A paper co-authored by BSE Affiliated Professors, Andre Groeger (UAB, MOVE and BSE) and Hannes Mueller (IAE-CISC and BSE) has won the 2023 Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research – BBVA Foundation Award in the category "Best contribution in Statistics and Operations Research applied to Data Science and Big Data". The paper is titled Monitoring War Destruction from Space Using Machine Learning.
In their paper ( with Jonathan Hersh, Andrea Matranga, and Joan Serrat) the authors build on the current research surrounding satellite images and AI for automated detection of war-related building destruction. They highlight the need to improve the training of the automated destruction monitoring and demonstrate ways in which this could be achieved. They also propose an additional machine learning stage that leverages images of surrounding areas and multiple successive images of the same area which further improves detection. By combining these steps, they construct an automated classification of building destruction which allows real-world applications using the example of the Syrian Civil War.
This project was partially funded by the La Caixa Foundation which supported groundbreaking research at the Barcelona School of Economics.
