Urban Refuge Puts Aid on the Map for Refugees with Help From the Hariri Institute and SAIL

Urban Refuge, a project by international relations professor Noora A. Lori, is gaining noteworthy attention for its ability to give refugees options to choose and find their own resources through a location tracking map tool. The research project was recently turned into an app with help from Microsoft and has received significant funding and technology support from the Software and Application Innovation Laboratory (SAIL) at the Hariri Institute, which was granted this past January. The project has found a home in both the Hariri Institute and the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, who recently wrote an article on the success it has found.

The app aims to aid refugees by giving them an easy-to-read map in Arabic, English and several other languages that pin-point shelters, schools, and more. The project came out of Lori’s IR 500 Forced Migration and Human Trafficking in the Pardee School of Global Studies, in which students declared their desire to be proactive about the current refugee crisis and attempt to find solutions for future crises. Lori also started the Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking in 2015 to pursue more educational research.

After initial support through Microsoft, where the app was built and created, Lori took over the app’s technology management. Through SAIL, Lori and her team have been able to tackle operational and technology with help from Frederick Jansen, Senior Software Engineer, and Andrei Lapets, Research Scientist and Director of Research Development. SAIL’s main function is to maintain the app as well as launch it, when the data has been finalized. Currently, Lori is in Jordan collecting data to populate the app, as well as find additional support and funding. SAIL will also continue to update the app with new features including new location types, collecting usage information and back-end map tracking.

Andrei Lapets, who has been involved in the project as the Director of Research Development at SAIL, finds the project exciting and an “important example of interdisciplinary work at Boston University,” and finds it “important to support a social cause that is making a difference as a real world project.”

Thanks to the Institute’s seed-project funding, the research was granted an award to allow continued research in its broad and interdisciplinary work. The grant will help Lori complete back-end location tracking and continue to test the service in other location markets outside of the Middle East. Currently, the app is being tested for use in Jordan. The Institute’s various funded projects represent an array of the innovative computational, data-driven, and interdisciplinary work happening within the BU community. 

The Urban Refugee app hopes to be officially launched by summer 2017. For more information, or for inquiries on funding opportunities, please visit the Urban Refugee website.