SINS22: Responsible AI for Addressing Human Security Challenges by Anjali Mazumder

Speaker
Anjali Mazumder, The Alan Turing Institute, UK

Abstract
The rise of big data and AI – the Fourth Industrial revolution – provides opportunity to tackle some of the greatest humanitarian challenges. Approximately 100 million people are currently displaced (2022) in the world due to war, violence, and human rights abuses – 1.25% of humanity. Under one billion people do not have a legal identity, limiting access to health and economic security. Over 40 million people were in modern day slavery (2016). Several countries with the highest estimates are those riddled with conflict and suffering from a lack of security and breakdown in Rule of Law, resulting in displacement and high risk of exploitation. Climate change and lack of economic opportunity increase these outcomes. This causes both national and international risk, particularly as people are bought and sold and moved across land and waters (often without papers/documentation). New technologies, rising smartphone ownership and cheap, fast internet use has taken slavery into modern digital age, facilitating modern day enslavers to entrap more victims through enticement, expand their illicit organisations and hide behind screens. New technologies such as remote sensors and machine learning methods yield “tech” solutions to enable law enforcement and intelligence agencies to engage with researchers to disrupt recruitment and enslavement, with potential to shift the risk from victims to enslavers and traffickers. For “tech” responses to be effective requires stakeholder engagement including survivors. In this talk, we share our multi-disciplinary socio-technical approach to actualise the benefits of AI whilst balancing the risks and harms to safeguard human and border security.

Keywords
AI, machine learning, human security, responsible innovation, human rights, privacy

Biographical Note
Anjali Mazumder is the Theme Lead on AI and Justice & Human Rights. Her work focuses on empowering government and non-profit organisations by co-designing and developing responsible and inclusive data and AI methods, tools and frameworks for safeguarding people from harm – particularly those most vulnerable, building resilient institutions and systems, and accelerating the opportunity for inclusive, fair and just services, systems, economies, and communities. She is passionate about fostering multi-disciplinary collaborations and multi-sector partnerships to co-create pathways for innovation that improves services, policy, and actions to safeguard human rights and address humanitarian challenges. Her research interests are in developing integrated Bayesian decision support systems to manage uncertainty with complex data structures, value of evidence, causal reasoning in the wild; expert judgement; detecting bias and algorithmic fairness; socio-technical solutions to harnessing multiple disparate sources of data whilst enabling responsible and inclusive data and AI principles and practices; communicating uncertainty and risk; and safeguarding rights and the Rule of Law.

She has over 15 years’ experience tackling fundamental statistical problems of societal importance – human rights, justice, security, the Law, education, public health & safety – working at the interface of research, policy and practice in the UK, the US, and Canada, fostering multi-disciplinary and cross-sector collaborations. She was appointed to Canada’s National DNA Databank Advisory Committee (2012-2018) and currently serves on the UK Forensic Science Regulator’s fingerprint interpretation subgroup, and the senior management board of the UK’s Policy and Evidence Centre for Modern Slavery and Human Rights. She has also served the Royal Statistical Society in a variety of ways, most recently appointed to the Statistics & Law Section and the Data Science Section committees. She holds a doctorate in Statistics from the University of Oxford and two masters’ degrees in Measurement and Evaluation, and Statistics from the University of Toronto.

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Citation: Anjali Mazumder, 11 November 2022, “Responsible AI for Addressing Human Security Challenges” in Kathleen Vogel et al., Securitization for Sustainability of People and Place: A Call to Transdisciplinarity, The 15th Social Implications of National Security Workshop, IEEE STS Technical Committee together with SPEC of Arizona State University.