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Indian Engineer wins UN Challenge to create open-source tool providing greater visibility into Member State voting patterns

Indian Engineer wins UN Challenge to create open-source tool providing greater visibility into Member State voting patterns

Image: Overall analysis from the Global policy tool, UNGAviz entry by Abdulqadir Rashik, General Overview and User Guide
The United Nations announced the winners of the Unite Ideas #UNGAViz Textual Analysis and Visualization Challenge last week.
Unite Ideas is a big data crowd-sourcing platform developed by the Office of Information and Communications Technology, which seeks to provide a platform for collaboration between academia, civil society, and the United Nations.The vast amount of information generated by the UN in at least 6 official languages, and formats e.g. documents, datasets, and multimedia is increasingly being made available to the public as “open data”.  At Unite Ideas, the public can access not just these these datasets, but also the source code of the solutions to previously completed challenges and build on them. Solutions and expertise developed can be re-used by governments and civil society to support international peace and security, sustainable development, human rights, international law, and humanitarian aid.
#UNGAViz is the sixth challenge issued by Unite Ideas. Till date, academia, the general public and private companies have have contributed more than 50 open-source solutions, many of which will be used by the United Nations or shared with Member States.
Under this challenge, the first collaboration between the United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) and a Member State agency, the United States Department of State, developers worldwide were asked to create an open-source tool capable to provide greater visibility into Member State voting patterns on General Assembly resolutions, improving transparency about their voting choices and making it easier to gain insights from them.  The United Nations General Assembly has passed over 13000 resolutions, since its first session in 1946.
Along with technical merits, solutions were judged based on their potential to support policymakers dealing with humanitarian challenges, peace and security issues, and other international matters, sometimes under extreme time pressure.
Abdulqadir Rashik, an Indian software engineer was declared the winner with his open-source tool, “Global Policy”. It provides decision makers insights into three key areas: 1) A broad overview of resolutions passed related to the chosen topic and interest in the topic over time; 2) analysis into the behavior of any particular country with respect to the resolutions found (including comparison of voting patterns with other countries, to find like-minded nations which tend to cast the same vote on the given topic, as well countries which generally oppose the vote cast by the chosen country); and 3) a detailed look into any one of the resolutions found, making data such as the date on which it was passed, voting on the resolution is easily accessible, along with a link to the entire resolution text if the user wishes to analyse in even deeper detail.

Image: Country analysis (left) and resolution analysis (right) from the Global policy tool, UNGAviz entry by Abdulqadir Rashik, General Overview and User Guide

Mr. Rashik is a frequent contributor to Unite Ideas challenges, and he previously won the top prize in the #LinksSDGs challenge for his submission, “Links to Sustainable Cities”, an interactive visualization that identifies and maps the links between Sustainable Development Goal 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities, and the other 16 Goals.
Maximiliano Lopez, an information technology consultant from Argentina, was the runner-up, with a multilingual application, with an interface and authentic search capabilities in English, French and Spanish. The application makes use of Information Retrieval libraries (Apache Lucene) allowing users to find resolution on the basis of terms. Resolutions may also be filtered on the basis of their date and the availability of voting records.
Ongoing challenge- #IDETECT
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) has set the #IDETECT challenge to create a tool that will be used to monitor internal displacement as a result of natural-hazard induced disasters, armed conflicts, generalised violence and development projects. The tool will provide the humanitarian community with an easy way to extract and analyse facts from a variety of documents, news, field reports, social media and any other relevant source).
Using Natural Language Processing algorithms, the tool should automatically extract “facts” from the documents. A fact is a displacement figure and each fact should include the date of publication of the document, the location where displacement happened; the reporting term used in the document and the reporting unit. There are different reporting units used to identify displaced population should be grouped in two main reporting units (people and households) and the number displaced.
Relevant documents should be classified in three categories, “Disasters”, “Conflict and violence”, and “Other”. representing different triggers of displacement. The tool should provide a platform for visualisation and quantitative analysis of facts.

Type image caImage: Graphical representation of the challenge workflowption here (optional)

This challenge is open till April 28, 2017. All the winning solutions from past challenges can be accessed here.

PARTNER

Qlik’s vision is a data-literate world, where everyone can use data and analytics to improve decision-making and solve their most challenging problems. A private company, Qlik offers real-time data integration and analytics solutions, powered by Qlik Cloud, to close the gaps between data, insights and action. By transforming data into Active Intelligence, businesses can drive better decisions, improve revenue and profitability, and optimize customer relationships. Qlik serves more than 38,000 active customers in over 100 countries.

PARTNER

CTC Global Singapore, a premier end-to-end IT solutions provider, is a fully owned subsidiary of ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) and ITOCHU Corporation.

Since 1972, CTC has established itself as one of the country’s top IT solutions providers. With 50 years of experience, headed by an experienced management team and staffed by over 200 qualified IT professionals, we support organizations with integrated IT solutions expertise in Autonomous IT, Cyber Security, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure, Workplace Modernization and Professional Services.

Well-known for our strengths in system integration and consultation, CTC Global proves to be the preferred IT outsourcing destination for organizations all over Singapore today.

PARTNER

Planview has one mission: to build the future of connected work. Our solutions enable organizations to connect the business from ideas to impact, empowering companies to accelerate the achievement of what matters most. Planview’s full spectrum of Portfolio Management and Work Management solutions creates an organizational focus on the strategic outcomes that matter and empowers teams to deliver their best work, no matter how they work. The comprehensive Planview platform and enterprise success model enables customers to deliver innovative, competitive products, services, and customer experiences. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with locations around the world, Planview has more than 1,300 employees supporting 4,500 customers and 2.6 million users worldwide. For more information, visit www.planview.com.

SUPPORTING ORGANISATION

SIRIM is a premier industrial research and technology organisation in Malaysia, wholly-owned by the Minister​ of Finance Incorporated. With over forty years of experience and expertise, SIRIM is mandated as the machinery for research and technology development, and the national champion of quality. SIRIM has always played a major role in the development of the country’s private sector. By tapping into our expertise and knowledge base, we focus on developing new technologies and improvements in the manufacturing, technology and services sectors. We nurture Small Medium Enterprises (SME) growth with solutions for technology penetration and upgrading, making it an ideal technology partner for SMEs.

PARTNER

HashiCorp provides infrastructure automation software for multi-cloud environments, enabling enterprises to unlock a common cloud operating model to provision, secure, connect, and run any application on any infrastructure. HashiCorp tools allow organizations to deliver applications faster by helping enterprises transition from manual processes and ITIL practices to self-service automation and DevOps practices. 

PARTNER

IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 3,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

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