RightsCon Toronto 2018

6 products, 25 students.

Archer is the first student-run nonprofit that builds technology for human rights investigators. Composed of 25 UC Berkeley students split up into 5 product teams, Archer builds free technology that makes open-source data sets accessible and analyzable.

Our session will include demos of six products that the Archer teams have worked on since August 2017, with each including a five minute presentation followed by a five minute Q&A session. These products include: a platform for access to integrated official public data across jurisdictions, an OFAC Sanctions List Data Analysis Tool, Archer IPFS Directory (a tool that will help investigators easily interact with the Interplanetary File System — a new internet protocol that generates permanent and decentralized web pages), a bitcoin investigative dashboard (allowing users to view & share a network of transactions over time), and the Archer-HRC collaboration on using network analysis to conduct creative content discovery.

Over the past academic year, Archer has partnered with the multi-disciplinary Human Rights Investigation Lab at UC Berkeley Law School and with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies to build technology that helps researchers verify digital evidence of war crimes and conduct research about US sanctions. These partnerships represent a new way for student engineers to embed with research bodies to design and build impactful technology.