JUNE 2020

Spotlight on drones in humanitarian work, AI climate change problem, fighting hate speech, predicting modern slavery, and preserving indigenous knowledge with AI

For more news and resources on AI, privacy, surveillance, and contact tracing look at our Special Edition Newsletter on Covid19 and Privacy

THIS MONTH’S BEST READS 

New website maps and models the science of peace, 30 June 2020, PHYS-org

A new website (http://sustainingpeaceproject.com/) centering on recent research on sustainably peaceful societies has just been launched at The Earth Institute at Columbia University. The website presents an interactive introduction to the findings and outputs of the work of a multidisciplinary team of scholars that began studying peaceful societies in 2014. It showcases a global map of peaceful societies, findings from hundreds of empirical studies, and peace tech visualizations and simulations from the Sustaining Peace Project at the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity (AC4), which seeks to advocate for more a more comprehensive understanding of how peace is sustained with local stakeholders, policymakers, and academics.

Humanitarian Drones: Should AI Powered UAVs be Used for Humanitarian Work? 5 June 2020, DroneLife

While I hope that every reader will inform themselves, in these times of seemingly unending disasters, it is my considered opinion that drone programs should be implemented without delay in humanitarian programs.  It is true that human operators of AI-powered drones, cars, guns, cell phones and a multitude of other tools may use these in ways that violate human rights.  However, to broadly limit the use of the tool itself -a tool already in common use – is to limit the good that humanitarians are able to do; and in some cases, to allow needless loss of life.

Deep Learning’s Climate Change Problem, 17 June 2020, Forbes

Earlier this month, OpenAI announced it had built the biggest AI model in history. This astonishingly large model, known as GPT-3, is an impressive technical achievement. Yet it highlights a troubling and harmful trend in the field of artificial intelligence—one that has not gotten enough mainstream attention. Modern AI models consume a massive amount of energy, and these energy requirements are growing at a breathtaking rate. In the deep learning era, the computational resources needed to produce a best-in-class AI model has on average doubled every 3.4 months; this translates to a 300,000x increase between 2012 and 2018. GPT-3 is just the latest embodiment of this exponential trajectory.

Teaching Machines to Detect Climate Extremes, 17 June 2020, EOS

Extreme weather events, whether scorching temperatures that ruin crops or killer storms that drown coastal towns, are likely to be more frequent and more powerful with climate change. Quantifying the increase in these extreme events (and their economic and public health costs) requires combing through thousands of gigabytes of data that climate models generate every day. Scientists can’t just look at the results of their climate models and count hurricanes or droughts. Instead, they are turning to machine learning to find such extreme weather events in their models’ data.

‘AI has potential to solve humanity’s biggest challenge’, 17 June 2020, The Guardian

ITU in its AI for Good: Global Impact report, ahead of its scheduled conference, observed that the technology has enormous potential to accelerate progress on all 17 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The body noted that AI can help the 1.7 billion unbanked individuals gain access to digital financial services; reduce 1.3 million deaths yearly on roads; translate and educate in 2,000 African languages; monitor and protect ecosystems; lower public health costs for millions; elevate the quality of data collection during pandemics without sacrificing privacy, and improve the quality and accessibility of civic services in overcrowded cities.

Digital tools being used to track people as never before, 27 June 2020, ModernDiplomacy

The internet and new digital tools are being manipulated as never before to infringe on people’s right to free assembly, the UN’s top rights official said on Thursday, in a call for a moratorium on the use of facial recognition technology during peaceful demonstrations. Amid global protests against systemic racism, corruption and economic woes exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis, High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet also expressed concern about the use of non-lethal weapons against demonstrators.

THIS MONTH’S PODCAST EPISODE CHOICE   

HUMANITARIAN AI TODAY – Laura Walker McDonald from DIAL, June 2020

Humanitarian AI Today's host Mia Kossiavelou speaks with Laura Walker McDonald, Senior Director of Insights and Impact at the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) and former member of the Humanitarian Innovation Fund’s Funding Committee, about humanitarian AI, Dial, the Humanitarian Innovation Fund and HIF’s search for new Funding Committee members.

RightsCast - Digital Witness: Using Open Source Info for Human Rights Investigations (with Alexa Koenig and Sam Dubberley)

This panel, marking the launch of Digital Witness - the first textbook dedicated to open source investigations - brings together leading experts in the open source movement, discussing what the future holds for the use of open source techniques in human rights investigations.

The Human-Centered AI Podcast AIX: Designing Artificial Intelligence, with Sudha Jamthe

In this episode, we are joined by Sudha Jamthe, Founder of DriverlessWorldSchool, Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Vehicles Instructor at Stanford. We discuss her recent book, AIX: Designing Artificial Intelligence, and what it means to design for AI, the role of AI in the current global landscape and her advice on how to pivot your career to AI.

