Thank you.
The conflict observatory program is a project of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the State Department. It is really the first effort, at scale, to support independent researchers, such as the humanitarian research lab at Yale, in having access to particularly the commercial satellite data needed at scale to monitor events in non-permissive environments, such as Ukraine. We also operate in Sudan and have been focused on attacks on villages in Darfur, and in bomb assessment and human security assessment in Khartoum and Omdurman.
In the case of Ukraine, the children's work is just one part of what we do. Our initial work was supporting the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe on doing bomb damage assessments of hospitals and schools in the first phase of the war. Then we did an assessment, with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, of damage to crop storage infrastructure, using algorithmic machine vision to be able to count damaged silos.
We've additionally done open-source reporting on the filtration camps, on the issue of torture in Kherson and on passportization, which was mentioned earlier.
What's critical in the case of Ukraine is that there is an extremely large amount of open-source data. What broke the case open through the conflict observatory with regard to the kids' issues is the fact that the local officials were taking selfies. It was from this that we were able to identify the latitude and longitude of the locations and begin satellite surveillance. Without this program, we would not have had these assets to do this reporting publicly.