From the cities of Angola to the villages of Ukraine, efforts are under way to protect civilians from a deadly, hidden peril. Even when peace treaties have been signed and soldiers have gone home, the populations of war-torn countries remain in fear as roads, paths and fields are littered with landmines.
Humanitarian NGO the Halo Trust (for Hazardous Area Life-support Organisation) has spent the past three decades working to clear landmines from former and current war zones — one of the most dangerous humanitarian tasks in the world. But now, its work is about to become a lot easier, or at least quicker.
Technology is being roped in to streamline and speed up the task of identifying landmines, munitions and other unexploded ordnance left behind by years of war. Last week, Halo announced that it would pilot artificial intelligence and machine learning in its work in Ukraine as part of a new $4m (R77.7m) package of support from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The AWS investment will help detect the debris of war in drone imagery. It will also help automate the analysis of satellite imagery to detect buildings damaged by explosives and signs of human activity near battlegrounds and minefields. That, in turn, will allow Halo to prioritise areas for clearance.
We have cleared over 170,000 landmines in Mozambique alone, and we were able to declare that country mine-impact-free in 2015
— Susanna Smale, Halo regional director for Africa
Susanna Smale, Halo regional director for Africa, told Business Times this week that the organisation remained active in Southern Africa. “We work in over 30 territories and countries. In Africa, our work has been focused on the Horn of Africa and Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. Since starting those programmes — some as early as 1994, for example, when we started our work in Angola — we've had some huge success.
“We have cleared over 170,000 landmines in Mozambique alone, and we were able to declare that country mine-impact-free in 2015. That is one of our great achievements. We have also been working in Zimbabwe since 2013, a much smaller amount of time, but due to the nature of the very dense minefields that we clear there, we've already cleared over 200,000 landmines, which is quite staggering.”
Halo has been working in Angola since before the end of the civil war there in 2002. When the war ended, all 18 provinces were littered with minefields, says Smale. “It’s a huge legacy of those wars. To date we have already cleared over 100,000 landmines in Angola and, with other explosive ordinance, over 170,000 items. Our work has been a combination of working diligently to clear those minefields for safe release back to local communities, and then conducting work around weapons and ammunition management.”
A big part of Halo’s work is risk education, teaching families living near explosive threats how to identify hazards. It uses a variety of digital and in-person methods to help people, especially children, learn to stay safe around explosives until they can be removed.
“Safety is our first priority,” says Smale. “We work very diligently with standard operating procedures, in line with national standards and international standards, to ensure our people remain safe in the workplace. But one of the greatest challenges is that the challenges are different in every place that you work.
“It's all very context specific. The type of minefields, the way minefields have been laid, then informs how they will need to be cleared. That can be different within one country, within one province even, as well as being drastically different between different countries.”
Southern Africa stands out for the density of minefields. In Angola, a minefield can be as long as 18km. “And that's just one individual minefield. We also have a large variety of landmines that we clear, and there are so many different types, different sizes, different metal content, which makes our work more challenging.
“In Angola, for example, a huge number of anti-vehicle mines have been laid along the roads. So you have that challenge of safely getting to minefields as well as the clearance of minefields themselves. Access is a huge challenge. We're often working in areas in border lands, or in very rural parts of the country.”
One of their greatest successes was clearing the Huambo province in Angola. “We are working in the rural parts of the far southeast of Angola, where you've got limited infrastructure, and so limited road access to places, and very challenging, sandy terrain. And time has passed since these minefields were laid, so the terrain may change, the environment may change, vegetation grows, and roads and tracks that used to be easily recognisable are no longer visible.”
In such cases, she says, advanced technology is coming to the rescue. “One of the great things around AWS’s generous investment with us is that we can transform the way that we work in our survey process. We often don't have maps of minefields, and that's obviously hugely challenging. You're working with all the evidence that you can collect in the field, be that information that local members of the community provide, or records of car accidents as a result of anti-vehicle mines.
“The process of survey work is a bit like a jigsaw, and we've got our colleagues out there piecing together this information to be able to map and identify where minefields are. And that can take a very long time and that information can change over time.”
She said some of the machine learning they were looking at, combined with drone imagery and data collection, would give Halo an edge. “Critically, it means we can better target alternative assets and clearance technologies to exactly where we know those threats are.”
• Running AI and machine learning algorithms on satellite imagery to identify damaged buildings, using its SageMaker machine learning service.
• Powering its open-source mapping project in Ukraine, which integrates open-source data from a variety of sources and brings it into a central data repository.
• Hosting Halo's suite of business intelligence tools, which provide critical insights into its operations.
— Halo is using the AWS Cloud in several other ways:
Dave Levy, vice-president for worldwide public sector at AWS, says: “Technology, and in this case, AI specifically, has enormous potential to help solve major global challenges. We’re looking forward to working with Halo by enabling them to better harness the power of the satellite and drone imagery they are collecting to accelerate the clearing process.”
AWS is also helping Halo leverage AWS cloud computing infrastructure globally and training staff to optimise its use. Halo has more than 1,200 field data collectors across 30 countries and territories who need to upload and safely store a vast quantity of data each day — from photos to spatial and non-spatial data.
Ironically, even as the volume of drone and satellite imagery grows exponentially, field workers often find themselves in areas with little or no connectivity. The challenge then is to use technology solutions that enable them to work offline and upload content to the cloud when connectivity allows.
Said Smale: “Historically, we've relied on individuals using metal detectors, and that takes a huge amount of time. You have to be extremely meticulous. Now we use different types of detection, ground penetrating radar, for example, different mechanical assets, as well as the use of satellite imagery and drone imagery. We have a whole toolbox of different technologies.”
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