Machine Learning for Peace:

Digital Tools for Civic Actors

PDRI-DevLab

University of Pennsylvania

November 15, 2023

Principal Investigator: Erik Wibbels

Director of Civic Research: Jeremy Springman

Data Scientists: Zung-Ru Lin, Hanling Su

Affiliates: Serkant Adiguzel, Mateo Villamizar Chaparro, Diego Romero, Rethis Togbedji Gansey, Jitender Swami

MLP: Context


  • Global trend of democratic recession
  • Governments leveraging technology to enhance repression
  • Authoritarian powers exerting more influence abroad
  • Lack of fast-paced data on civic space

MLP: Approach


How can data contribute to human rights defense?

  1. Awareness: data on what’s happening very recently
    • Mass scraping online news + ML to track events
    • Interactive data dashboard

  2. Planning: predictive analytics for strategic decisions
    • Forecasting political events
    • Civic Space Early Warning System

Data Production

Input: Online news

  • 300+ news sources
  • 34 languages
  • approx 100 million articles

Data quality

  • Focus on reputable local sources
  • Much better coverage than extant archivers/aggregators (GDELT, Wayback, Lexis Nexis, etc.)



Output: Monthly data

  • 56 countries
  • 2012 - last month

MLP: Digital Tools

MLP: Digital Tools

MLP: Digital Tools

Awareness: Civic event detection

Uganda: Arrests

Planning: Forecasting events

Planning: Forecasting events

Purges:

  • Rwanda (Aug)

Legal Changes:

  • Senegal (Jul)
  • Georgia (Feb)

Arrests:

  • Kosovo (May)
  • Nicaragua (Apr)

Security mobilization:

  • Philippines (Apr)

Legal Actions:

  • Uzbekistan (Jul)
  • Kosovo (Jul)
  • Zambia (Jun)

Protests:

  • India (Mar)

Non-lethal Violence:

  • Guatemala (Jun)

Applications & Extensions

Current applications

  • Directing Flexible Response Funds (INSPIRES Consortium)
  • Distribution to local civil society organizations
    • 1,900+ site users across 100 countries; mailing list of 500

Extensions: Flexible data production infrastructure

  • Unique local news corpus to track + forecast new events
    • Climate-human interactions
    • Media polarization, threatening language

mlpeace.org