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Attendees of the Digital Humanitarianism: Tech, Law & Policy Challenges workshop

Reflecting on the Digital Humanitarianism: Tech, Law & Policy Challenges workshop

Thu 09 March 2023

On 23 February 2023, the UNSW Faculty of Law & Justice was host to a highly interdisciplinary workshop, ‘Digital Humanitarianism: Tech, Law & Policy Challenges’, centered on the promise and difficulty of incorporating data science and machine learning into humanitarian work and official government statistics.

This one-day event gathered scholarly researchers from law, social science, computer science, statistics, and mathematics together with humanitarian professionals from the private sector, and senior statisticians and data scientists from four different governments (Australia, Colombia, Indonesia, and the UK) and from the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP). The aim of their coming together was to discuss insights from the Data Science in Humanitarianism: Confronting Novel Law and Policy Challenges project and explore prospects for future, related research.

Among those who gathered for this purpose was the project’s UK-based Participating Investigator, David Nelken, Professor of Comparative and Transnational Law at King’s College London. As well as being supported by the UNSW Allens Hub for Technology, Law & Innovation, this event was sponsored by the Australian Federal Government’s ARC Discovery Projects scheme, the Australian Human Rights Institute and the UNSW Data Science Hub (uDASH). Technical collaboration on some of the statistical and computational challenges discussed at this event is ongoing and was the focus of a hands-on workshop on the following day, led by Hub member Wayne Wobcke and Siti Mariyah from UNSW’s Faculty of Engineering.

Meanwhile, some of the insights discussed on the social science and law side are available to read in a book that has just been published by Oxford University Press: #Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order authored by Hub member Fleur Johns.

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Photo Description: Setia Pramana (BPS - Statistics Indonesia), Fleur Johns (UNSW), Eric Deeben (UK Office of National Statistics), Wayne Wobcke (UNSW), Siti Mariyah (UNSW)