Earlier this month, Bellingcat hosted its fourth hackathon, our first to happen in-person. We’re excited to share the tasks our members dropped at life over three days of intense hacking on the College of Amsterdam.
In contrast to our earlier hackathons, which adopted narrower standards, we inspired members to work on any sort of undertaking inside the scope of open supply analysis. We noticed groups design guides, construct instruments, dive into investigations, and even crimson crew current instruments. We had been completely happy to see the imaginative methods members approached our three proposed broad themes:
- Making public open information extra accessible and helpful
- Visualising local weather change and its penalties
- Understanding the visible tradition of disinformation
We had been fortunate to satisfy over 45 members and see their tasks take form from the primary ideation actions to the ultimate displays to our panel of judges. The variety of expertise and pursuits made the occasion a fantastic studying expertise for members and organisers.
Given the Hackathon’s broad boundaries we select to have 4 awards. One for Finest General and three Commendations — for Impression, Accessibility, and Creativeness. Our judging crew comprised of visible investigations reporter Alison Killing of the Monetary Instances, professor of journalism and new media Erik Borra of the College of Amsterdam, and Bellingcat’s personal researcher and journalist Michael Colborne. We thank them for his or her insightful feedback and had been glad to listen to how shocked they had been by the standard of the members’ work.
We’re excited to current the ultimate tasks from our Fall Hackathon right here with a short rationalization of every one. We hope to see them assist and encourage open-source researchers sooner or later.
The Winners
Finest General
Meal Prep by the UI4CLI crew. Meal Prep is a common UI platform for CLI-based Python script instruments, reside device URLs, and markdown recordsdata. With the perception that round 75% of open-source researchers don’t use command-line instruments because of accessibility points, Laurynas Keturakis and Mia Bonardi’s undertaking goals to bridge the hole between device builders and open-source researchers and journalists. Revealing their ingenuity, Meal Prep is constructed on prime of an current open-source code undertaking — Docassemble. The jury was significantly impressed with the impression this undertaking might have on how on-line investigations are performed. You possibly can attempt their MVP at apps.uiforcli.com.
Commendation for Impression
Figuring out SOGI-based crimes in Russian courtroom selections by Dataout’s Andrei Nesterov. This undertaking develops a replicable methodology for uncovering crimes motivated by prejudices in opposition to somebody’s Sexual Orientation and/or Gender Id (SOGI) in Russian courtroom selections. Utilizing sudrfparser to scrape over 2000 Russian courtroom web sites, Andrei investigated SOGI-based crimes between 2021 and 2022 by filtering the info based mostly on textual content search, legal code articles, and guide validation. This led to an preliminary dataset of 42 such crimes. The jury was impressed by how this system was efficiently utilized and by its potential impression as a result of ease of replicability to different investigations.
Commendation for Accessibility
Matchmaker by crew Le Chapeau. Yasha, Fabio, Fraser, Renu, Dasha, and Andrey fashioned a crew of six and mixed their expertise to check and examine 4 approaches for detecting narratives on social media. Utilizing information from Bellingcat’s QAnon dataset, the crew first set a baseline by doing a guide narrative identification after which in contrast these outcomes to incrementally technical approaches: utilizing entity detection, then entity clustering, and eventually ChatGPT. Their outcomes are promising and present, for instance, how ChatGPT was in a position to determine structured info, it couldn’t discover all human-found narratives however did discover some new ones. The jury appreciated how the insights from this undertaking can inform future work on disinformation analysis and make it extra accessible given how gradual this process is when performed by hand.
Commendation for Creativeness
Investigating Landfills in Gaza by crew UVA trash(wo)males. Meg Kitamura, Nora Svensson Hahr, and Jesper Brinkhof labored on a strategy to research landfill administration worldwide and zoomed in on waste administration in six landfills within the Gaza Strip. Amongst their findings is how hearth information, corresponding to NASA FIRMS, can be utilized to check waste mismanagement within the Gaza Strip. Verify their presentation for a full run-down. The jury was happy to discover a well-known open-source analysis approach getting used imaginatively on this new state of affairs and the way that may encourage extra lateral considering within the subject.
Generative AI, Disinformation, Outer House Trash, Gang Violence By means of Drill Music
Once more, judging this hackathon was powerful. Each undertaking was considerate and deserving of reward, whether or not for taking up vital topic areas, exploring novel open supply strategies or for sheer inventiveness and creativeness. The opposite tasks to come back out of the occasion are listed beneath and we invite you to take a look at their linked GitHub repositories for extra info on each.
AI Influencers, a undertaking investigating the web presence of synthetic intelligence generated influencers on Instagram and Twitter. Jacky and Veronika produced an infographic with insights and a dataset of current AI Influencer accounts.
ContrFinder by Anastasiia Iurshina and Kristina Nedzvetskaia of crew Bienenstich [a delicious German dessert cake – Ed.] constructed a device to detect contradictions in multilingual textual content information.
Investigating London Gang Violence with Music by Adnaan Jiwa, Winnie Lee, and Cees van Spaendonck. Gang tradition in London is a prevalent problem mirrored within the expression of people by means of drill music, which on this undertaking is investigated by each content material (lyrics) and contextual evaluation. The crew developed a set of instruments, datasets, and an article to assist researchers in exploring London gang tradition and associated gang violence.
Flooding in Ballia by Hannah Hamilton, Maggie Spider, and Jiri Svboda of The Hen Sanctuary crew. Utilizing satellite tv for pc imagery and consumer generated content material the crew delved into the open-source information that may paint a extra full image of an space affected by local weather change.
Adana by Denis Zvyagintsev and @soxoj of crew WatchCats. Adana, or Analytical DAshboard (for NArratives), is a dashboard to visualise statistics, matters and sentiments of narratives from social media posts scraped information. You possibly can attempt their device right here.
Artificial picture detection and evasion by Kolenyo, Opos, and Kat of the Artificial Disinfo Group. With the objective of enabling higher artificial picture detection and understanding how current instruments carry out, the crew examined how completely different points and tunable parameters of a small pattern of AI-generated pictures replicate on the detection fashions. Verify their work in this presentation.
Analysing Sources of Local weather Disinformation on Reddit by Simon Castles, Shiva Shah, Zachary Horsington and Martin S. of The International Safety Initiative crew. The crew units out to analyse influential Reddit customers as sources of local weather disinformation by way of a number of textual content and community evaluation strategies utilizing a scraped dataset.
Unravelling the Hyperlink by Arina Mahmoudian, Sikharin Yotin, Brittany Zelada, and Naufal Rafif Siahaan of crew POSINT Bellingkitten. Following the exodus of Myanmar’s mass Rohingya displacement in 2017, the undertaking goals to seek out the correlation between the unfold of hate speech on Twitter and the prevalence of fires inside the border areas of Bangladesh and Myanmar.
A report and research of Satellite tv for pc Junk in House as of 2023 by Anabella Villanueva, Anushikha Chaudhuri, Julia Krönert, Laura Dea Vamper, and Polina Yordanova of crew House Junkies. On this undertaking, the crew analysed the inhabitants tendencies of satellites in decrease, medium and geostationary orbits and the way house junk needs to be thought-about as a critical level of dialogue within the close to future. You possibly can watch their glorious video presentation beneath.
Many thanks once more to the entire members, the judges, and to the College of Amsterdam for internet hosting.
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