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Silo AI and United Nations collaborate to fight AIDS with NLP and automated data processing

Silo AI and UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, collaborate to build an AI-driven solution to make data collection and analysis more efficient. As a result, Silo AI built an assistant that finds and summarizes relevant paragraphs from the source data as well as combines numerical data from various sources into a single source. The pilot project indicates that such a solution based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and automated data processing can save an estimated 30–40% of time spent on data analysis by individual experts.

Silo AI is one of Europe’s largest private AI labs, with a world-class team of more than 90 PhDs and close to 200 AI experts, many of whom are specialized in NLP. UNAIDS collects data from 193 United Nations’ member states and tracks progress towards global AIDS targets.

For this pilot project, UNAIDS sought an experienced NLP partner to help them streamline their data collection and analysis, which is typically highly laborious, including a significant amount of manual work. The data is collected from UN member states demonstrating their progress towards the global AIDS targets, consisting of information such as new HIV infections, scaling up treatment, and implementing HIV prevention programs. Several data collection tools and mechanisms are used to collate data on countries’ response to the HIV epidemic. 

NLP and automated text processing to extract relevant information

Silo AI built a solution leveraging NLP and automated text processing to extract relevant information from the vast amount of documents. With the help of modern NLP and automated text processing, UNAIDS is able to process and analyze different data sets from multiple sources faster, with less manual effort. 

“We need the expertise and experience in implementing efficient NLP-driven solutions to improve working with vast amounts of unstructured data. The first results are promising: We see the use of NLP as a solution especially for those datasets where the data is scarce as well as where we need multiple data sources to triangulate the data to increase its reliability. We continue exploring the use of NLP-driven solutions to reduce the time spent on manual work and enabling our individual experts to focus on more value-adding work.”, says Taavi Erkkola, Senior adviser at UNAIDS, heading the workstream responsible for delivering the annual Global AIDS Report. 

“This work at UNAIDS has an important mission that is fully aligned with our vision at Silo AI, enabling people to have a positive impact with the help of AI technologies. NLP offers suitable techniques to such data-heavy and laborious use cases, in which much of the information is unstructured, scattered around various documents and other sources," says Peter Sarlin, CEO at Silo AI.

"We look forward to taking the first results even further and hope to contribute towards the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of ending AIDS by 2030.”

The solution can help save 30–40% of time spent on analysis

According to Erkkola, the use of NLP could save an estimated 30-40% of time spent on analysis by an individual expert. As a result, this time can be used to conduct more meaningful analysis, and produce better insights for global AIDS reporting. That makes the reporting and the evidence base more useful for the readers, including those who make decisions on which interventions should be prioritized in order to end AIDS by 2030. 

Would you like to discuss how NLP could help your organization? Get in touch with Pertti Hannelin, pertti.hannelin@silo.ai or on LinkedIn.

About

Silo AI

Silo AI is one of Europe’s largest private AI labs – a trusted AI partner that brings competitive advantage to product R&D. We build AI-driven solutions and products to enable smart devices, autonomous vehicles, industry 4.0, and smart cities. Silo AI provides its customers a unique access to world-class AI expertise, as well as the Silo OS infrastructure to speed up AI development and deployment. Established in 2017, Silo AI is on a mission to build a European flagship AI company, with offices currently in Helsinki, Turku, Oulu, Stockholm, London and Palo Alto.

UNAIDS

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) leads and inspires the world to achieve its shared vision of zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths. UNAIDS unites the efforts of 11 UN organizations—UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, UNDP, UNFPA, UNODC, UN Women, ILO, UNESCO, WHO and the World Bank—and works closely with global and national partners towards ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030 as part of the Sustainable Development Goals. Learn more at unaids.org.

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Want to discuss how Silo AI could help your organization?

Get in touch with our AI experts.
Pertti Hannelin
VP, Business Development
pertti.hannelin@silo.ai
+358 40 063 8810
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Pauliina Alanen
Former Head of Brand
Silo AI

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