IBM Joins International Data Hub to Combat Human Trafficking

IBM, Stop the Traffik (STT), Western Union, Barclays, Lloyd's Banking Group, Liberty Global, Europol and University College London 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 industry 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 and 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. 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 Data Hub platform will run in a secure IBM Cloud-hosted environment with access granted to authenticated members only.