The 2024 CASSINI Challenge, under the theme “Make it with Space!”, was looking for solutions that use space technologies to solve real-world problems. From satellite navigation and Earth observation to secure communications and space surveillance and tracking, participants showed their innovation and commercial potential across the 3 competition tracks: Idea, Prototype and Product.

PeaceEye was one of the winners in the Idea track 2024. For this challenge, we integrate EO data, public news and ACLED conflict incidents to make prediction and extract feature importance that is highly related to conflicts in each state.

Our idea saw us integrate EO and open-source data to uncover conflict drivers using AI and NLP, delivering context-specific information to decision-makers through our state-of-the-art data extraction and integration pipeline.

The NLP pipeline (bigrams) revealed key environmental factors relevant to conflicts such as water access, built-up areas, precipitation, and population. By combining conflict event datasets with EO data (Sentinel-2, MODIS, CHIRPS) and ML prediction techniques, we were able to gain a holistic understanding of the conflict situation in our focus area, South Sudan.

This recognition by the EUSPA – EU Agency for the Space Programme’s CASSINI Platform reinforces our belief that when data becomes a story, it can become a force for peace!

Cover image source: https://www.euspa.europa.eu/cassini-challenges-winners-2024