 He hails from Canada from the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University and he helped build up the Digital Mass Atrocity Prevention Lab. Please welcome Nikolai. Hello everyone, thank you very much for that kind introduction. Thank you all for just coming to the latest talk tonight. And thank you for CCC for inviting us. It's a great honor for us to be here. Just a little bit about myself, just a little bit of background. I'm a German Swiss citizen, but I work now in Montreal for the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. And since the beginning of the year, or for me better, since April I helped build up what we call the Digital Mass Atrocity Prevention Lab. And I mean everyone has a lab these days and so what we want to do with that is actually kind of try and reach out into different communities. There's a lot of policy work, but obviously since we have a hacking audience tonight, we also want to be involved in tech communities and hacking communities. So when we saw the talk on the keynote and the introduction to this Congress, my colleagues and I were really pleased to see that there is a need from the community actually to open up and kind of let people who are not necessarily hackers like my background is international relations and not necessarily the deep tech. I'm interested in it and I can follow what the CCC is doing for the last couple of years. And especially one talk just at the camp this year by Claudio about helping the helpless where he basically told the InfoSec community to reach out to human rights groups and then help them where they can actually be helpful that resonate with us. And we come from the other side and basically Montreal like we're a fairly small team. And so what I'm going to talk about in the next couple of, I would say 20 minutes, it's just a little bit what we did over the last seven, eight, nine months. And it's going to be like pretty much in chronological order. We're going to talk a little bit about what UN is doing in peacekeeping and peace tech. We did a big research project using MediaCloud. That's a tool by the Berkman Center and the MIT Center for Civic Media. We kind of encouraged, like we talked a lot of technologists and hackers at various hackathons and so we kind of want to share some lessons learned. And like if there's time I just want to go through like a couple of various projects which we found a little bit interesting, very interesting and just kind of see what you could learn from it and then just open the dialogue between different fields because obviously I'm coming from a fairly different field than many of you. So one thing we do at the Montreal Institute of Transiting Rights Studies is we have a workshop on mass atrocity prevention. So it's mainly for policymakers and people in the peacekeeping and peacebuilding community. A lot of people with a non-technical background. And what we try to do in the last couple of years is getting more tech stuff into the workshops. You see here at this picture it's like the workshop in the middle. We have Walter Dorn who is a professor in Kingston, Ontario in Canada and he looks on how like the UN is using technology or could be potentially using technology to monitor peace treaties or just kind of look at new ways because I mean obviously it's 2015 and the UN is finally kind of catching up to that. For those who are interested like there is earlier this year like the UN actually came off come out with a final report on how they can use new technologies in peacekeeping and Walter Dorn was part of that kind of expert panel. So there are things happening. I mean the UN is a slow and sometimes very kind of hard to, like a ship hard to maneuver. So it's interesting to see that even there there's kind of thinking about technology and then admittedly like it is more like on the military side of things so like they think about like the new peacekeeping kind of force and then how to kind of get them equipped. But what we also have been involved with is like a growing field of what they call peace tech which is more like on the civil side and really kind of, I believe a lot of people with good intentions are being part of that and it seems like there are a couple of conferences out there since I guess 2010, 2011 they started and what they wanted is try a couple of, try to get a lot of people from the tech community, software development community together with peace building community so it's about kind of getting the barriers down between different fields because that's also what we saw over like pretty much last year in the different events we participated like it is difficult for those fields to talk to each other there's different languages, different backgrounds and like different cultures and we see a benefit in actually kind of getting those barriers down in a bit. So that would be one part of just kind of informing what's out there there's way more stuff out there and that's just like a preview overview. The other thing what we did is at the Monterey Institute we have a media monitoring project where basically we do qualitative free research in countries which might be at risk of mass atrocity or atrocity crimes there are other NGOs out there the crisis group for example has a very prominent project as well but what we find is that it's very difficult to just kind of we basically rely on interns who like escape look at the media landscapes in those countries and look at international media and see what's actually happening but it's very qualitative work so we were thrilled when we saw that there is a way to actually use more quantitative methods there's a tweet by Ethan Suckerman which we basically followed we wrote a proposal for this and we kindly got invited to do research with the media lab what we did there was we used the media cloud framework that they have a couple of other tools we mainly used the media matter dashboard which pretty much is like a dashboard which you can query a database in the sense that we query the database about US mainstream media there's about 25 biggest media sources in the US and basically just look you can query for different subjects and then it gives you like a timeline where you see like it's basically sentences per day and then over the timeline which you have looked at and you can get like a world cloud it's very good to kind of just get a very brief overview on a topic and what we did we were really interested in a lot of countries we did research on like in Sub-Saharan Africa mainly so we wanted to know how Sub-Saharan Africa is presented in US mainstream media because many of the things you would normally think is