Liesbet Heyse and Chamutal Afek-Eitam receive 150.000 pounds from Humanitarian Innovation Fund for humanitarian innovation project

Humanitarian Innovation Fund rewards University of Groningen researchers Chamutal Afek-Eitam and Liesbet Heyse 150.000 pounds for developing a lessons-learned search engine in the humanitarian sector

On May 25th, the Humanitarian Innovation Fund rewarded Chamutal Afek-Eitam (PhD researcher at ICOG/IO-IR/NOHA) and Liesbet Heyse (assistant professor at the Department of Sociology/ICS), in partnership with the Emergency Capacity Building Project (ECB), ICCO/KerkinActie and ICT company Soluto, 150.000 British pounds for their innovation project titled ‘The Humanitarian Lessons-Learned Genome Project 1.0’. Building on existing academic insights into organizational learning and performance as well as sector-wide initiatives by ECB and others, this project aims to develop a cloud-based search engine for evaluation and lessons learned data in order to ensure quick access to relevant information for the humanitarian sector. The project is one out of four large grants, selected to be funded out of 189 applications. The project will start in January 2012 and will

1) create a hand-coded expert system and database of over 500 evaluation reports,

2) develop the necessary software for the search engine and the server side for the prototype;

3) generate shared lessons-learned patterns in the data; and 4) to explore the possibilities of an automatic coding device.

Additional humanitarian and evaluation expertise is provided by Leonie Barnes (Programme Manager of the UN Mine Action Office in Sudan) and Adriaan Ferf (evaluator and consultant), whereas additional academic expertise to the project is provided by dr. Roel Popping (Department of Sociology) and the Computational Linguistics Group (Faculty of Arts) within the University of Groningen. The managers of this project are Liesbet Heyse (l.heyse rug.nl) and Chamutal Afek-Eitam (c.eitam rug.nl).