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 ?repinko, 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