like there are a couple of topics which always come up but many other good things which happen in Sub-Saharan African countries that never show up so what you see here we have a couple of countries like Cameroon, Niger, South Sudan, Uganda they're all like they're all plotted next to each other and what we found is that compared to other topics there's not much coverage at all if there is and if there's actually interest to see it here it's when there's a World Cup so there's like an event in the West which then actually sparks interest in media attention and obviously now we don't really have too much to compare it to so we figured that like we needed something which is very prominent in US mainstream media and that is Kim Kardashian I'm not sure if you know who she is she's like a media celebrity but when you've plotted against like what the media attention she gets it's way more than what all those nine Sub-Saharan African countries get combined that's actually not nothing new we had the kind of research that's been done like since the 60s but now we can actually show it with actual like a lot of data behind it then we also went into like a more like a qualitative sort of research where we looked at 50 articles each and what we saw was like basically we have like 340 stories which are valid and when you look at what the frame of those stories is it was terror related, it's Ebola related or soccer related but that's pretty much the main topics to get on mainstream media reporting in Africa is that and so a lot of good things which are happening in those countries are not getting reported they're just not there so when we kind of were at that stage we looked at the supply side of things that's what the media supplies and that's what people can read and all and we also looked at the same time when we did the research there was an article by Quinn Orton on Medium where she basically says that it's also on the demand side like so a lot of people actually don't really want to like read anything else so she has a very strong quote there where she says like you people never click the fucking link so and when we kind of think about mass atrocity prevention or prevention of atrocities we believe it's important to know that the way we see a lot of countries like African countries especially we need like another frame we just don't need only the frame we have which gets normally portrayed like Ebola and terror related then one thing we kind of did at the same time when we talked about when we did the research when we wrote the proposal right at the beginning we had like a little mishap I'm really interested in like the philosophy track we have here at the congress and so I want to share like a little anecdote so basically what happened we saw the proposal and I just saw it on my work computer and then I went home on my laptop and so I went home and I wrote like an email just kind of trying to figure out hey guys what is that research about et cetera and just had a couple of questions what I didn't know was that my wife actually she installed a chromium plug-in which would actually mock the overuse of the word cloud and turn it into butt so what happened I read this really long elaborate email because I think that it was a great project and then this is what I get back FYI it's media cloud not media butt I'm really curious et cetera obviously it was a fail we felt embarrassed but we were lucky and we got it but like yeah I think it's important to kind of share whatever mishaps you have be it in like software development or especially in academia so just putting it out very briefly then I guess the last thing I want to talk about is like we participate in various hackathons and sometimes there were like free and open source software hackers there there was a lot of people who were just like the traditional tech community like in Montreal we have a lot of software developers and obviously out there there's like some sort of like a hackathon fatigue I mean you see they're like T-Mobile and Red Bull and Evernote they're like basically big corporations using hackathons and hacking culture in a way to basically outsource their R&D so we also saw kind of like a hackathon fatigue in what we did and we said like a couple of criticisms like pretty much the biggest thing we noticed was that when we when like a lot of people who organized hackathons we participated in they tried to bring actually both pieces together the tech community and then the peace building community for example but oftentimes it was really difficult to actually get enough people with the tech knowledge so you had like 40-50 people but only two or three were able to code which then in the end if you have to actually like try to get some sort of ideas going in the deployable project you actually end up with a lot of policy talk and a lot of like there wasn't as much like cross-culturalization as like talking between the fields as I would have kind of hoped for it but also like one I would say more like on the positive side of things an example was where we participated in like the Talking Peace Festival where we found like that hackathon in Washington DC and we participated in that and there we found a good mix of both people actually knew how to code, knew kind of how to think about surveillance and kind of think about the important topics I guess the audience here is really concerned about so and what we also found is that when you think about building whatever kind of technology it's really important to be engaged with the community those people it should be served with or for so we found like this was something we felt like there was a lot of movement I think there was interest from both sides so it wasn't only from like the political policy side but also from the side of the tech knowledge and we think and so like in a way like what a lot of NGOs and the human rights groups could use like hackathons or similar ideas could use it for is actually like yeah Bill trying to get a bridge between those two communities I know there's like I mean today we heard a lot of a lot of fairly depressing stories and I don't want to end with like a happy ending but like I'm just like what I want to say is that we feel that there is like there are a lot of people who think they could be working together to actually build technologies which could help people in human rights situations and what we think in Montreal is like actually just trying to engage and get together and see where that leads that's part of why I'm here that's kind of like I'm happy to talk to people who like have different thoughts and actually give us feedback on what we can improve because