Not a Target. A Deep Learning Approach for a Warning and Decision Support System to Improve Safety and Security of Humanitarian Aid Workers

Humanitarian aid workers who try to provide aid to the most vulnerable populations in the Middle East or Africa are risking their own lives and safety to help others. The current lack of a collaborative real-time information system to predict threats prevents responders and local partners from developing a shared understanding of potentially threatening situations, causing increased response times and leading to inadequate protection. To solve this problem, this paper presents a threat detection and decision support system that combines knowledge and information from a network of responders with automated and modular threat detection. The system consists of three parts. It first collects textual information, ranging from social media, and online news reports to reports and text messages from a decentralized network of humanitarian staff. Second, the system uses deep neural network techniques to automatically detects a threat or incident and provide information including location, threat category, and casualties. Third, given the type of threat and the information extracted by the NER, a feedforward network proposes a mitigation plan based on humanitarian standard operating procedures. The classified information is rapidly redistributed to potentially affected humanitarian workers at any level. The system testing results show a high precision of 0.91 and 0.98 as well as an F-measure of 0.87 and 0.88 in detecting the threats and decision support respectively. We thus combine the collaborative intelligence of a decentralized network of aid workers with the power of deep neural networks.