On any given day, tens of millions of people find themselves trapped in instances of modern slavery. This CCC visioning workshop, organized in collaboration with Code 8.7[1], 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[2] 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.

Potential session topics include:

• Self-Aware Learning, including trustworthy learning, data provenance, explanation and interpretablity, quantification of uncertainty, and durable machine learning systems.
• Meaningful Interaction with AI Systems, including integrating diverse interaction channels, collaborative interaction, alignment with human values and social norms, modeling and communicating mental states, supporting interactions between people, preventing undesirable manipulation, and preserving privacy in human-computer interactions.
• Integrated Intelligence, including heterogeneous knowledge, reasoning at scale, knowledge capture and dissemination, and rich memory models that more closely reflect human memory.
• Open AI Platforms and Resources, including AI-ready data repositories and AI integration frameworks.
• Computational techniques designed to support the sharing of highly sensitive data while at the same time providing strong privacy guarantees.

[1]   Code 8.7 is a community that researches, develops and applies AI-powered anti-slavery strategies, directly informed by survivors. See https://delta87.org/code87/ for further details.

[2]   https://cra.org/ccc/visioning/visioning-activities/2018-activities/artificial-intelligence-roadmap/