SSI Brown Bag – Detecting Human Rights Violations with SmallSats

Andrew Marx , Ph.D. and HSGI Research Lab Students

At the end of August 2017, the Myanmar military began a campaign of genocide to remove religious minority group from southern Rohingya. Within two months, hundreds of villages were destroyed and more than 620,000 people fled Rohingya.

Mass atrocities such as this continue to occur in remote areas, with the international community often finding out the full scale of the conflict weeks later.

In response, student researchers from SSI’s Human Security and Geospatial Intelligence Lab partnered with Human Rights Watch and the SmallSat company, Planet, to create an algorithm leveraging daily satellite imagery to alert when villages are destroyed.

This presentation will describe how the HSGI lab worked with collaborators to produce this research and, ultimately, publish findings in a peer-reviewed journal for implementation by the international community.

BlueJeans Link: https://bluejeans.com/484255976