On any given day, tens of millions of people find themselves trapped in instances of modern slavery. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is organizing a visioning workshop, in collaboration with Code 8.7, on March 3-4th, 2020 in Washington, DC that will bring together members of the computing research community along with anti-slavery practitioners and survivors to lay out a research roadmap aimed at applying AI to the fight against human trafficking. Building on the kickoff Code 8.7 conference held at the UN in February 2019, the focus for this event will be to link the ambitious goals outlined in the 20-Year Community Roadmap for AI Research to challenges vital in achieving the UN’s Target 8.7.
After brief introductions including opportunities to hear from survivors, advocates, and policy experts, the workshop will turn to a series of highly interactive sessions on a selection of computing research topics selected in advance by the organizing committee. Each session will be led by a pair of researchers chosen for their complementary perspectives. The outcome in each case will be to determine ways in which computing research successes, both long- and short-term, could be aligned with problems that currently present intractable hurdles to ending modern slavery. This will require imaginative leaps from the normal lines-of-thinking that are typically aimed at “low hanging fruit”: datasets that are relatively small and well structured, and apps that help with narrowly-defined tasks.
The topics will be chosen by the organizing committee, inspired by the AI Roadmap, with input from members of the community.
See the workshop website here.
If you are interested in attending, please email CCC Director Ann Schwartz Drobnis (adrobnis@cra.org) a paragraph describing why you are a good fit for this workshop.
