With input from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor and Human Trafficking, the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently published a new solicitation on Disrupting Operations of Illicit Supply Networks (D-ISN) “to support the research needed to inform the economy, security, and resilience of the Nation and the world in responding to the global threat posed by illicit supply networks.” The proposal deadline is July 1st, 2020.
Major goals of NSF’s D-ISN include:
- Improve understanding of the operations of illicit supply networks and strengthen the ability to detect, disrupt, and dismantle them.
- Enhance research communities that effectively integrate operational, computational, social, cultural and economic expertise to provide methods and strategies to combat this complex and elusive global security challenge.
- Catalyze game-changing technological innovations that can improve discovery and traceability of illicitly sourced products and illicitly sourced labor inputs to products.
- Provide research outcomes that inform U.S. national security, law enforcement and economic development needs and policies.
“Key to projects will be integrating different disciplines, so we provided opportunities for team formation and hope the CS community will respond!” – Georgia-Ann Klutke, NSF Program Director Responsible for D-ISN
The solicitation calls for fundamental research across engineering, computer and information science, and social science with two proposal submission tracks.
- Track 1: Research Grants with a budget of up to $1,000,000 and a maximum duration of 5 years.
- Track 2: Planning Grants with a budget of up to $250,000 and a maximum duration of 24 months.
Recently, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) held a workshop on Applying AI in the Fight Against Modern Slavery. This CCC visioning workshop, organized in collaboration with Code 8.7, brought 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.
The four themes that were produced from the workshop include:
- Networks– Advanced geo-spatial and temporal analytics to track network effects and assumptions across space and time in the human trafficking domain, incorporating privacy and confidentiality as a fundamental tenet, aimed at identifying hidden populations targeted for exploitation, earlier detection of trafficking when it arises, and avoiding simply pushing it off to another region after it is uncovered.
- Perceptive Agents to Provide Survivor Support and Identify Tipping Points – Two-way augmented intelligent agents incorporating advanced visual and language analysis as well as domain knowledge that can learn from the lived experiences of survivors, and use this information to improve matching algorithms for providing economic, job, social, and other recommendations to survivors and refugees, while also helping researchers and practitioners identify key tipping points for people who are vulnerable to exploitation.
- Data Collection and Usage Standards – Development of ethical standards for data governance in modern slavery research, including mechanisms to facilitate data sharing, understanding, and fusion as well as governance issues for associated AI techniques, including responsible use of predictions, recommendations, and human-AI interactions.
- Data Fusion and Surveying – Ethics-infused AI techniques that integrate, process and make sense of diverse and heterogeneous data arriving from a wide-range of sources, including the use of AI to direct survey sampling, while undoing bias, at massively greater scale and lower cost than possible today to support critical tasks such as prevalence estimation.
The workshop report is currently being drafted.
Learn more about the solicitation here and submit a proposal before the July 1, 2020 deadline.
