AI 2023 for Good Partners, announced by Dataminr 

Dataminr provides social welfare organisations with customised AI solutions to aid in their endeavours to better society and the environment.

One of the foremost AI companies in the world, Dataminr, has announced Insecurity Insight, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and Ushahidi as its 2023 AI for Good partners. Applications for the AI for Good programme commenced in May 2023 on Dataminr’s website. This collaboration programme enables non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and multilateral organisations (MOUs) to work alongside Dataminr AI scientists in order to develop customised AI solutions that address their most compelling societal and environmental concerns.

Joel Tetreault, senior director of research at Dataminr mentioned that the initiatives they have chosen are distinct in geography and thematic emphasis, but each one contributes to enhancing AI’s capacity to fulfil critical social impact requirements. This encompasses the extension of real-time event detection to novel humanitarian scenarios and the improvement of machine comprehension even when training data is limited.

Following an exhaustive selection process, the following organisations were selected to implement the following development and humanitarian solutions:

Insecurity Insight: By collaborating with Insecurity Insight, Dataminr will automate the classification and identification of assaults that target food systems. This will enable humanitarian partners of Insecurity Insight to respond more promptly and with greater efficiency. This initiative will enhance the efforts of Insecurity Insight in the areas of health education, protection, and aid security, allowing for consistent dissemination of information regarding acts of violence that impact the aid sector.

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP): By collaborating with the Risk Anticipation Hub of the UNDP, Dataminr will be able to detect events such as gender-based and intercommunal violence. As a result, the UNDP will be better equipped to identify and mitigate a wider variety of risks, as well as to address the drivers and fundamental causes of conflict and other crises.

Ushahidi: By utilising data generated by citizens, Ushahidi enables individuals to develop solutions that promote human rights protection, humanitarian aid, and good governance. Following the receipt of hundreds of thousands of crowdsourced reports regarding their Kenyan deployment, Ushahidi and Dataminr have formed a partnership to automate the categorization of these messages according to their language and content. This automation will enable Ushahidi to disseminate information to affected communities more rapidly and efficiently.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Good programme is a research-based, collaborative project that is led by Dataminr’s Social Innovation Lab. Researchers from Dataminr will collaborate closely with the organisations that have been chosen as social good partners over the course of the next three to nine months to define the scope of each project. They will use iterative processes to do so, gathering new information about the research issue and the possible technical solutions as they become available. According to Sirene Abou-Chakra, Director of Dataminr’s Social Innovation Lab, “We began the programme earlier this year and issued a call for submissions for the first time.” “It fills me with pride to report that the response was unprecedented. We got applications from a wide pool of organisations located in different parts of the world, all of which were keen to produce creative solutions that serve to accelerate progress and change that is driven by AI.