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đź“… Progress Timeline

2020

  • Gitanjali Rao launches her proof-of-concept for Kindly, an AI-based, anti-cyberbullying service. Her initial work included a Natural Language Processing (NLP) model developed using Microsoft Azure's Language Understanding (LUIS) cloud-based engine. The data is manually reviewed and added to LUIS. The proof of concept includes an API, a Chrome Extension, and a standalone app.
  • A small dataset was collected directly from contributions by children who learned about Kindly through Gitanjali’s social media outreach and local community launch of the beta version of the product.
  • UNICEF profiles Gitanjali Rao in the Voices of Youth global community, where Gitanjali blogs about Internet safety, protection against discrimination, and protection against cyberbullying.

July 2021

August 2021

  • Various UNICEF stakeholders (including the Office of Innovation, Division of Communications, and Information and Communication Technology Division) and Gitanjali draft Kindly’s vision, goals, product features, and external outreach plan.

September 2021

  • Kindly’s vision document is vetted by UNICEF’s Child Protection unit.
  • Kindly’s development efforts begin. An open-source machine learning (ML) model is trained on an existing public dataset consisting of 50 million tweets, authored by adults
  • An initial API is developed and internally tested.

October 2021

  • A front-end demo interface where users can get a feel for what Kindly can do is developed. The demo is meant to show an example of what the integration of Kindly with an existing service can look like.
  • A public-facing website for Kindly (https://kindly.unicef.io/) is created. At this stage, no data is collected from any submission.
  • UNICEF conducts external outreach and begins conversations with relevant, vetted education technology (edtech) organizations around the integration of the API.

November 2021

  • Develop Kindly’s landing page on the UNICEF website: https://www.unicef.org/innovation/kindly. The demo interface will be integrated into this page. At this stage, no data will be collected from any submission.
  • Establish a process to collect, store, review, anonymize, and sanitize training data provided by children. A Contribute page is added to https://kindly.unicef.io/ to this end.
  • Kindly's documentation site is launched to provide an easy onboarding to new contributors.
  • Conduct soft outreach for training data collection through schools so that students can contribute to the training dataset, and improve the machine learning model that powers Kindly.
  • Conduct soft outreach for training data collection through schools so that students can contribute to the training dataset, and improve the machine learning model that powers Kindly.
  • Gitanjali spoke about Kindly at World Children's Day (https://www.unicef.org/world-childrens-day) at the Dubai 2020 EXPO. Kindly was also featured in a Voices of Youth blog post by Gitanjali.

December 2021

  • The team aims to conduct outreach to 600+ students and education leaders through multiple school events and conferences.

January 2022

  • Outreach to additional 100+ students through school events to raise awareness around Kindly (received 200+ contributions).
  • Introductory conversations with schools and education technology product leads.
  • Enhancements to the website (including Counter functionality), back-end processes, and contribution guidelines.