Happy belated Easter!

The intersection between technology and human rights monitoring is a growing field.

I'm currently working on a human right monitoring project. The idea is to scrape articles on the Israel-Gaza war and identify events, individuals, and war crimes with the help of newspaper articles.

There are multiple crowd-sourcing solutions for monitoring situations such as Ushahidi and Syria Tracker which tag human rights violations live on a map.

Identifying actors, intentions, and events from social media is also gaining traction in the cyber defense space where researchers have used machine learning to classify tweets and detect early threats.

Here's some useful readings

• Yash Rajendra Pilankar, Human Rights Violation Detection on Social​​Media. In his dissertation, Yash discusses different methods of classifying tweets for human rights violations. His dissertation is a great introduction to the topic.
• Dr. Walaa Saber Ismail, Threat Detection and Response Using AI and NLP in​​ Cybersecurity​. Ismail provides a useful summary of how NLP helps in identifying events and threat actors by reducing false positives.
• Roberta Rocca et al, Natural language processing for humanitarian action: Opportunities, challenges, and the path toward humanitarian NL. Roberta and her team provide a really useful summary of how applying natural language processing can help us transform unstructured data into structured data for human rights monitoring.

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In the coming weeks, I hope to share updates on the Israel-Gaza monitoring project.

I'd love to hear if you have advice or recommendations for:

• Avoiding captchas while scraping
• Models or datasets that are effective for identifying actors and events in the context of conflict monitoring.

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Best,
Albin Touma
​https://albintouma.com​

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