Anjali Mazumder, artificial intelligence, justice and human rights lead at the Alan Turing Institute, works across three programmes; the AI programme which focuses on safe and ethical AI, the defence and security programme and the public policy programme.
She explained that one of her areas of focus is the way in which data science and artificial intelligence can be used to combat modern slavery and other exploitive crimes. She said: “Generally we are looking at modelling pathways of exploitation and use these to determine where we could intervene along the pathway to either prevent or protect [people] from harms.”
To give background to the problem, Mazumder stated that there are estimated to be 40 million individuals in slavery at present. In addition, there is the Sustainable Development Goal 8.7 which calls for the eradication of forced labour, modern slavery and human trafficking by 2025. She pointed out that if this goal is to be met, 9,000 people a day will have to be brought out of slavery, which may be overly optimistic.
In terms of the data on the estimated number of people held in slavery, Mazumder said that the number came from various sources and there is acceptance of the fact that not all victims are being counted because they use ‘multiple disparate sources of data with large gaps.”
Labour exploitation at sea as well as domestic servitude, as depicted in the film ‘I am slave’, keep people well-hidden and much harder to count. “There are lots of people that we may not be reaching or understanding. So we are looking at other ways to capture this data and identify victims as well as perpetrators, whether they be recruiters, users or abusers,” she said.
She spoke of Slavery from Space project from The Rights Lab of the University of Nottingham as an example of an innovative way to find hidden victims of slavery using satellite images. Mazumder said: “The idea is that identifying brick kilns in India in rural areas is a potential indicator of a risk of bonded labour.”
Satellite imagery data is one source but there is also mobile data and transactional data, and when those sources are integrated some individuals may be missed while others may be double counted.
Thank you for your input
Thank you for your feedback
DataIQ is a trading name of IQ Data Group Limited
10 York Road, London, SE1 7ND
Phone: +44 020 3821 5665
Registered in England: 9900834
Copyright © IQ Data Group Limited 2024