As part of the AI and Conflict&Peace Lecture Series, Prof. Dr. Thomas Chadefaux (Professor of Political Science, Trinity College Dublin) will give a talk titled Hospitals Under Fire? Causal Evidence from Satellite Imagery in Ukraine.
Online participation
Zoom link
Meeting ID: 627 1267 4303
Passcode: 630553
Abstract
The talk tests whether Ukrainian hospitals are disproportionately targeted by Russian strikes. Satellite imagery is used as the treatment in a causal estimator that models how terrain and urban form around each facility influence attack risk. A two stage approach first learns how socioeconomic covariates relate to conflict outcomes, then embeds multispectral scenes into a latent space. By swapping a hospital embedding with matched counterfactual sites, the method estimates how the expected strike rate would change. The gap between observed and counterfactual outcomes is used to isolate deliberate targeting while keeping local drivers explicit. An interpretable layer translates influential image embeddings into plain language land use features to show which surroundings drive each hospital risk estimate.
This lecture series is organized by Paul Thurner (Institute for Political Sciences) and Göran Kauermann (Institute for Statistics).