Since the lightning rise of ISIS in 2014, an enormous amount of innocent people were brutally killed in terrorist attacks and bombings. And although the American president Donald J. Trump claims he defeated ISIS, the world’s deadliest terrorist organisation is still threatening in our world. Fortunately, ISIS attacks in the West fell steeply in 2018. On the other hand, the attempted attacks remain stable and are even rising in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. So ISIS has not been defeated yet and still a lot has to be done in order to safe the lives of many people. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play a major role in doing just that.
Khaled al-Idlibi, a 23-year-old media activist, was speeding away with his brother on the back of his motorbike when he heard the airstrike that destroyed his neighbour’s house in the Idlib, in the northwest of Syria. A warning system called the HALA System, warned Khaled a few minutes before the attack and has probably saved Khaled and his brother’s live.
The HALA warning system aims to create a massive social impact and to save lives. They already achieved an estimated 20-27% reduction in casualty rates in 2018! Sentry is HALA’s early warning system utilising a multisensor network to generate a credible, real-time, situational awareness of threats in the toughest places on earth. Sentry uses AI to instantaneously validate information from multiple sources, including humans, allowing stakeholders to detect, identify, and predict threats. It includes AI-driven tools to identify trends, predict change, and recognise the impact of thousands of events. The HALA alert system is available to everyone with a computer or smartphone through Facebook Messenger or Telegram. Using these platforms, the system warns you a few minutes before an attack is forecasted to happen and is therefore able to save many lives, just as in the case of Khaled.
The following interesting video is elaborating on the HALA system in a beautiful way.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s3rys3xlBZbUKsamWz0nyGPuY7mje71S/edit
This case is showing the power, strength and employability of AI to do amazing things, such as saving lives. What do you think about the future of AI with respect to the role it can play in warzones? Is it a positive trend or might it introduce new threats as well?
Sources:
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-6113077/Air-raid-warning-tech-gives-Syrians-life-saving-minutes.html
- https://halasystems.com
- https://jobs.halasystems.com
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/world/middleeast/isis-attacks.html
- https://www.vox.com/world/2018/1/30/16945312/state-of-the-union-2018-isis
