The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS)

unaids

UNAIDS is leading the global effort to end AIDS as a public health threat by 2030 as part of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Description of Activities on AI

Project: Global AIDS Monitoring and use of AI

Currently, the Global AIDS Monitoring (GAM) data collection is done through an online reporting platform, and the data are published in the annual Global AIDS Report and on AIDSinfo data visualization platform. Much of this work includes manual processing: data entry (country rapporteurs), data management and organization, validation and presentation/visualization (strategic information department, SID).

While the new UNAIDS strategy and targets outline far more detailed and broader data framework, it is anticipated that the burden on collecting, validating and analyzing the data is likely to increase both for country rapporteurs and UNAIDS. It is necessary to explore new ways of automating the data collation from publicly accessible sources and platforms, reducing the reporting burden on countries. Furthermore, with the increase in data, iterative yet fast cross-analysis and learning are required to identify issues such as inequities in services and affected communities, as well as the role of societal enablers affecting peoples access to the services they need.

Collecting data via GAM online reporting tool is currently the primary data acquisition mechanism for GAM. The data submitted through the platform, by the authorities from different countries, have to be inspected by experts of UNAIDS and partner organizations to ensure the correctness of information reported in GAM. Often the direct data collection is complemented by analysis of existing reports and journal articles. This requires searching and reading the requested pieces of information from lengthy documents within many different repositories. An intelligent search functionality implemented with state-of-the-art NLP AI models becomes an invaluable assistant.

The following AI-functionalities are required for GAM processes: prefilling GAM online reporting tool fields with specific automatically retrieved information; helping UNAIDS experts to quickly find the relevant information from auxiliary sources to validate the reported data; extracting the tables from various PDF documents to UNAIDS internal repository to enable efficient search with predefined keywords.

Related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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