Distric-9 like ship hovering over Malmö in June 2025

Unlocking Migration Insights: Personal Name Classification & Big Data at IFMS 2025

From June 16–18 in Malmö, the 4th International Forum on Migration Statistics (IFMS 2025) brings together statisticians, policymakers, demographers, and data scientists to advance innovative tools—especially Big Data and AI—for richer, more timely migration statistics.

One particularly promising innovation, already used by the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) as part of its Diaspora Mapping and Engagement Toolkit, is personal name classification, a technique that leverages large datasets of names to infer migration patterns and origins

Internet for Trust Towards Guidelines for Regulating Digital Platforms for Information as a Public Good

UNESCO “Internet for Trust” takeaways

The UNESCO “Internet for Trust” conference provided a great opportunity to better understand the challenges relating to the regulation of generative AI and content moderation in social media. Namsor can indeed play a role in the process of making these tool safer for users.

French court admits onomastic proof of discrimination

The Cour de Cassation is the highest court of law in France. A judgment of the Court of Cassation of December 14, 2022 recognizes patronymic analysis – statistics on the ethno-cultural origin of names – as ex post proof of discrimination in hiring.

"The Social Science Research Network" by DALL-E

Top 20 papers using or citing NamSor in SSRN

Top 20 papers in The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) using or citing NamSor name classification software. SSRN is a high impact journal (top 14% of journals). Some papers used NamSor to infer the gender of a personal name, some other papers to supplement subject data with race / ethnicity, or cultural heritage and ethnic origin.

A portrait of Mariam KABORE #thisnamedpersondoesnotexist #DALLE

This Mariam KABORE does not exist

Two weeks ago, we generated several portraits using DALL-E of hypothetical Fatimata SWADOGO, a Bukinabé name shared by hundreds of people in Burkina Faso, mostly in the Centre-Nord, Nord regions of the country. Today, we present some new portraits generated from personal names with the tag #thisnamedpersondoesnotexist – and we feature a “classic fail” of AI software.