Hend Alhinnawi, CEO of Humanitarian Tracker talks with Jeff Frick at AWS Imagine Nonprofit 2019 from Seattle, WA. #ImagineABetterWorld #WomenInTech #theCUBE @SiliconANGLE theCUBE https://siliconangle.com/2019/08/20/can-smartphones-and-ai-bring-free-press-to-corrupt-regimes-imagineabetterworld-startupoftheweek/ Can smartphones and AI bring free press to corrupt regimes? Nonprofit organizations may push for political or societal change with a variety of tactics. They could collect signatures on petitions, ask for donations, or raise awareness via literature, web pages, etc. Others may send volunteers to help people in need. A newer type of NPO may bring the very people it serves into its own operations. Not only does it help them; they help the organization in return. Advanced data-science technology and widely available smart phones enable this collaborative new approach to humanitarianism. Founded in 2011, Humanitarian Tracker is a technology- and citizen-powered NPO. It combines crowd sourcing, citizen reporting, data mining and artificial intelligence to aid people in distressed regions of the world. It employs these methods to bring relief to populations facing humanitarian disasters, conflicts, human-rights violations, disease outbreaks, etc. Importantly, it does not simply aggregate statistics or other structured data. It relies on unstructured data from real people — photographs, first-person accounts and the like — for a richer, holistic picture of scenes on the ground. “We see our job as really elevating the otherwise marginalized voice,” said Hend Alhinnawi (pictured), chief executive officer of Humanitarian Tracker. The organization’s data scientists process the data it collects from citizens, organizations, researchers, etc. The insights they derive inform the organization’s decisions about where to concentrate its efforts. It also makes its data and intelligence available to the public, journalists, students, government officials, and others. “We’re not just about collecting the data; we want to make sure it’s meaningful, and we want to derive insights. We want to know: What is the data actually telling us?” Alhinnawi said. Alhinnawi spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Imagine conference in Seattle. They discussed Humanitarian Tracker’s tech-powered mission and its work with the United Nations (see the full interview with transcript here). This week, theCUBE spotlights Humanitarian Tracker in its Startup of the Week feature. Big tech tackles big problems Diverse nonprofits — whether fighting crime or reconnecting the homeless with family — are leveraging new technology to help execute their missions. Analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence can make time-consuming tasks involving vast amounts of data much simpler. And some of the most successful tech companies including Amazon Web Services Inc. and Splunk Inc. seem eager to pick up nonprofit customers. AWS is increasingly invested in enabling NPOs to tackle major global issues like population migrations and healthcare. “We’re trying to help them deliver on their mission with our technology,” Dave Levy, vice president, federal government, at AWS, told theCUBE earlier this month. Humanitarian Tracker is using technology to enable content and information-sharing online. One may ask if collecting and reporting facts about urgent world issues is not already performed by the press. The answer is complex; the power and positioning of the press varies vastly from one nation to another. Reporters Without Borders annually scores countries around the world on press freedom and transparency. Of the 180 countries studied in 2019, about 76% — 137 countries — achieved a less-than-satisfactory score. Sixty-five countries — including the United States — had a situation deemed “problematic”; 51 countries were rated “bad”; and 18 were “very bad.” Nations without a free and open press often lack a means to hold those in power accountable for their actions. Also, calling out corruption or publicizing evidence of government officials acting can put whistle blowers in peril. Khaled Mohamed Saeed was a young Egyptian man who happened to possess video implicating police in a drug deal. In 2010, Saeed was accosted in public and beaten to death by police in Alexandria. Photos of his corpse went viral and incited the Egyptian Revolution of the following year. Saeed’s tragic death is a tale of two potentials inherent in modern technology. One is the potential for citizens to use smart phones and the internet to capture and report incidents of corruption; the other is the chance that these technologies could leave tracks for corrupt authorities to follow to innocent citizens. ...