Session
United Nations Global Pulse, the Secretary-General's Innovation Lab
- Ahmed El Saeed, Regional Head of UN Global Pulse Asia Pacific
- Ankit Bisht, Partner, McKinsey and Co
1. No Poverty
2. Zero Hunger
13. Climate Action
17. Partnerships for the Goals
Targets: Natural disasters can un-do years of poverty reduction and hunger eliminations efforts, scarring affected communities for decades. Climate change is making natural disasters more frequent and less predictable, making efforts around building community resilience and improving the speed, precision, and efficiency of disaster response more important than ever.
Lightning talk and demo
This lightning talk will present an example of a UN-led effort to create an ecosystem of partners able to match digital technologies and AI to humanitarian and development needs the market alone will not deliver on. This effort is called DISHA - Data Insights for Social and Humanitarian Action, disha.unglobalpulse.org. DISHA is a large multi-partner coalition led by UN Global Pulse that brings together technology companies, academic and civil society research centers, philanthropies, and data providers. Importantly, it also includes humanitarian and development agencies who are not only DISHA's users but co-designers of each of the DISHA solutions. Working side-by-side, DISHA partners transform 'AI for good' research papers into robust products that help UN colleagues do their work more efficiently. Currently, we're focusing on two types of solutions to support disaster response planning and community resilience. Solutions of the first type use mobile network data to provide insights about population mobility post-disaster and predict areas of greatest vulnerability based on call and top-up patterns. We collaborate with numerous UN and external humanitarian organizations like CRS and Red Cross. Together, we co-design, test, and validate these solutions while managing associated risks. The second type of DISHA solutions uses high-resolution satellite imagery to assess damage to infrastructure after natural disasters. Rapid access to this data is crucial for first responders. But these assessments, usually manual, can take weeks to produce and may not cover all affected areas. We have recently announced a solution developed in partnership with UN Satellite Center, Google and WFP that allows to speed up the time needed to produce a directional assessment of affected areas by a factor of 6. To learn more, come to our lightning talk or visit our blog: https://disha.unglobalpulse.org/blog/
Report
This lightning talk presented an example of a UN-led effort to create an ecosystem of partners able to match digital technologies and AI to humanitarian and development needs the market alone will not deliver on. This effort is called DISHA - Data Insights for Social and Humanitarian Action, disha.unglobalpulse.org. DISHA is a large multi-partner coalition led by UN Global Pulse, the Secretary-General's Innovation Lab, that brings together technology companies, academic and civil society research centers, philanthropies, and data providers. Importantly, it also includes humanitarian and development agencies who are not only DISHA's users but co-designers of each of the DISHA solutions. Working side-by-side, DISHA partners transform 'AI for good' research papers into robust products that help humanitarians respond to an unfolding disaster faster and with greater precision. Two types of solutions to support disaster response planning and community resilience were presented in the lightning talk. Solutions of the first type use mobile network data to provide insights about population mobility post-disaster and predict areas of greatest vulnerability based on call and top-up patterns. We collaborated with numerous UN and external humanitarian organisations like CRS and Red Cross to co-design, test, and validate these solutions while managing associated risks. The second type of DISHA solutions uses high-resolution satellite imagery to assess damage to infrastructure after natural disasters. Rapid access to this data is crucial for first responders. But these assessments, usually manual, can take weeks to produce and may not cover all affected areas. During the Lightning Talk, we demonstrated a solution developed in partnership with UN Satellite Center, Google, and WFP that allows to speed up the time needed to produce a directional assessment of affected ifrastructure by a factor of 6. To learn more, visit our blog: https://disha.unglobalpulse.org/blog/