LANDMINESEach Year, Landmines Kill Residents of War-Torn Countries. This Innovative Tool Could Save Lives.
Landmines and other explosive remnants of war killed or wounded at least 4,710 people in at least 49 countries in 2022, according to a recent report from the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Ukraine reported 608 casualties. Afghanistan documented 303. Colombia recorded 145.
As he grew up in Bogotá, Colombia, Mateo Dulce Rubio would hear a familiar news story every few days. Someone, he’d learn, had stepped on another landmine. The explosion had killed or injured them. Though the capital city was far from the country’s war-torn areas, these accidents stayed in the back of his mind.
Colombia has been embroiled in conflict with armed rebel groups for roughly six decades. The guerrilla fighters have buried thousands of landmines in rural areas, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of death, dismemberment and displacement. Recent efforts to remove the explosives have reduced casualties, but the reported victims increasingly have been civilians.
Dulce Rubio is now a fifth-year doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, where he studies public policy at Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy and statistics at Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.
The risk of landmines in countries like Colombia is “not a problem that people in the U.S. are very aware of,” he said. “It mostly affects third-world countries, developing countries. But in those countries, it’s a very, very important problem.”
That’s why, about three years ago, Dulce Rubio began leading a team of classmates and faculty in developing a three-pronged system for more accurately identifying landmine contamination. They’ve since collaborated with the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS) to refine the system, called RELand. A humanitarian organization in Colombia has been testing it in two municipalities for more than a year, in a process known as a field test.
These organizations have had limited resources to understand where landmines are located; RELand uses artificial intelligence to provide more accurate predictions. So far, he and several faculty believe the results from the system’s field test are promising. The Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies has published the research team’s paper on RELand, and UNMAS plans to test it in other war-torn territories.
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There is a lot of uncertainty on where to deploy teams, where to deploy equipment, and that’s affecting both the operational results, but also the funding.
— Mateo Dulce Rubio, Heinz College Ph.D. candidate
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Rory Collins, global information management and analytics advisor at the UN’s Office for Project Services, wrote in a statement that artificial intelligence has helped the organization more efficiently remove landmines in Colombia and made its employees safer.
