Humanitarians look to put the AI in aid
Humanitarians look to put the AI in aid
https://www.yahoo.com/news/world/articles/humanitarians-look-put-ai-aid-021916593.html
Publish Date: 2026-07-09 22:19:00
Source Domain: www.yahoo.com
From remote-controlled trucks delivering life-saving aid in dangerous settings to mobile phone data analysis flagging mass displacement, humanitarians are eyeing ways in which artificial intelligence can speed up and improve their operations.
There have been plenty of warnings about the dangers of AI for aid agencies, who face growing challenges of securing often extremely sensitive data and swelling misinformation about their operations and beneficiaries.
But at the AI for Good summit in Geneva this week, a handful of humanitarian-focused displays emphasised the technology’s positive potential.
Parked in one corner of a vast hall at the Palexpo conference centre was a giant white SHERP vehicle, resembling a hulking Martian rover, decked out with cameras and sensors and a drone landing-pad on the roof.
Made in Ukraine, SHERPs are amphibious vehicles that can float on water, drive through swamps and flooded rivers with their giant wheels, and climb over obstacles up to one metre (3.3 feet) high.
The UN’s World Food Programme is preparing to begin field-testing a version of the AI-enabled truck that can be steered remotely through the most dangerous and difficult terrain to reach people in need.
“I think this could be a game-changer,” Bernhard Kowatsch, head of WFP’s global accelerator and ventures innovation division, told AFP.
The technology, he said, “should allow us essentially to reach people that otherwise never would have been reachable”.
– Not possible without AI –
WFP already has drivers using SHERPs to deliver aid in Sudan, South Sudan and Uganda.
But after numerous heartbreaking losses of drivers, it tasked the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to help equip the vehicles with AI and other technologies, making it possible to control them remotely through particularly dangerous terrain.
The idea is to set up a shipping container control room in a safe area, where a human can remotely control the vehicle on the last, most treacherous leg of its journey.
Tests have been…
