{"id":1052793,"date":"2024-07-10T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-10T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?p=1052793"},"modified":"2024-07-12T08:18:40","modified_gmt":"2024-07-12T15:18:40","slug":"empowering-ngos-with-generative-ai-in-the-fight-against-human-trafficking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/empowering-ngos-with-generative-ai-in-the-fight-against-human-trafficking\/","title":{"rendered":"Empowering NGOs with generative AI in the fight against human trafficking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Tech<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Human trafficking and labor exploitation are ancient problems that have evolved with each major leap in technology, from the agricultural revolution to the information age. But what if the right combination of people, data, and technology could help to tackle these problems on an unprecedented scale? With the emergence of generative AI models, which can create rich text and media from natural language prompts and real-world understanding, we are seeing new opportunities to advance the work of organizations that are leading this fight on the front lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Presentation
Presentation of generative AI tools and opportunities at Issara Global Forum, Bangkok, November 2023.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One effort to combat trafficking is the Tech Against Trafficking (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> accelerator program, in which tech companies collaborate with anti-trafficking organizations and global experts to help eradicate trafficking with technology. In the latest accelerator, Microsoft worked with Issara Institute (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> and Polaris (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> to explore how generative AI could help NGOs drive the ethical transformation of global supply chains. By aiming to reduce all forms and levels of worker exploitation, including but not limited to the most serious cases of human trafficking, these organizations aim to make systematic labor exploitation impossible to hide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main issue to contend with, however, is that it is all too easy for such practices to remain hidden, even across datasets that contain evidence of their existence. Many NGOs lack the resources to \u201cconnect the dots\u201d at the necessary scale, and time spent on data work is often at the expense of direct assistance activities. Through the accelerator, we developed several first-of-their-kind workflows for real-world data tasks \u2013 automating the creation of rich intelligence reports and helping to motivate collective, evidence-based action. We are pleased to announce that we have now combined these workflows into a single system \u2013 Intelligence Toolkit (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> \u2013 and published the code to GitHub for use by the broader community.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\t

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\n\t\tSpotlight: Blog post<\/span>\n\t<\/p>\n\t\n\t

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Research Focus: Week of September 9, 2024<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

Investigating vulnerabilities in LLMs; A novel total-duration-aware (TDA) duration model for text-to-speech (TTS); Generative expert metric system through iterative prompt priming; Integrity protection in 5G fronthaul networks.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

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Building on multi-stakeholder engagements <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Since Microsoft co-founded Tech Against Trafficking (TAT) in 2018, we have worked with a range of UN agencies and NGOs to understand the challenges facing the anti-trafficking community, as well as opportunities for new research technologies (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> to drive evidence-based action at scale. For example, our collaboration with IOM (UN Migration) (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> in the 2019 TAT accelerator program (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> resulted in new tools (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> for private data release, as well as new open datasets (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> for the community. However, while growing the shared evidence base enables better decision making and policy development, it is not sufficient. NGOs and other anti-trafficking organizations need time and resources to analyze such datasets, discover relevant insights, and write the intelligence reports that drive real-world action. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the 2023-2024 TAT accelerator program, we worked with Issara and Polaris to understand the potential for generative AI to support such analysis within their own organizations and geographies of concern (South and Southeast Asia for Issara; Mexico and the U.S. for the Polaris Nonechka (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> project). Using a combination of open and internal datasets, we developed and refined a series of proof-of-concept interfaces before sharing them for stakeholder feedback at the annual TAT Summit (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, Issara Global Forum (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, and NetHope Global Summit (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> events. We learned many lessons through this process, helping to shape what community-oriented tool we should build, how to build it, and when it should be used: <\/p>\n\n\n\n