Traffik Analysis Hub (TA Hub) is a not-for-profit organisation based and registered in the UK. TA Hub is an impactful collaboration across multiple sectors, united by the common goal of preventing human trafficking. At its heart is a suite of technologies developed by IBM and owned and operated by TA Hub, specifically configured to serve the needs of all those with a stake in countering trafficking.
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What is Traffik Analysis Hub?
The Challenge
Global efforts to counter human trafficking are ineffective and fragmented. The recent rise of the internet and technology has made it easy for traffickers to recruit and exploit.
Today, trafficking in persons generates US$498 billion in revenue that moves largely unchecked through financial systems each year. Every financial transaction for goods and services that is tainted by trafficking and exploitation is the ‘proceeds of crime’, and therefore, this is money laundering.
Attempts to identify, track and counter human trafficking and the associated illicit money are inadequate. Some jurisdictions are increasing legislation, preventative measures and law enforcement. In parallel, many NGOs, charities and faith groups – motivated by humanitarian concern – have programmes to identify and rescue victims of trafficking.
And yet, despite these efforts, modern slavery, in its many forms, still thrives.
TA Hub's Mission
To create a single, coherent source of intelligence on human trafficking and exploitation worldwide as the de facto source that financial institutions, businesses, governments, NGOs, LEAs, and Academia trust and rely upon.
How it Works
Traffik Analysis Hub is an impactful collaboration across multiple sectors united by a common goal of preventing human trafficking. At its heart is a suite of technologies developed by IBM and specifically configured to serve the needs of all those with a stake in countering trafficking.
Traffik Analysis Hub runs in a secure cloud environment with access for authenticated members only, into which they can upload non-personal data related to human trafficking. This allows analysts to draw from a rich data pool and more easily identify trafficking patterns, networks and hotspots.
TA Hub is a solution that supports joint analysis of large AI-powered data sets, providing partners with the ability to pool data assets to generate new insights into patterns and hotspots of trafficking incidents. The solution provides partners with highly customisable analytical tools which can be used to generate outputs of significantly enhanced value and operational consequence. It is a fundamental principle of TA Hub that collaborative data sharing will provide all its partners with more excellent value than can be achieved in isolation.
Authenticated partners can upload data from a wide variety of sources. In addition, open-source data, including thousands of publicly available newsfeeds, is ingested at scale.
Using IBM Watson – AI, machine learning, and natural language recognition – and intelligence “golden tagging” schema is applied to the data. In addition, the TA Hub solution is trained to recognise terms and incidents related to human trafficking in the unstructured content and structure it along the golden tags schema. This allows for consistent formatting, analysis, and output.
With the data from all sources on the platform aggregated, structured and linked, the initially disparate datasets are transformed into a shared actionable information pool (a “data lake”). As the TA Hub develops, complex data will be used to create actionable data visualisation (i.e. graphs or tables) and analytic outputs with supporting interpretive narratives.
Once the structure and unstructured data have been gathered, processed, an analysed with an interpretive narrative, partners can act on this vital and powerful information to investigate global trafficking activity.
Why Join TA Hub?
Because we are at a time in history where working together on a global level is possible, and by doing so, we can have a deeply powerful impact, more powerful than by working alone. More partners mean more data from a variety of sources – and this improves IBM’s advanced cognitive technology and ability to hone in and find trouble spots and actually uncover trafficking activity.
This is your chance to be part of history and contribute to a genuinely collaborative approach to ending human trafficking.