if it is about talking to each other that's something we would really be engaging in okay and so like just to give you like an example a couple projects we found fairly interesting or kind of we came across during the time we did the research and then in the last half year there's a project called the early warning the early warning system which basically has a couple of components such as like a statistical analysis method and some sort of like an expert grouts or so they ask a lot of people from the peace building community and then different other communities like what they're going to think is going to happen in the next 12 months in country X, Y, Z and then they give opinions like it's a fairly big opinion poll too it's about like I think 200 people participating from different fields so it kind of tries to get a couple of methods together and I'm very sure that like a lot of people who are engaged with this project would be interested in how to make those tools better because what we kind of think is that a lot of NGOs and human rights groups what they can offer is kind of like a network to connect people with each other and they also have like often times quite a bit of knowledge of how to actually get the message out rather than if you just have technologists and attackers who just think about the deep tech and that's what they're doing kind of getting their heads away from the keyboard and actually in the wider world and how it is deployed etc so it would be great if you could get some feedback on that as well then there's another actually like I'm very kind of hesitant to promote apps because I'm not really sure how just an app by itself can promote peacekeeping or mass atrocity prevention is just I don't really see that necessarily like a good way of promoting it but there's this one app we found pretty interesting it's called Eyewitness and basically what it does it is an app to document atrocity crimes and like you can just download it and it kind of looks at takes the security of the people who use it very seriously so for example like it's not just like a logo on the app but it's kind of it's more hidden within the US but actually to get to that point it took a lot of work from security researchers to actually be able to make photos of an atrocity and then securely transmitted to I think it's international bar association which then can use those pictures with timestamps etc then to be actual legal documents in for example ICT international criminal court cases I think the last thing I would do is just kind of there are like three Canadian companies I think a couple of them might be even at the Congress so we try to kind of engage with them like for example Equality, Subcraft and Impsyphone they work very much with free and open source software in the field of human rights and kind of since we're very new with what we're doing at the digital mass atrocity prevention lab it would be great if we could just kind of get a conversation going seeing what's actually what we're doing really badly from a securities perspective and yeah so if I think that should be actually most of what I wanted to share I will put a couple of links already of what we did and what we did on an Etherpad but feel free to just reach out, write your comments in there you can't even troll, I will just delete it and yeah I think that would be the main thing of my talk give us feedback and let us know what you think and then be critical Thank you very much Nikolai we have actually plenty of time for questions so if you have any questions please line up at microphones Are there questions from IRC? No questions from IRC Any questions from the audience? No, come on Please go to the microphone so our listeners at home can hear you and we can also record it Microphone, front left please From left Hi Yeah, I guess some reflections because you were also asking for input the first one was I'm interested if anyone here is developing USSD or Sim application toolkits or any type of technology that I guess it's called technological blending or whatever you call it but to bridge the digital divide between people with dumb phones and feature phones which are pretty much the new dumb phone and I guess the entry level of an Android phone that can run that app is always increasingly going down but successful projects like Ushahidi have thought about that integration with dumb phones from the start so I would be interested if we have those skills or Sim application tool kit for example is that a completely neglected technology that's just I guess more of a brain part more of an idea and then the second question is how do you deal with the fact that in situations like this you do usually have tech experts usually from the global north narrating the stories of the global south as a big generalization but it's a tendency and how does that get resolved I think the second question I could answer in a way that a lot of what we're doing is part of a learning experience especially for myself personally I know my colleagues that do that work for a longer time and they've been involved in peaceful projects for a long time so they were actually talking about how getting Western narratives, getting them into narratives where they shouldn't be and so they know way more about that but for me personally it's just kind of like a learning experience that's what we try to reach out so I'd be able to talk more if that's possible later Sorry just to add a selfish point I'm writing a thesis on the topic so if anyone wants to continue a conversation later I'm sure that's the point of this whole session anyway to continue a conversation Thank you very much Microphone on the front right please Themetically bridging the early warning project and the media cloud project I'm wondering it seems kind of plausible to me that mass atrocities are introduced by some media activity locally or globally and I'm wondering if you're aware of any research or if you have done any research into that direction analyzing media and as an early warning for mass atrocities are you aware of any research done in that direction Yeah like I mean one piece why we were interested in what media cloud is providing is that it actually measures what's happening like in the media environment in certain countries for example Burundi and one thing we kind of were thinking about and that's just an idea which would be interesting to get also some feedback about it like there's something called the cheat out project it's like the general database on language and tone and I mean it's a project with like actually Google is behind some of that and then they basically look at media and runs