How AI Acts as a Human Rights Watchdog for the Maasai People

The Maasai, an indigenous ethnic group in Kenya and northern Tanzania, have faced significant land displacement due to British colonialism and recent land grabs by the Kenyan and Tanzanian governments under the guise of conservation and tourism. To address this, students from General Assembly are utilizing satellite data from Google Earth Engine and computer vision models to monitor Maasai villages, track their movements, and assess changes in land usage. This initiative aims to create an automated system to identify village structures and provide a form of surveillance against unjust land claims, with the project leveraging Roboflow's preprocessing techniques to enhance model performance. The team hopes to present their findings to the Maasai community and see their model used as an AI Human Rights Watchdog to protect the rights of the Maasai people.