“Mnemonic is a Syrian NGO that archive digital information for documenting human rights violations”
Mnemonic wanted to search for evidence that a specific “cluster” weapon called RBK-250 had been used on Syrian civilians. The NGO had more than 350,000 hours of video that contained evidence of war crimes but couldn’t analyze them manually.
An AI program requires thousands of images of the RBK-250 to train (to recognise the weapon, from every angle and in any situation, whether it was partially destroyed or covered in rubble). Images that didn’t exist.
In November, the group experimented with a new technique using synthetic data instead of real images. Researchers of the NGO created 10,000 synthetic images of RBK-250s and used these to train the AI program. And in a three-day trial, software trained on the synthetic images detected the use of RBK-250s more than 200 times from a cache of more than 100,000 videos, with 99 per cent accuracy.
Mnemonic provided these findings to human rights defenders to identify who is responsible for these war crimes.
