Machine Learning for Peace
Funding for the Machine Learning for Peace (MLP) was terminated in February 2025 following the Trump Administration’s cancellation of the Department of Defense Minerva Research Initiative and dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development.
Our final set of data and forecasting updates covers events through November 2024. In the coming weeks, the MLP team will complete one last data update extending through December 2024, which will be made publicly available via our Github repository.
Machine Learning for Peace (MLP) harnesses the power of machine learning and data analytics to enhance democracy promotion and crisis response efforts worldwide. MLP’s digital tools provide fine-grained data tracking and forecasting major political events across more than 60 countries by continuously scraping and processing tens of millions of articles published by more than 300 local, regional, and international news sources in nearly 40 languages. This infrastructure provides up-to-date data on recent and historical trends in civic space and foreign influence and builds forecasting models that learn from historical patterns to predict how conditions are likely to change in the near future.
We provide a variety of interactive digital tools that activists, policymakers and academics can use to interact with our data and forecasts on civic space and foreign influence, including the Civic Space Early Warning System (CSEWS), which has provided advanced warning of major political events in recent months.
You can contact our team at mlpeace-devlab@sas.upenn.edu. If you are interested in receiving monthly updates on our work, please join our mailing list by submitting your email address here. Our monthly emails highlight major events detected in our data since the last update, offering valuable information for monitoring conditions across countries. Additionally, we review notable forecasts made during the previous update and provide a preview of significant events we are forecasting over the next seven months. By staying informed through our monthly updates, you will have access to timely and actionable data that can inform your organization’s initiatives.
If you are a researcher or non-profit organization interested in accessing the data behind these digital tools, please complete our data request form. We will respond as quickly as we are able.