2021 | Computer Software | Early stage | Japan | SDG12 | SDG13 | SDG14 | SDG15 | SDG6
RuleWatcher.com

1. General

Category

SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production

SDG 13: Climate Action

SDG 14: Life Below Water

SDG 15: Life on Land

Category

Computer Software

2. Project Details

Company or Institution

OSINTech Inc.

Project

RuleWatcher.com

General description of the AI solution

Totally new “social think-tank” with primary rule-making trend gathering functions. Everyone discusses the same global issues beyond any language barrier, aiming to reach the next level.

We collect rule-making related data from more than 700+ sources (governments, UNs, NGOs, Initiatives etc. excluding media information) everyday and categorize them into most related themes automatically with translations, providing visualization. For example, every user can compare Chinese and Vietnamese government’s latest announcements of specific topics in the same format without being bothered by local languages.

Currently monitored themes are “Plastic pollution”, “Climate mitigation”, “Climate adaptation”, “Water shortage”, “Circular economy”, “Biodiversity”, “ESG investment”, “Privacy”, “Basic income”, “New Mobility”, “ Blockchain”, “Corporate human rights” and “Universal human rights”, which are added accordingly with the social benefit.

After launching RuleWatcher at the end of June 2020, many Japanese enterprises, researchers, and citizens have joined, enjoying its benefits.

Citizens use this to study and be connected with someone who has the same interests.
Researchers use this to search world regulation trends and to grasp government trends. As we already gather data from a proper data source, our user mentioned they can reduce 90% of data searching time. Without using translations, they can search local government information conveniently.
Enterprises use this to accelerate their SDGs transformation by knowing what kind of rules and standards are discussed now, which are very crucial for enterprise strategy.

Rules, including soft laws, are the keys to tackle global issues. We utilize AI power to democratize Rule areas. Good regulations will spread good technology quicker to the society. Outdated regulations should be removed. We will promote the “Rule-Watch” movement.

From May 2021, with the support of UNOPS S3i programs, we shift towards global expansion. In addition, UN organizations are trying to use RuleWatcher for their DX purpose. RuleWatcher has been awarded by many SDGs related competitions.

Website

https://en.osintech.net/

Organisation

OSINTech Inc.

3. Aspects

Excellence and Scientific Quality: Please detail the improvements made by the nominee or the nominees’ team or yourself if your applying for the award, and why they have been a success.

Intelligent crawlers and text analytics technology focusing on public documents and social issues. Our technology is based on social issues. Thus, every engineering staff understands the keywords of the issue and designs systems accordingly to categorize data based on the social issue topics.

Those social issue topics are designed by humans who have knowledge of them, though options are proposed by technology. We believe humans need to focus on what humans only can do. Therefore, when we add new themes, humans design its thesaurus manually with the help of big data analysis results.

Though one of our essential technologies is translation, we do not focus on it. We concentrate on utilizing 3rd party translation modules. Our original AI is focusing on “Social issue categorizing system” and “Rule-making progress detecting systems’ ‘. With the effort of our staff, those qualities are improving day by day.

What is important here, is that as we have a community, users give us their feedback. For example, in case many users push their reaction button (like “Nice Watch!”) to some countries’ announcements, we can say that articles have high possibilities of importance. Those human behaviors are important elements of our AI to realize collective wisdom.

Those intellectual properties are already applied. (Patent Pending)

Also, we are developing some functions to analyze policy trends and academic trends by connecting those data. We would like to contribute evidence based policy making by this.

Scaling of impact to SDGs: Please detail how many citizens/communities and/or researchers/businesses this has had or can have a positive impact on, including particular groups where applicable and to what extent.

RuleWatcher is in itself designed to be fit into SDGs. We started it with our focus on the environment and human rights. All the themes of SDGs are firmly related to rules and regulations. Thus, we can say those theme’s purposes are almost the basic concept of SDGs. Especially as we started our activity from the theme “Climate Crisis”, we have great interests in that topic.

RuleWatcher automatically provides the latest updates on our monitoring list from all over the world everyday. By monitoring RuleWatcher’s specific theme, researchers / enterprise users can regularly grasp the trend of the areas.