THIS MONTH’S WEBINAR CHOICE   

Indigenous Knowledge and Storytelling with AI, June 2020, IVOW AI

Our goal was to show how creating structure around our stories can foster reasoning and cultural intelligence in machines and conversational AIs. Sina is designed as a digital storyteller and built by journalists and developers at IVOW AI. Sina is a demo, but you can interact with her on Google Assistant by using the invocation phrase “OK Google: Talk to Sina Storyteller.” "The genesis of our Indigenous Knowledge Graph was in Baltimore, Maryland, at Morgan State University in April 2018," says Davar Ardalan, Founder of At IVOW AI. "We invited AI scholars, storytellers, business leaders, academics and students to gather for a daylong symposium on Cultural AI. As part of the summit we presented on the notion of a cultural engine."

ICYMI

How to Monitor and Combat Hate Speech on Social Media, 7 February 2020

Althea Middleton-Detzner, Director of Hate Speech at PeaceTech Lab, joined the M&E Thursday Talks to lead a discussion on "How to Monitor and Combat Hate Speech on Social Media."

THIS MONTH’S PUBLICATIONS

Recent advances in artificial intelligence contribute to nuclear risk—new SIPRI report, June 2020

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) contribute to nuclear risk according to a new report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The authors warn that nuclear-armed states’ competition in military AI and premature adoption of AI in nuclear weapons and related capabilities could have a negative impact on strategic stability and increase the likelihood of nuclear weapon use. The report proposes AI-specific nuclear risk reduction measures and is now available now.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Applied to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) And its Impact on Humanitarian Action, June 2020, DH Network

The drone industry is now in its golden age and its growth promises to be exponential. Even though humanitarian aid workers have used this technology for a decade, the expansion of its market as well as the development of technology are pushing more and more organizations to equip themselves with this device.

A National Security Research Agenda for Cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence, May 2020, CSET

Machine learning advances are transforming cyber strategy and operations. This necessitates studying national security issues at the intersection of AI and cybersecurity, including offensive and defensive cyber operations, the cybersecurity of AI systems, and the effect of new technologies on global stability.

ICYMI

The ethics of artificial intelligence: Issues and initiatives, 11 March 2020, European Parliamentary Research Service

This study deals with the ethical implications and moral questions that arise from the development and implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. It also reviews the guidelines and frameworks that countries and regions around the world have created to address these. It presents a comparison between the current main frameworks and the main ethical issues, and highlights gaps around mechanisms of fair benefit sharing; assigning of responsibility; exploitation of workers; energy demands in the context of environmental and climate changes; and more complex and less certain implications of AI, such as those regarding human relationships.

EVENTS TO FOLLOW 

Collective and Augmented Intelligence Against COVID-19 – Launch Event, July 9, 2pm PT/5pm ET

A virtual event hosted by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and the AI Initiative at The Future Society to officially announce a global alliance on the COVID-19 pandemic response. The alliance will provide an information service not yet available that is vitally important to facing and mitigating the crisis.

In parallel with the UN High Level Political Forum, the launch agenda will include details on the partnership and speakers from the private sector, academia, government, and multilateral institutions, including UNESCO, the World Bank, the WHO and UN Global Pulse, offering unique perspectives on the roadblocks and opportunities to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. Topics covered will include challenges with disparate data and determining meaningful information in the fight against the virus, as well as the importance of building multi-stakeholder collaborations.

Serving Humanity with Space Data, July 9, 10am EDT

Co-hosted by the Space Enabled research group and the Secure World Foundation, this virtual series aims to engage a multi-sector audience in discussions on how space technologies and geospatial applications contribute to better outcomes in critical fields around the world, such as energy, food security, poverty, and governance. Held twice a month, the events will bring together stakeholders working in companies, nonprofits, academia, and government to highlight initiatives taken to progress toward the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) using a truly transformative multi-stakeholder approach. The series will highlight real-world case studies as well as opportunities and challenges for expanding the use of satellite data in efforts to achieve the SDGs.  This series seeks to look at ongoing work by a variety of actors, with a special focus on development and humanitarian projects.

Predicting and Verifying Modern Slavery Risk: Practical Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, July 14, 6am PT/9am ET

In partnership with the International Organization on Migration (IOM), the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery (GFEMS) is co-hosting a series of five webinars on modern slavery in supply chains in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Webinar 3 is on “Predicting and Verifying Modern Slavery Risk: Practical Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics.” Modern data analytics have the potential to improve detection of modern slavery in supply chains. They can narrow the focus so that supply-chain teams can better prioritize their efforts. They can make predictions that enable preventative action, not just reaction. No perfect app or model has yet emerged but progress is steady and breakthroughs appear imminent. In this session, we look at efforts already underway, the challenges they face, and what companies can do to help unlock the full potential of AI and other forms of data analytics in the fight against modern slavery.

Online Library 

On our website, AI for Peace, you can find even more awesome content, podcasts, articles, white papers and book suggestions that can help you navigate through AI and peace fields. Check our online library!