Humanitarian aid workers are faced with many challenges, from possible terrorist attacks to dealing with difficult stakeholders and securing operational space free from violence. To do their work properly and safely, they need effective intelligence. Humanitarian intelligence refers to the use of investigative and analytical techniques in service of rapid and continuous assessment, project and program development, impact evaluation, and learning. It focuses just as much on how to use early warning indicators to assess risks, evaluate trends, and write early warning analyses as it does provide guidance on the operational design of humanitarian relief efforts. Further, operational security depends on the intelligence analysis. Unlike governments, NGOs’ resources are very limited. Humanitarian intelligence officers hardly have any literature detailing useful current standards and important tools for their analysis needs. Humanitarian Intelligence is the first to provide an overview and a practical guide to the tools and methods of data gathering and assessment, standards of measurement in humanitarian action, interpretation strategies, and operational planning tools. Short hypothetical cases and practical examples illustrate and explain the tools detailed in each chapter. Additional resources including case studies and teaching tools are available online at http://humanitarianintelligence.net.

A groundbreaking narrative on the urgency of ethically designed AI and a guidebook to reimagining life in the era of intelligent technology. The Age of Intelligent Machines is upon us, and we are at a reflection point. The proliferation of fast–moving technologies, including forms of artificial intelligence akin to a new species, will cause us to confront profound questions about ourselves. The era of human intellectual superiority is ending, and we need to plan for this monumental shift. A Human Algorithm: How Artificial Intelligence Is Redefining Who We Are examines the immense impact intelligent technology will have on humanity. These machines, while challenging our personal beliefs and our socioeconomic world order, also have the potential to transform our health and well–being, alleviate poverty and suffering, and reveal the mysteries of intelligence and consciousness. International human rights attorney Flynn Coleman deftly argues that it is critical that we instill values, ethics, and morals into our robots, algorithms, and other forms of AI. Equally important, we need to develop and implement laws, policies, and oversight mechanisms to protect us from tech’s insidious threats. To realize AI’s transcendent potential, Coleman advocates for inviting a diverse group of voices to participate in designing our intelligent machines and using our moral imagination to ensure that human rights, empathy, and equity are core principles of emerging technologies. Ultimately, A Human Algorithm is a clarion call for building a more humane future and moving conscientiously into a new frontier of our own design. “[Coleman] argues that the algorithms of machine learning––if they are instilled with human ethics and values––could bring about a new era of enlightenment.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Humanitarians are required to be impartial, independent, professionally competent and focused only on preventing and alleviating human suffering. It can be hard living up to these principles when others do not share them, while persuading political and military authorities and non-state actors to let an agency assist on the ground requires savvy ethical skills. Getting first to a conflict or natural catastrophe is only the beginning, as aid workers are usually and immediately presented with practical and moral questions about what to do next. For example, when does working closely with a warring party or an immoral regime move from practical cooperation to complicity in human rights violations? Should one operate in camps for displaced people and refugees if they are effectively places of internment? Do humanitarian agencies inadvertently encourage ethnic cleansing by always being ready to 'mop-up' the consequences of scorched earth warfare? This book has been written to help humanitarians assess and respond to these and other ethical dilemmas.

While the booming humanitarian sector faces daunting challenges, humanitarian economics emerges as a new field of study and practice--one that encompasses the economics and political economy of war, disaster, terrorism and humanitarianism. Carbonnier's book is the first to present humanitarian economics to a wide readership, defining its parameters, explaining its utility and convincing us why it matters. Among the issues he discusses are: how are emotions and altruism incorporated within a rational-choice framework? How do the economics of war and terrorism inform humanitarians' negotiations with combatants, and shed light on the role of aid in conflict? What do catastrophe bonds and risk-linked securities hold for disaster response? As more actors enter the humanitarian marketplace (including private firms), Carbonnier's revealing portrayal is especially timely, as is his critique of the transformative power of crises.

The study of human intelligence features many points of consensus, but there are also many different perspectives. In this unique book Robert J. Sternberg invites the nineteen most highly cited psychological scientists in the leading textbooks on human intelligence to share their research programs and findings. Each chapter answers a standardized set of questions on the measurement, investigation, and development of intelligence - and the outcome represents a wide range of substantive and methodological emphases including psychometric, cognitive, expertise-based, developmental, neuropsychological, genetic, cultural, systems, and group-difference approaches. This is an exciting and valuable course book for upper-level students to learn from the originators of the key contemporary ideas in intelligence research about how they think about their work and about the field.

The overflow of information generated during disasters can be as paralyzing to humanitarian response as the lack of information. This flash flood of information‘social media, satellite imagery and more is often referred to as Big Data. Making sense of this data deluge during disasters is proving an impossible challenge for traditional humanitarian

In this revised and updated edition of Hunt's classic textbook, Human Intelligence, two research experts explain how key scientific studies have revealed exciting information about what intelligence is, where it comes from, why there are individual differences, and what the prospects are for enhancing it. The topics are chosen based on the weight of evidence, allowing readers to evaluate what ideas and theories the data support. Topics include IQ testing, mental processes, brain imaging, genetics, population differences, sex, aging, and likely prospects for enhancing intelligence based on current scientific evidence. Readers will confront ethical issues raised by research data and learn how scientists pursue answers to basic and socially relevant questions about why intelligence is important in everyday life. Many of the answers will be surprising and stimulate readers to think constructively about their own views.