SUMMARY

This session will explore how automation tools and humans can work together in a complementary way, playing on each of their strengths to advance human rights.

Under the UK and Australian Modern Slavery Acts, large companies have the obligation to publish annual statements outlining how they are addressing slavery issues in their operations and supply chains. Project AIMS (AI against Modern Slavery) is a coalition of organisations developing an open source AI algorithm to automate the assessment of these statements and publish the data in an open format.

Using Project AIMS as a case study, the panellists will explore the opportunities and challenges of developing an AI algorithm to scale corporate accountability. This will include a discussion of AI techniques (e.g. NLP, computational linguistics), methods used to access the data in companies’ modern slavery statements, go over bottlenecks in automation processes, highlight opportunities to build on and adapt existing tools, and give a preview of upcoming developments.

The session will make explicit the role that humans can and must play in the development and implementation of automation tools to account for nuances and untangle data complexities.