PPMI established a partnership with the IICPSD SDG AI Lab to advance the research and application of frontier technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in accelerating the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The organizations will cooperate to make frontier technologies, specifically document classification and analysis technologies, available to a wide range of stakeholders by advancing an open-source and free OSDG tool that can accurately classify and analyze documents by their relevance to specific SDGs. The activities will be built on the prior work of both partners but also experiment with new approaches and identify the most promising technologies. Moreover, the organizations will conduct research on promising frontier technologies to advance the SDGs and develop relevant capacities on these through skills and community development
SDG AI Lab has a mission to harness the potential of frontier technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for sustainable development. The Lab provides research, development and advisory services in the areas of frontier technologies and sustainable development. As well, the Lab supports UNDP’s internal capacity strengthening efforts for the increasing demand for digital solutions. To bridge the talent gap in the use of frontier technologies in development contexts, the Lab mobilizes a community of volunteer data scientists, connecting UNDP teams and highly skilled data scientists to address development challenges with digital solutions.
PPMI is one of the leading public policy research centers in Europe. The institute’s research and advisory role has contributed to the improvement of public policies in Lithuania and the European Union. PPMI assists its clients in dealing with contemporary public policy challenges through strengthening their administrative capacities and ability to make evidence-based strategic decisions. The organization developed initial version of OSDG and other digital tools, and shared openly their code, and the research findings. Overall, PPMI is one of the pioneers in machine learning for SDG research.
SDG AI Lab and PPMI have partnered to respond to the increasing demand from the UN system, public institutions and private sector for the classification of documents such as policy briefs, academic literature and corporate documents according to the SDGs. Categorizing policies, programmes, projects, initiatives, and products such as research papers and their outcomes according to the SDGs has been identified as a vital task that can significantly improve analytical processes and reduce the burden on the organizations and field experts. As there has been an ongoing search for a suitable digital solution, particularly in clustering and categorizing text-based information according to SDGs, it is expected that industry grade OSDG tool will have a value proposition to all institutions working with SDGs.
