Case Study: Scholars at Risk achieves faster, more accurate academic freedom monitoring with Signal AI

Reporting on human rights violations within the higher education community and conducting global advocacy using Signal A.I. - time saved is people saved

Scholars at Risk, an international network that protects threatened scholars and promotes academic freedom, faced slow, inaccurate monitoring of attacks on higher education—relying on Google Alerts, complex Boolean searches and manual translation—making timely verification and advocacy difficult. To address this, they partnered with Signal AI and adopted Signal monitor to improve global monitoring and reporting.

Signal AI implemented a bespoke, AI‑trained "Higher Education" topic combined with a "Human Rights Violations" feed and case‑specific searches (including more than 25 Scholars‑in‑Prison feeds), consolidating alerts into a single daily digest and tailored searches. The change cut daily review time from about an hour to 15–20 minutes reviewing 20–40 items, improved multilingual sourcing and obscure source discovery, enabled faster verification and bi‑weekly case reports, and strengthened SAR’s capacity for timely advocacy — all delivered via Signal AI.

Scholars at Risk

Daniel Munier

Senior Program Officer, Advocacy