Sensing and Shaping Emerging Conflicts Report of a Workshop by the National Academy of Engineering and United States Institute of Peace Roundtable on Technology, Science, and Peacebuilding (2013) / Chapter Skim
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2 The Technological Potential
2 The Technological Potential
Pages 11-22
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From page 11... ...
THE TECHNOLOGICAL CAPABILITIES Prabakhar Raghavan of Google described some of the many technological capabilities that are now available. For example, it is routine in many parts of the world to use the collective flow of information from smartphones on a highway to measure traffic; the information can then be conveyed back to individual drivers about the state of traffic and the time it will take to get somewhere.
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From page 12... ...
"There is something very powerful about that," said Raghavan, and peacebuilding needs to tap into that development. As technologies continue to develop and be applied in unanticipated ways, Raghavan suggested that pressure from the peacebuilding community directed at technology developers to apply these new technologies to the cause of peace could have tremendous benefits.
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From page 13... ...
For ex ample, any time regime forces moved to a particular area, infrastructure such as communications, electricity, or water would degrade, partly be cause the forces turned off utilities, a normal practice, and partly because the movement of heavy equipment through urban areas caused electric ity systems to go down. The electrical grid is connected to the Internet, so monitoring of Internet connections provided immediate warnings of force movements.
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From page 14... ...
External actors may be agencies, NGOs, and self-organizing communities focused on an issue or problem; internal actors include the local communities and people directly affected. The use of the information generated in any of the three categories above -- representation, early warning, or communication and facilitation -- is very different depending on which set of actors receives it.
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From page 15... ...
BIG DATA FOR CONFLICT PREVENTION The world's population is generating and processing an immense quantity of digital information, observed Emmanuel Letouzé, a consultant for the United Nations and other international organizations and the author of UN Global Pulse's white paper "Big Data for Development: Opportunities and Challenges."2 He quoted a figure from the University of California that the world's computers process about 10 zettabytes of information in a single year, the equivalent of 10 million million gigabytes. Furthermore, the number is increasing -- "the growth is really ahead." "Big data" is not well defined, but it is often characterized in terms of three Vs: volume, variety, and velocity.
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From page 16... ...
Global Pulse, in partnership with several other organizations, has analyzed situations analogous to conflict prevention to get a sense of the potential for big data to serve peacebuilding. For example, it has looked at the sociopsychological effects of a spike in unemployment, as measured by online discussions, to seek proxy indicators of upcoming changes, just as the food price index has been a predictor of food riots.
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From page 17... ...
As Patrick Meier and Jennifer Leaning pointed out in 2009, information and communications technologies, including the use of big data, raise serious concerns about access and security because of the lack of economic development, the prevalence of oppressive regimes, and the increasingly hostile environment for humanitarian aid workers throughout the developing world.3 In addition, the use of big data for conflict prevention faces many of the same challenges as its use for development, such as digital divides, lack of infrastructure and other resources, and political constraints. A related important challenge concerns the balance between access to data and protection of data producers.
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From page 18... ...
TECHNOLOGICAL CHALLENGES FOR PEACEBUILDING Shortly before the workshop, USAID and Humanity United issued the Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention. Five key challenges in peacebuilding were presented at the workshop by Patrick Vinck, a research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health and associate faculty with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI)
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From page 19... ...
An example from Eastern Congo is a project called Voix des Kivus, in which individuals were selected and trained to report information as it happened in the field. Another example of the adoption of a new technology is the use of satellite images to document the preparation of attacks, a step that has helped to democratize tools previously limited to military use.
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From page 20... ...
A key question, then, is, Where do technologies have the potential to make new kinds of connections and boost resilience? "If we start thinking about what information do we need and go from there, we will be in a much better place than if we ask what information the technology allows us to obtain." Robert Loftis, a consultant and former State Department official responsible for conflict stabilization, discussed the need to separate sensing 5 Thereport, Using Data Sharing to Improve Coordination in Peacebuilding, was released in December 2012 and is available on the NAE website (www.nae.edu/66866.aspx)
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From page 21... ...
Joseph Bock, director of global health training for the Eck Institute for Global Health at the University of Notre Dame, wondered whether some aspects of big data might be overly hyped. Flashpoints are often single precipitating events, not related to complex pattern analysis, and understanding them may be more important than analyzing big data.
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