Peacefulness is a principal dimension of well-being for all humankind and is the way out of inequity and every single form of violence. Thus, its measurement has lately drawn the attention of researchers and policy-makers. During the last years, novel digital data streams have drastically changed the research in this field. In the current study, we exploit information extracted from Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone (GDELT) digital news database, to capture peacefulness through the Global Peace Index (GPI). Applying predictive machine learning models, we demonstrate that news media attention from GDELT can be used as a proxy for measuring GPI at a monthly level. Additionally, we use the SHAP methodology to obtain the most important variables that drive the predictions. This analysis highlights each country's profile and provides explanations for the predictions overall, and particularly for the errors and the events that drive these errors. We believe that digital data exploited by Social Good researchers, policy-makers, and peace-builders, with data science tools as powerful as machine learning, could contribute to maximize the societal benefits and minimize the risks to peacefulness.

Breakthroughs in technology are typically attributed to a single lone genius, but research led by DeepMind scientist Thore Graepel suggests the full power of AI will be unleashed through a collective approach of multi-agents. The UCL machine learning professor helped create AlphaGo, which pursued an individual strategy called competitive self-play to become the first computer program to defeat a human professional Go player in 2015. He's since turned his focus from competition to cooperation, using deep reinforcement learning to understand how teamwork develops among self-interested agents, whether they're computer programmes or human social dilemmas. "We believe that this kind of model is a powerful baseline to study these kinds of social dilemmas in more detail," said Graepel at the AI for Social Good symposium at the Turing Institute. His work forms part of DeepMind's ambitious mission "to solve intelligence".