Machine Learning for Peace:

Digital Tools for Civic Actors

PDRI-DevLab

University of Pennsylvania

March 11, 2024

Principal Investigators: Erik Wibbels, Jeremy Springman

Data Scientists: Zung-Ru Lin, Hanling Su

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

Awareness: Civic event detection

Uganda: Arrests

Successful Early Warnings

  • ~70% success rate
  • ~60 events across 25 countries

Purges:

  • Kyrgyzstan (Sept)
  • Rwanda (Aug)

Legal Changes:

  • South Africa (Sept)
  • Georgia (Feb)

Civic Activism

  • Senegal (Oct)

Protests:

  • Tunisia (Oct)

Lethal Violence:

  • Albania (Sept)
  • Turkey (Oct)

Non-lethal Violence:

  • El Salvador (Sept)

Planning: Forecasting events

Leveraging MLP data


Dissemination Efforts

  • 2,900 unique website visitors across 115 countries (since June)
  • 150 hours of public dashboard usage time per month
  • Mailing list of 500+ sign-ups across USG and partner organizations

USAID Collaboration

  • Analytic Task on Authoritarian Resurgence and Influence
  • Pandemic Backsliding
  • Zimbabwe Governance Analysis
  • REMEDIOS Evaluation (ongoing)
  • DEPP Anti-Corruption Tool (planned)

Text color indicates subject matter

  • Foreign authoritarian influence
  • Democracy and human rights
  • Corruption

Update Reports

Appendix

MLP: Approach


How can data contribute to crisis response?

  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
  • 35 languages
  • ~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

  • 60 countries
  • 2012 - last month

Underlying Data: Crawlers vs Direct

Scraping: Wayback vs Custom

El Diaro

Data Processing



MLP: Digital Tools

MLP: Digital Tools

MLP: Digital Tools

mlpeace.org