in almost real time so when you basically have an environment where you think there might be atrocities happening in the near future that could be something to look at because you can actually monitor what's happening but I mean then again monitoring is close to then again also like you surveil a whole country and you surveil what's happening in their environment but like that's something we talked about like I mean the research on what like different technologies or media play in mass atrocities that I think that's a whole range of literature out there when you look at that at the Rwandan genocide for example there's a whole bandwidth of literature on like RadioS being the enabling technology because it was like there was lies and then kind of hate speech transmittable radio technology for example so there's a whole bunch of research on that topic The microphone front left please Hi, thanks for the talk Could you expand a little bit like in an ideal world what kind of software would be missing from a peace building or from a UN perspective? In an ideal world like I mean that's such a thing I think what we're actually interested in is how to enable collaboration I think collaboration tools might be something really interesting to look at because in some environments you have many different NGOs with different channels and how they work with each other so if you make it like a community effort it might be interesting to look at just basic collaboration tools and how to implement them So what I got over the work I did over the last couple of months over like a year was that often times the tools are there and then tools are there to be used but they're actually not embraced or not used by a lot of NGOs or like I mean when we look at like a lot of surveillance technologies or anti-surveillance technologies people know about it but we know how to use it and it actually would be great to have better resources and that's the way to implement it but it also I think it needs a human factor to actually push people to use the technologies that could be provided in them Microphone front right please So I understood that you are covering official media reports with media cloud Are you also researching already in the social media like the publicly available what ever Twitter streams and stuff like that to understand? Like us personally we don't I mean obviously there is like I've been involved with a couple of projects which like I know about it but I said who do that but that's the thing like us we're not like a handful of people actually at my institute and like we don't at this point we don't have the technological skills and some of it is actually fairly easy I suppose there are tools out there in which you can look at what's happening on Twitter etc and actually at this hackathon in Washington DC we had something which basically looked at the GDEL project, media cloud and Twitter at the same time as some sort of like a big monitoring system or risk assessment system and the interesting thing about GDEL is it also evaluates tone so basically if I have a sentence which is kind of negative towards a special group it could theoretically trigger something and we had a couple of guys who like coded in Python they coded like a prototype and basically they would then send it automatically a message to the piece building people on the ground so they're thinking about it like I'm not really sure who else is thinking about that kind of stuff but I mean the fact is like stuff's gonna be more digital like years to come so I think the piece building community will have to catch up to that I think that Twitter sentiments are also image recognition this can help thank you microphone front left please yeah thank you for your talk one thing that was missing for me was actions for peace enforcement which you I think did not cover in the talk did you what you're gonna do peace enforcement is the third escalation step for UN atrocity prevention I mean deploy forces to prevent stuff so what I saw here was mostly reactive international law is reactive from these atrocities some I think technology could also be used as an offensive the eyewitness idea I think was a good start if you combine it for example with image recognition on the ground or let's say drones or small mini drones that fly over the area affected so that they are also visible so that people on the ground who might commit atrocities can also see that they are witnesses stuff like that so that you build up offensive capabilities with technology I think that will also be interesting that's something I haven't thought about yet but thanks for the input that's great do we have any questions from IRC no then one last time please you had mentioned using technology for looking at the media and it seemed like also some things were leveraging what's already been done by different organizations involved in preventing atrocities and it seemed like you thought that eyewitness was an example of an app that may not be a very effective direction for technology investment it seems like the appeal of an app like that is that it's about directly impacting the atrocity whereas the media and just leveraging other people's abilities seems more indirect it seems like this image recognition is also a way of using technology to more directly impact things I kind of wonder if there are other directions that would come to your mind as far as having a direct impact on atrocity or potential atrocity I think what I meant with the apps in general I think I've seen a lot of apps which just don't really make much sense it's basically just a website and an app umbrella just kind of repackaging content actually the eyewitness app we found comparatively very smart in the way they thought about it so what was the other part of your question whether we think about other ways of kind of what we've been talking about so far besides eyewitness is like image recognition where it seems like clearly the technology itself is playing an integral role in preventing or documenting an atrocity so I was wondering if there are other ways that the technology can be used to directly impact either the prevention or the results of an atrocity to be honest I'm not really sure whether we've thought about image recognition in that sense as you describe it but I mean that's part of why we're here because we kind of want to get input on a lot of different things I mean obviously you can research a lot but just getting a human feedback on things would be very audible so if you can stick around a couple of minutes later I would be able to talk more Thank you very much Nicolae please give him a warm round of applause