We are excited to announce that our flagship tool Uwazi has been recognised as a finalist in the AI and data category of Fast Company’s 2022 World-Changing Ideas Awards.
Every year, Fast Company honours the innovative ways businesses and organisations are finding solutions for the biggest challenges of our time. This year, they received more than 3,000 nominations and HURIDOCS is honoured to be among the 1,053 who made the list. In the AI and data category, the winners, finalists and honourees are all projects that harness the power of data, machine learning, or artificial intelligence to understand the world and empower change.
Uwazi is our open-source web-based database application to help human rights defenders manage collections of information, including documents, evidence, cases and complaints. We have added machine learning services to Uwazi to help make human rights information more up-to-date and accessible. Our work on machine learning was done with the support from the Google AI Impact Challenge and the Google.org Fellowship.
Machine learning helps to reduce the workload and minimise tedious tasks for our human rights partners. Our machine learning feature on information extraction can automatically fetch information from an online source, extract the basic elements of a document, and make highly accurate suggestions for categorising it.
For instance, our partners have found that categorising human rights information, which usually takes around 2 to 3 months to complete, now only takes around 1 week. By saving such a huge chunk of time, human rights defenders can now spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on using their information for accountability and justice processes.
We are continuously developing and improving our machine learning services such as optical character recognition (OCR) for documents, automatic table of contents generation, document segmentation and machine assisted metadata extraction.
A huge congratulations to Smarter Sorting, the winner of the AI and data category, for their use of artificial intelligence to learn whether a product is toxic, without any need for animal testing. Kudos to all the other winners, finalists and honourees who are changing the world with their innovative ideas!