ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM),
Stop the Traffik (STT), Western Union, Barclays, Lloyd's Banking
Group, Liberty Global, Europol and University College London today
announced the first ever international data hub between NGOs, law
enforcement, and financial institutions providing its analysts with
enhanced information to combat human trafficking. The estimated
$150 billion forced-labour
industry1 is one of the most pressing social issues of
our time, with potentially millions of people around the world
being subject to multiple forms of illegal exploitation.
Despite an increased awareness of human trafficking efforts to
manually track and counter the issue through legislation,
preventative measures and enforcement, these initiatives have been
fragmented and ineffective—modern slavery is still pervasive in
almost all communities. IBM, STT, Western Union, Barclays, Lloyd's
Banking Group, Liberty Global, Europol and University College
London are unveiling the Traffik Analysis Hub (TAHub), an impactful
collaboration to more easily facilitate the exchange of information
about human trafficking across organizations.
Using Watson Natural Language Understanding, the TAHub has been
trained by the IBM Ireland Lab with search terms by STT and other
stakeholders for human trafficking incidents, such as exploitation
type and demographic details. The TAHub uses machine learning and
structured data from contributors to identify the characteristics
of human trafficking incidents (e.g. means of transport and
recruitment). And with IBM i2, analysts will also be able to
visually analyze the enriched data and combine it with additional
data sources to identify trafficking networks, patterns and
hotspots to drive intelligence led collaboration.
IBM Watson Discovery is specifically trained on human
trafficking terms and by using machine learning capabilities,
ingests open sources of data at scale from multiple sources – such
as thousands of daily public news feeds. By training the hub over
time, it will improve in accuracy and likely develop predictive
capabilities.
"The market is rapidly adopting AI and cloud-based platform
models to address siloes across their functions, increase client
satisfaction and revenue share," said Guillermo Miranda, Vice President of IBM
Corporate Citizenship. "We're using the same emerging technologies
and applying similar design principles to help the organizations
working to save the millions of men, women and children who are
trafficked in countries around the world."
"Today's event and the announcement of the Traffik Analysis Hub
('The Hub') marks the culmination of more than four years of
collaborative work with STT. Western Union firmly believes that
adopting a multi-agency approach is the most effective path to take
to tackle the exploitation and trafficking of people," said
Duncan Deville, SVP and Global Head
of Financial Crimes Compliance from Western Union.
"This initiative is a huge step forward in bringing together
information from across multiple sectors, including NGOs, law
enforcement partners and financial services, where we can take a
truly intelligence-led approach to proactively tackling human
trafficking," said Paul Horlick,
Director Financial Intelligence Unit, Barclays Financial Crime.
"The creation of the Traffik Analyis Hub is an important event
in the fight against human trafficking and modern slavery. It is an
institutional and structural development to society, industry and
hopefully rule of law that will allow much greater data and
information sharing and therefore potentially greater trust and
collaboration," said Duncan Jepson,
Managing Director, Liberty
Global.
"Trafficking in human beings is one of Europol's main concerns
in any of its forms, be it sexual exploitation, labour
exploitation, forced marriage. Therefore, we are very pleased to
support STOP THE TRAFFIK in the fight against this crime. We see
great potential in this initiative, not only for better prevention
and detection of human trafficking cases, but also for a further
understanding and awareness raising. We are sure that the technical
development of a system that enables data sharing between law
enforcement, NGOs and the private sector will help to combat
trafficking in human beings on a global scale," said Robert
Črepinko, Head of the European Migrant Smuggling Centre of
Europol.
"The TAHub brings together two very promising elements: a truly
cross-sector multi-agency partnership and an innovative technical
approach. We are excited to be on board in our role as project
evaluators. Such new initiatives are essential to developing
evidence concerning the nature of trafficking and ultimately
designing more effective solutions," said Professor Kate Bowers of University College London.
The Data Hub platform will run in a secure IBM Cloud-hosted
environment with access granted to authenticated members only.
Memberships to the data hub for other organizations combatting
human trafficking will be available soon.
Media Contacts:
Katie Leasor
IBM
212-671-9356
kleasor@us.ibm.com
Claire Treacy
Western Union
720-332-0652
Claire.Treacy@westernunion.com
Liberty Global
contact@libertyglobal.ngo
For more information on IBM Cloud:
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/
For more information on IBM Watson Discovery:
https://www.ibm.com/watson/services/discovery-3/
1 The International Labour Organization (ILO),
Profits and Poverty: The Economics of Forced
Labour . 2014.
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SOURCE IBM