The goal of Crowd4SDG is to research how citizen science can provide data for tracking progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals and to study how grassroots innovation can help achieve such progress.

 

Crowd4SDG is a Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action supported by the European Commission's Science with and for Society (SwafS) programme.

 

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), launched by the UN in 2015, are underpinned by 169 concrete targets and 232 measurable indicators. Some of these indicators have no established measurement methodology. For others, many countries do not have the data collection capacity. Measuring progress towards the SDGs is thus a challenge for most national statistical offices.

 

Based on shared expertise in crowdsourcing for disaster response, the transdisciplinary Crowd4SDG consortium of six partners is researching how applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning can enhance citizen science projects involving non-traditional data sources such as social media, in order to provide effective monitoring of SDG targets and indicators by citizens.

 

Launched in May 2020, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, the Crowd4SDG project partners immediately set about applying their hands-on research and innovation methodologies to improving the quality and quantity of data about Covid-19 available to scientists and decision makers.

The DEIB research group will extract visual evidence about events from social media and will study its application to natural emergency events, mostly collecting evidence about the impact of COVID-19.