Introducing our new event series – “4,3,2,1: The Humanitarian AI Countdown”

Humanitarians need to upskill—and fast. Members of our Humanitarian AI+MERL working group have repeatedly flagged the need to rapidly improve their comprehension and confidence in navigating AI tools.  

Recently MTI produced a humanitarian brief on AI to help ground humanitarian decisionmakers and provide critical foundational knowledge on humanitarian AI. That got us thinking about how much more humanitarians need to know in order to navigate the coming years. But amidst overstretched staff, increasing risk and violence directed at humanitarian workers, and more nuanced and niche AI developments, it’s hard for humanitarians to stay up to date! 

After conversations with our NLP-CoP members, humanitarians and other stakeholders, we’re excited to bring you “4,3,2,1: The humanitarian AI countdown,” a new event series designed to respond to the need for quick and incisive takes on recent AI research, distilled for humanitarian stakeholders. 

Timely updates in a time-sensitive format

We aim to help humanitarians learn more about relevant work through trusted sources curated by our team.

Each event will be 30 minutes, feature a different expert speaker with new research and learnings, and focus on four central questions:

• What are the four key learnings for humanitarians from your new piece of research?
• What are the three key questions your work prompts humanitarians to ask themselves?
• What are two critical resources humanitarians can add to their knowledge base?
• What is one piece of policy advice or action for humanitarians to operationalise in light of this research?

Speakers interventions will be followed by an audience Q+A.

These questions are designed to help humanitarians rapidly process new information and minimise the time between learning and action. Our intent is to use a consistent format to propel collective humanitarian upskilling, and ensure humanitarians know what they can expect from each session with the hope of enabling other systems and processes to draw on the continuity provided by a set format. 

Join our kick-off event on October 15th, 3pm BST/10am ET/ 5pm EAT

The event series kicks off with Shivaang Sharma talking about his research and recent publication “How Stakeholders Operationalize Responsible AI in Data-Sensitive Contexts”. You are welcome to join us by registering here or in the link below.

And if you haven’t already, find out more about joining the NLP Community of Practice here.