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Sudanese women gather for a hot meal in al-Rahmaniyah camp for displaced people, near the city of El-Obeid in the southern Kordofan region of Sudan on Tuesday. Geneva - Misinformation and hate speech are inciting harm to refugees, with artificial intelligence exacerbating the spread, the United Nations warned Tuesday, as it urged tech giants to help turn the tide. However, if handled the right way, AI could be put to good use in managing humanitarian crises, said UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency. UNHCR is taking part in the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, putting across its point that the world's major displacement crises are often twinned with "information crises". The summit is an attempt by the wider U.N. to focus on using AI's potential to serve humanity by solving global challenges, and to look at the state of AI standards.

Many attempts have been made throughout the last thirty years.

The United Nations should follow the European Commission in establishing a regulatory framework for artificial intelligence and biometrics to protect people subject to the technologies, build trust in their use and take the pressure off data scientists to constantly justify the ethics, writes Eleonore Fournier-Tombs of McGill University for The Conversation. The European Commission (EC) put forward proposals in April 2021 that seek to harmonize rules on artificial intelligence and create mechanisms which Fournier-Tombs likens to the process for seeking approval for a new drug. Developers of a new high-risk application of AI would have to submit it for regulatory approval. They would also have to provide details on how the models and data are used and how impacts on privacy or discrimination would be addressed. Areas of risk include biometric identification, categorization and evaluation of the eligibility of people for accessing welfare and services, including in emergency response situations.

The European Commission recently published a proposal for a regulation on artificial intelligence (AI). This is the first document of its kind to attempt to tame the multi-tentacled beast that is artificial intelligence. "The sun is starting to set on the Wild West days of artificial intelligence," writes Jeremy Kahn. He may have a point. When this regulation comes into effect, it will change the way that we conduct AI research and development.

Together with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) 34 collaborators built several AI and machine learning based solutions to predict forced displacement, violent conflicts, and climate change in Somalia. In addition, an exploratory data analysis resulted in powerful insights regarding conflict types, areas, and reasons. The findings will help UNHCR to execute necessary support mechanism for people at need in a faster and more effective way. Millions of people in Somalia are forced to leave their current area of residence or community due to resource shortage and natural disasters like droughts and floods as well as violent conflicts. Our challenge partner, UNHCR, provides assistance and protection for those who are forcibly displaced inside of Somalia.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 4.8 million people have fled Syria alone since the outbreak of civil war in 2011. In 2015, Amnesty International reported that the number of refugees worldwide reached nearly 20 million. When including displacements within countries, the number climbs to 60 million. Such numbers may appear to be a crippling crisis for many governments and NGOs - but they may be an opportunity for businesses and startups. Refugees looking for shelter away from areas of conflict often live in appalling conditions, with minimal access to food, water or healthcare.

AI will become one of the most defining technologies across industries, and the nations that get it "right" are bound to break to the next level of economic and social development. The US and China have been at a race to harness the potential that the application of artificial intelligence holds for the national economic environment and international competitiveness. There are a number of societal and organizational characteristics that China possesses that might put it at an advantage in the development of advanced AI. The first is China's particular brand of socialist market economy gives the government a significant amount of control and involvement in market forces. Not only does this mean Beijing can push for over-the-horizon innovation where market forces would typically fail, but it also has created a unique level of cooperation between Chinese tech companies and the government.

What started with a Siri-like chatbot to provide localized refugee information led to various UN agencies backing the idea of a hackathon to develop tech to help in Syria's humanitarian crisis. By February this year, Lebanon was hosting about 1.1 million refugees from neighboring Syria, which amounted to about one in five people in the country, according to Amnesty International. Since then the numbers have continued to grow. Alongside those figures, 4.8 million Syrian refugees are registered with UNHCR in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. With Syria's civil war and the resulting humanitarian crisis showing no signs of abating, one Lebanon-based US entrepreneur, Mike Clarke, director of The Humanitarian Innovation Lab, is working with agencies like UNHCR, UNICEF, and OCHA "to inspire and cultivate new technologies that can quickly improve the current response to the refugee crisis in Lebanon".

In the midst of a continuing refugee crisis across much of the globe, June 20 marks World Refugee Day, an occasion that seeks to raise awareness for the plight of refugees across the world. And thanks to a partnership between Blippar, the augmented reality and artificial intelligence company, and UN refugee agency UNHCR, that awareness is going digital. Currently, the Blippar app allows people to "blipp," or scan objects they want to learn more about, thereby accessing informational or entertaining content about the world around them. As part of the new campaign, Blippar is asking users to show their support for refugees by blipping their hands. This scan of support translates into an instant signature on the UNHCR #WithRefugees petition, which requests that national governments act with solidarity and shared responsibility when it comes to the migrant crisis.