DOHA: Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) of Hamad Bin Khalifa University has won the Open Source Software World Challenge 2015 Grand Prize for its humanitarian technology ‘Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Relief (AIDR)’.
The annual competition is hosted by the Korean Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning.
QCRI’s project involved the creation of a system that aggregates and analyses tweets and text messages related to disasters on a large scale, enabling people from humanitarian relief organisations, such as International Red Crescent, to easily understand a situation in real-time.
In building the system, a QCRI team collaborated with United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It also received input from International Federation of the Red Cross and Qatar Red Crescent.
The project combines human interactions with artificial intelligence to automatically identify urgent and important information from social media mentions related to a disaster, speeding up response times.
After a team dealing with a humanitarian disaster identifies areas needing attention and action, the QCRI system is able to sift through and auto-classify up to 30,000 tweets per minute.
It also provides quick and simple reports alerting humanitarian teams to trends they may need to be made aware about.
The challenge is in its ninth year and primarily aimed to promote open source software and expand exchanges among open source software developers all over the world.
The win by QCRI is the first an institution in the Middle East has won the award. Winners were selected based on the broad applicability and potential impact, novelty and technical depth of their projects, with this year’s competition involving 36 submissions from 19 countries.
The Peninsula
DOHA: Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) of Hamad Bin Khalifa University has won the Open Source Software World Challenge 2015 Grand Prize for its humanitarian technology ‘Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Relief (AIDR)’.
The annual competition is hosted by the Korean Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning.
QCRI’s project involved the creation of a system that aggregates and analyses tweets and text messages related to disasters on a large scale, enabling people from humanitarian relief organisations, such as International Red Crescent, to easily understand a situation in real-time.
In building the system, a QCRI team collaborated with United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It also received input from International Federation of the Red Cross and Qatar Red Crescent.
The project combines human interactions with artificial intelligence to automatically identify urgent and important information from social media mentions related to a disaster, speeding up response times.
After a team dealing with a humanitarian disaster identifies areas needing attention and action, the QCRI system is able to sift through and auto-classify up to 30,000 tweets per minute.
It also provides quick and simple reports alerting humanitarian teams to trends they may need to be made aware about.
The challenge is in its ninth year and primarily aimed to promote open source software and expand exchanges among open source software developers all over the world.
The win by QCRI is the first an institution in the Middle East has won the award. Winners were selected based on the broad applicability and potential impact, novelty and technical depth of their projects, with this year’s competition involving 36 submissions from 19 countries.
The Peninsula
