Amnesty AI human rights research

Interesting case study from Amnesty International on using automated satellite image classification for human rights research in war zones: tens of thousands of volunteers labeled 2.6 million image tiles of the Darfur region in western Sudan as empty , human presence, or destroyed, which Amnesty and Element AI researchers used to train a model that could predict these labels at 85% precision and 81% recall on the test set. This model then allowed them to visualize and analyze different waves of destruction in the zone over time. The full case study is well worth a read: it includes detailed notes on the ethical tradeoffs they considered before starting the project —a contrast with the ethics sections in many recent ML papers that read like checkbox afterthoughts.