AI Emerges as Crucial Tool for Groups Seeking Justice for Syria War Crimes

So as the United Nations, European authorities and human-rights groups build war-crimes cases, they have turned to a novel tool: artificial intelligence. With the regime of President Bashar al-Assad emerging largely victorious from nearly a decade of conflict, efforts to bring about some measure of accountability are gaining speed, largely in European courts. Since the beginning of Syria's conflict, activists on the ground risked their lives to document human-rights violations, from torture and attacks on protesters to indiscriminate rocket strikes and barrel bombs. Now, AI and machine learning could play an integral role in bringing war criminals to justice for Syria by helping to sort through the huge trove of evidence, and serve as a model for investigations into other modern-day conflicts. "You have a use of technology both to disseminate the information, capture it, and now to search it that is suddenly very different and changes the way you work," said Catherine Marchi-Uhel, who heads the United Nations body tasked with collecting Syrian evidence and building cases.