving countries, through the opinions of Twitter users. Find the results of the analysis here (SPA).

“Given the magnitude of the migration phenomenon and the importance of creating inclusive, equitable and sustainable policies, data has become an indispensable tool to understand the challenges we face.”