The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
In January 2014, I wrote this blog post announcing my intention to write a book on Digital Humanitarians. Well, it’s done! And launches this week. The book has already been endorsed by scholars at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, etc; by practitioners at the United Nations, World Bank, Red Cross, USAID, DfID, etc; and by others including Twitter and National …
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MicroMappers: Towards Next Generation Humanitarian Technology The MicroMappers platform has come a long way and still has a ways to go. Our vision for MicroMappers is simple: combine human computing (smart crowd-sourcing) with machine computing (artificial intelligence) to filter, fuse and map a variety of different data types such as text, photo, video and satellite/aerial imagery. To do this, …
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Calling All Digital Jedis: Support UN Response to Super Typhoon Ruby! The United Nations has officially activated the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) in response to Typhoon Ruby. The DHN serves as the official interface between formal humanitarian organizations and digital volunteer groups from all around the world. These digital volunteers—also known as Digital Jedis— provide humanitarian organizations like the …
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Using Social Media to Anticipate Human Mobility and Resilience During Disasters The analysis of cell phone data can already be used to predict mobility patterns after major natural disasters. Now, a new peer-reviewed scientific study suggests that travel patterns may also be predictable using tweets generated following large disasters. In “Quantifying Human Mobility Perturbation and Resilience in Hurricane Sandy,” co-authors Qi Wang and …
Crowdsourcing and Humanitarian Action: Analysis of the Literature Raphael Hörler from Zurich’s ETH University has just completed his thesis on the role of crowdsourcing in humanitarian action. His valuable research offers one of the most up-to-date and comprehensive reviews of the principal players and humanitarian technologies in action today. In short, I highly recommend this important resource. Raphael’s full …
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Computing Research Institutes as an Innovation Pathway for Humanitarian Technology The World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) is an initiative by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to improve humanitarian action. The Summit, which is to be held in 2016, stands to be one of the most important humanitarian conferences in a decade. One key pillar of WHS is humanitarian innovation. “Transformation …
Establishing Social Media Hashtag Standards for Disaster Response The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has just published an important, must-read report on the use of social media for disaster response. As noted by OCHA, this document was inspired by conversations with my team and I at QCRI. We jointly recognize that innovation in humanitarian technology …
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