Humanitarian

When Helsing raised a $223 million Series B round, the tech world saw it as continued confirmation that defense was unquestionably back on the investing agenda. Further confirmation comes today, in news shared exclusively with TechCrunch, in the form of a $5.5 million seed round for U.K. defense tech startup Labrys Technologies, led by Germany’s Project A Ventures. Also participating were MD One Ventures, Marque VC, Offset Ventures and Expeditions Fund. The funds will be used to expand the development and R&D…

AMMAN, Jordan —  Every hour of every day of the last two months, aid agencies have pleaded for deliveries of humanitarian supplies to the Gaza Strip. We have been placed in the intolerable position of requesting permission to do lifesaving work.  Earlier this week, I wrote to the president of the United Nations General Assembly to inform him that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s ability to continue delivering its mandate in Gaza has become very limited. In my 35 years of work in complex emergencies, I would…

December 1, 20234 min readIn promoting renewable energy, wealthier nations could worsen health, housing and labor problems in the developing nations where materials are sourcedBy Marx Itabelo Lwabanya & James HuangThe Democratic Republic of Congo is rich in natural resources, including metals like cobalt that are in massive demand globally. Many mines are small, like this one, seen in 2022. They are often poorly regulated, and miners subject to dangerous working conditions. As leaders converge on COP 28 in the United…

Researching a Humanitarian Disaster Situation Report Chatbot — Using GPT-4-Turbo and full-context promptingTLDRIn this article we explore OpenAI’s brand new GPT-4-Turbo model, using its increased 128k token context window to pass in a full document corpus for information retrieval. This crude brute force method — only possible with larger context windows — is simple to implement and doesn’t require document embeddings and semantic search as used in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Applied to humanitarian disaster…

Users of a new mobile app can scan barcodes to access the history of commodities and report damage to individual cans with photographs of the damage and geolocation and timestamp data. Credit: Lincoln Laboratory researchers. Although more than enough food is produced to feed everyone in the world, as many as 828 million people face hunger today. Poverty, social inequity, climate change, natural disasters, and political…

As the war rolled on, organizations responding to the crisis came to realize that they had to be flexible and think beyond fixed, brick-and-mortar health care infrastructure. They needed to get ART to people—interrupted treatment can contribute to drug resistance—and they needed to continue, and scale up, harm reduction programs.Andriy Klepikov, the executive director of the Alliance for Public Health, a nonprofit organization that focuses on HIV and tuberculosis, says his teams deployed 37 mobile clinics from Lviv in the…

Shari Redstone, the chair of Paramount Global and president of National Amusements, will be honored at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance’s National Tribute Dinner — an annual gathering of many of the most powerful and influential people in Hollywood — with the organizations’ highest honor, the Humanitarian Award, The Hollywood Reporter has learned exclusively. The 68-year-old will be feted on the evening of May 10 at the Beverly Hilton. Past Humanitarian Award honorees…

Image created by Stable Diffusion with prompt ‘Predicting Cats’.TL;DRIn this article, I explore using GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 to categorize datasets without the need for labeled data or model training, by prompting the model with data excerpts and category definitions. Using a small sample of categorized ‘Data Grid’ datasets found on the amazing Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), zero-shot prompting of GPT-4 resulted in 96% accuracy when predicting category and 89% accuracy when predicting both category and sub-category.…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Recent major earthquakes in Turkey and Syria have prompted a surge of international support for those affected, but research from Flinders University has found what triggers people to keep providing support for those suffering humanitarian crises. The researchers learned that donations to appeals currently…

Published By: Paras YadavLast Updated: March 26, 2023, 10:01 ISTImage used for Representation. (Photo: IANS)The Houthi-run Civil Aviation Authority said no humanitarian flights would land in Sanaa between March 25-30The Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen said they were imposing severe restrictions starting Saturday on U.N. and other humanitarian flights arriving in the capital, Sanaa.The Houthi-run Civil Aviation Authority said no humanitarian flights would land in Sanaa between March 25-30. It said in a statement they…