Using AI to connect every school to the internet

UNICEF has been expending great effort to map schools in developing countries. Part of the United Nations (UN), UNICEF provides humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide. One of their goals is to facilitate children’s access to education. By combining high-resolution satellite imagery, UNICEF’s Office of Innovation created a model capable of recognizing schools. Distinctive features of schools as viewed from above allowed the model to distinguish them from other buildings. 

However, UNICEF wanted to ensure that they avoid biases in their model as much as possible. Hence, UNICEF and Tryolabs partnered together to understand how UNICEF’s Machine Learning model was actually performing by employing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods. Leveraging AI for social good was the essence of the project and our main goal.

Training a machine learning model to identify schools from satellite imagery of developing countries is a difficult task. Our collaboration brought together their experience and our AI skills to gain new insights into their model’s predictive behavior. Tryolabs believes this kind of partnership promotes innovative and unique results.