"The technology can filter over one million articles a day using forced labour specific key words and highlight potential areas of risk in a supply chain"
By Anuradha Nagaraj
CHENNAI, India, Aug 9 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - With more than 20 million humans working as modern slaves, a technology developer is hoping artificial intelligence will help clean up the world's supply chains and root out worker abuse.
Developer Padmini Ranganathan said mobile phones, media reports and surveillance cameras can all be mined for real-time data, which can in turn be fed into machines to create artificial intelligence (AI) that helps companies see more clearly what is happening down the line.
"The time to do this now is better than ever before, with so many countries and companies focusing on modern slavery," she said in an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"At the start of the decade, the driving force for compliance was fear of being penalised. Now companies are looking at social impact and saying they want to do this."
Modern-day slavery has come under increasing scrutiny in recent year, putting regulatory and consumer pressure on companies to ensure their supply chains are free from forced labour, child workers and other forms of slavery.
Almost 21 million people are victims of forced labour, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), with migrant workers and indigenous people particularly vulnerable.
But Ranganathan said there are new digital ways to stamp out exploitation, given humans have failed to end modern slavery.
"The technology can filter over one million articles a day using forced labour specific key words and highlight potential areas of risk in a supply chain," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview from the United States.
Ranganathan works for information technology services company SAP Ariba, which helps companies better manage their procurement processes.
She said a new programme could map weak links in corporate supply chains by culling data from a host of sources, from surveillance cameras to non-profits and other agencies.
"Artificial intelligence and machine learning can use these huge volumes of data and extract meaningful information," she said.
Forced labour in the private economy generates $150 billion in illegal profits per year, according to the ILO.
Ranganathan hopes her new programme will curb that market and help create "supply chains with a conscience".
For instance, she said it could help detect if child labour was used to pollinate cotton, which in turn was used to produce a branded shirt. Or it could help monitor labour conditions on cocoa plantations, giving companies "real-time exposure" so they can purge their supply chains of abuse right away.
"The convergence of technology will make things more transparent and real-time exposure can be created," she said.
"In the AI world, techniques are being piloted where we could arm the lowest level supplier with a mobile app, ensure hotlines in factories, use of surveillance cameras and make this all a part of the contract."
Ranganathan conceded that mapping the "last mile" of any supply chain was the hardest part, with many outsourcing work to homeworkers and small units, where data was harder to gather.
(Reporting by Anuradha Nagaraj, Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths.Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)
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