108 for unexploded ordnance, land mine, improvised explosive device, cluster munitions, and other bomb types.” Each social media post is explored by HALO’s explosive ordnance disposal experts, who examine the image to see what they will be dealing with. “They know right away if it’s a FAB-500 aircraft bomb, which provides an evidence point we can investigate in the future,” Hamlin said. Mapping the bombs and bomb types has helped HALO educate the public in Ukraine about the munitions being dropped. “We’re interested in cluster munitions for one, because they’re dispersed over large areas and children often pick them up and play with them,” Hamlin said. HALO has also received evidence of a new Russian land mine called the POM-3, with sensors that detect human footfall rather than being triggered when disturbed. This new type of mine is launched by rocket and falls to the ground by parachute. When it senses a person, it detonates an explosive that spreads fragments in a circle 50 yards across. The POM-3 adds great complexity and danger to the demining effort because it will require bomb squad robots to dismantle them at a distance, and HALO will need to acquire that technology. Automating Damage Detection HALO first did this advanced mapping work in Tripoli, Libya, in 2019, for a conflict that lasted a year. “We asked ourselves what we could be doing during the conflict to aid our post-conflict intervention, and we decided to record and map the presence of explosive ordnance,” Jaupi said. “We learned a lot of lessons, and we’re doing things a lot better now.” In some of the cities in Ukraine, such as Mariupol, imagery showed massive damage from excessive and constant shelling. An effort is under way to apply the AI approach of machine learning to train computers to detect the damage from the imagery. HALO has been working for some time with machine learning experts at Esri to analyze the damage in countries such as Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Libya. Being able to detect damage programmatically helps HALO understand where to find unexploded bombs and land mines. Work is still in progress to refine the dataset and maps that will be shared with other humanitarian organizations and the Local experts on unexploded ordnance deal with rocket remnants in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. Photo by Anastasia Prokofyeva.
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