In partnership with the Policy Lab Joe Guay, Visiting Researcher, is helping to support the Human Rights Center’s research into digital security protocols. Guay will be helping the Human Rights Investigations Lab to develop a set of digital security protocol and support the development and scaling up of the university-based open-source lab model. The Human Rights Center and The Policy Lab will collaborate in 2018 to study the increasing use of cyber capability against civilian populations as a method and means of warfare and the implications for humanitarian protection in the digital age.
Joe Guay, an Associate at The Policy Lab, manages The Lab’s portfolio of humanitarian technologies and innovations. He is also a Human Rights Center Visiting Researcher. He has been a Visiting Researcher at the Human Rights Center since 2011. His support includes the development of information management strategies for mass atrocity prevention in South Sudan (at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Satellite Sentinel Project), and the Ebola pandemic responses. Through his teaching at Northeastern University’s Geographic Information Technology Master Program, and mixed-migration (with the Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat’s 4Mi pilot program) in Nairobi, As part of the Non-Violent Peace Force’s grassroots mobile conflict monitoring system, he advises in Myanmar.
Guay developed innovative programs and strategies for the Humanitarian Innovation Fund, the Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation, World Vision’s Nepal Innovation Lab, UNHCR’s Global Protection Cluster, and swissnex SF’s “Crisis Code” event series. These were based on strategic and evidence-based design as well as local strategies research and systems thinking.
Guay is the author of the first systematic study in the humanitarian sector on the role of innovation for humanitarian protection. His research on innovation and humanitarian technologies has been highlighted at the UNHCR Innovation Service and Brookings Institute.