Project AIMS (Artificial Intelligence against Modern Slavery) built the first exploration of the application of machine learning to automate the analysis of statements produced by businesses under the UK and Australian Modern Slavery Acts to boost compliance and help combat and eradicate modern slavery. The first phase of Project AIMSis now open source on GitHub! 

The speaker, Adriana Bora, will introduce the issue of modern slavery in supply chains. The presentation will focus on the existing modern slavery legislation, requiring companies to publish statements, outlining the steps they are taking to eradicate slavery from their supply chains. The presentation will give examples of research that used those statements to assess the level of transparency and compliance from companies in the fashion industry. Yet, all those examples are based on samples of only a few hundred statements as the process to manually assess them is time-consuming and resource-intensive. With the use of AI, we can speed up the analysis and achieve a census analysis of all the statements, and accountability as scale. Project AIMS (AI against Modern Slavery) produced the first set of machine learning explorations and it is now available open-source on GitHub. Project AIMS will continue now as part of Adriana's PhD at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), in collaboration with Mila (Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute).

About the speaker

Adriana Bora is a PhD Candidate in the School of Mathematical Sciences at the Queensland University of Technology, and the Project Lead of Project AIMS (AI against Modern Slavery) developed now at Mila, AI for Humanity. 

Adriana holds a Master’s Degree in International Public Management from Sciences Po Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA). She has also studied at the University of Hong Kong and holds a diploma in International Relations and Advanced Quantitative Methods from the University of Essex.

Adriana is listed as one of the 20 Rising Stars in AI Ethics 2022 and won the UNESCO International Research Centre in Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI)’s AI Award 2021 for her efforts to develop AI solutions to combat modern slavery, contributing to SDG 8, Target 8.7.

Her research focuses on applying machine learning in analysing and benchmarking the businesses’ reports published following the Modern Slavery Acts from the UK and Australia.

Throughout her membership and involvement in Code 8.7, DataJam, Traffick Analysis Hub and the MIT Computational Law Report Task Force on Modern Slavery, she has been working and connecting an interdisciplinary, global community, collaborating in the fight against modern slavery with technological-driven solutions.

Adriana is also the Queensland Community Lead of Women in AI (WAI) Australia, working towards increasing female representation and participation in AI.