About evaluations, our user mentioned that their time consuming research process of information collection was 90% reduced. Also, as RuleWatcher notify important updates as a push style, they will not miss important information anymore. Another think-tank said that they can search Vietnamese government / Chinese government important notifications without understanding its local language. That is a great benefit of RuleWatcher.

Our solution is a kind of information service. We know that things have both supporters and critics. On both sides, knowing the fact will be the power. We also know there are too many fakes on the internet. Therefore, we support users to monitor official information filtered by specific themes and to grasp more accurate world trends.

We would like to provide the power to people to have the power to watch their country’s rules. By penetrating the language barrier, we can compare other countries’ policies and their country’s one. Then, good regulation will spread good environmental technology faster. Outdated regulation will be improved sooner. To solve global issues, each country should collaborate to deal with global issues such as the climate crisis.

Scaling of AI solution: Please detail what proof of concept or implementations can you show now in terms of its efficacy and how the solution can be scaled to provide a global impact ad how realistic that scaling is.

We launched RuleWatcher with limited themes from Jun 2020, so still we are in the 1st step.

About scaling of RuleWatcher, we started to generate a warm community. For us, that phase is our concept building phase.
In this phase, to join the RuleWatcher community, pre-user need to submit an application form with their challenges and desire to solve certain social issues. Then, we have an hour-long meeting one by one for them to join the RuleWatcher community. We have some learning events regularly. Now we have a warm community with 350 members including enterprise management level and governmental staff, UNs, some NGO members and activists etc.

In the enterprise, management, sustainable planning or public affairs departments are referring to our information everyday as a paid user. They utilize information on RuleWatcher to fit their strategy to world sustainable trends. We can say we can contribute to the enterprise’s SDGs transformation. We evaluated that our concept was OK.

Now we are in the scaling phase.
We are executing a plan to expand RuleWatcher to all over the world. From UNOPS or other NGOs in Japan, we will start inviting many NGOs by March 2022 proactively. RuleWatcher will be the Rule-Watch SNS which will be used by international NGOs the most.

In the meaning of open strategy, our community has many professors and researchers. We accept requests of information source target sites from them. Our information source is, in other words, an aggregation of researcher wisdom.

As we are collecting information about policy building, it is very close to civic-tech activity. We hold some events related to “Rule-Watch” in them. As RuleWatcher is provided for FREE, it is easy to offer in such a public event.

Some schools and universities are utilizing RuleWatcher to analyze each country’s policy as well.

Ethical aspect: Please detail the way the solution addresses any of the main ethical aspects, including trustworthiness, bias, gender issues, etc.

Using AI includes those inevitable risks on ethics and responsibilities. Overrun algorism could mislead our judgement and AI itself could go far beyond our control.
RuleWatcher’s designed philosophy is to trust humanity’s biological intelligence. It is a stance we believe, that AI can be used to raise biological intelligence.

The information is collected from official government announcements and NGO releases and the sources of information are judged and determined by humans, so the possibility of fakes in the collected information is close to zero.

The themes we monitor are mainly human rights such as “Universal Human Rights” and “Corporate human rights”, and the environment issues such as “Climate Adaptation” and “Circular Economy” etc. Those themes are evolving based on the requests from users.

As there are such latest information collections updated in RuleWatcher, users are coming to monitor them. Those users are able to create their forums to discuss specific issues they wish to solve. RuleWatcher is designed considering the balance of human wisdom and importance of official information. Those cycles are the power of RuleWatcher.

AI collects a large amount of information and breaks the language barrier to deliver it to us. After that, it is up to humans to think and apply the information to create an ideal society.

RuleWatcher aims to be a social think tank that bridges the division between enterprises, researchers, and citizens around the world, and designs the society we hope based on ethical values.

CONTACT

International Research Centre
on Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI)
under the auspices of UNESCO 

Jožef Stefan Institute
Jamova cesta 39
SI-1000 Ljubljana

info@ircai.org
ircai.org

FOLLOW US

The designations employed and the presentation of material throughout this website do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNESCO concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

Design by Ana Fabjan