Home > Initiatives > Machine learning for human rights information

Technical Development Machine learning for human rights information

Managing a collection of evidence, research or law is a time-consuming endeavour. Human rights defenders must gather thousands of records, add each one to the database, classify them, and specify the relationship that one entry has to another. Machine learning can alleviate some of this burden — these smart features are able to automatically fetch information from an online source, make highly accurate suggestions for how to categorise records, extract the basic elements of a document, or deliver better search results.

We at HURIDOCS are working to bring machine learning into our flagship tool for building databases of human rights information, Uwazi. For the people who manage these collections, it means more time to dedicate to other important tasks, like advocacy or litigation. For human rights defenders who use these collections to inform their own efforts, it means information that’s more up-to-date and insightful.

How machine learning helps advance access to human rights information

HURIDOCS is using the power of machine learning in the advancement of accessible human rights information. We used BERT and TensorFlow to build a classifier that would take human rights related text, and assign human rights topics to them.

Watch this video to learn more about our machine learning work with UPR Info:

“It’s really been amazing to see how a technology like machine learning can be applied to human rights and have a real impact.”
Grace Kwak Danciu, Google.org Fellow and HURIDOCS Board Member

Check out the latest updates on our blog, and explore some highlights of our work with machine learning below:

New open-source AI tool unlocks content and structure of PDFs effortlessly

HURIDOCS’ open-source AI tool offers a powerful solution to efficiently unlock the structure and content of complex PDF documents.

HURIDOCS receives Google support to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Global Goals

HURIDOCS is receiving $1 million in grant funding from Google.org to integrate machine learning models and expand Uwazi.

Machine learning for human rights information

By using machine learning, human rights organisations can better curate large information collections

HURIDOCS is leveraging the power of machine learning to make human rights information more up-to-date and accessible. This helps our partners at UPR Info with their work of promoting human rights through the Universal Periodic Review (UPR).

HURIDOCS team at the Google Developers Launchpad Accelerator kick-off

"Cross-sector collaborations “are essential to creating sustainable and robust solutions”

For a period of several months, we worked together with a group of Google.org Fellows to take our machine learning development forward. They lent us their skills in software engineering, product management and user experience design to help us automate certain tasks within Uwazi.

Facilitating better international policy language for girls’ rights

We helped Plan International integrate machine learning into the international human rights law library on their Girls’ Rights Platform. The result? More time for staff to dedicate to advocacy, and more complete access to policy language for human rights defenders.

Giving a smart boost to human rights recommendations

HURIDOCS worked with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to add machine learning classifiers to the backend of the Universal Human Rights Index. These help keep the index consistent and alleviate some of the burden on its administrators.

Streamlining access to Universal Periodic Review documentation

UPR Info supports human rights defenders by improving access to information coming out of the Universal Periodic Review mechanism. We rebuilt their database with machine learning features, leading to faster updates and increased sustainability.

Collaborating to apply machine learning to human rights information

If done well with input from human rights defenders, machine learning could have an enormous impact on the accessibility of information. And that’s exactly what we’re doing, working closely with our partners to design smart solutions that meet real-world needs.