The governments of the United Kingdom and Switzerland will support a project to prioritise humanitarian demining. It is being implemented on the platform of Palantir, a technology company specialising in big data analytics. The announcement was made at the Ukraine Mine Action Conference (UMAC-2024), which is taking place in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The money will be used to support a pilot project in Kharkiv region. It will test the general logic and prioritisation algorithm developed by the Ukrainian team within one region.

“Prioritisation is one of the most important processes in building an integrated mine action system. Based on a large amount of data processed by AI, we will be able to determine which areas should be demined first. And I am glad that we are moving quite quickly in building this process: we recently signed a memorandum with Palantir, and today we are launching a pilot project. I thank our partners for their support and I am convinced that this is a two-way street – the technology we have developed and improved will be used by other countries facing the problem of mining,” said Yuliia Svyrydenko, First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy of Ukraine.

Once the project funding agreement has been signed, the Ukrainian teams will have three months to test the prioritisation system and correct any discrepancies. Following successful testing, the project will be rolled out to 10 regions affected by the hostilities.

As the UK-Switzerland joint statement notes, quality information management is an important element of Ukraine’s new National Mine Action Strategy. And the Palantir platform can be the basis for creating a fast, effective mechanism for prioritising mine action in Ukraine based on multiple sources of data. The results of the pilot will help determine whether and how to implement the prioritisation system at the national level.

The Ministry of Economy of Ukraine, the Humanitarian Demining Centre, the UK, Switzerland and Palantir are working on signing a contract to implement a three-month pilot project in Kharkiv region.

Background

Palantir Technologies is an international corporation that develops software for integrating and analysing large amounts of data using artificial intelligence.

Since the start of the full-scale invasion, the company has launched several projects in Ukraine in cooperation with the Government. Among them is assistance in humanitarian demining. The relevant partnership agreement was signed between the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine and Palantir on 3 March 2024.