Analyzing AI data… 100,000 forced laborers for 6 years

AI data analysis revealed that up to 100,000 workers were being forced to work on fishing boats that went to the high seas to fish.

According to environmental data scientist Gavin McDonald, it is well known that forced labor is becoming a norm in high sea fishing. However, it is not clear how many people are forced to work.

For this reason, it was decided to use AI to check the status of forced labor. First, the movement of fishing boats found to have been forced to labor in the past was tracked using Global Fishing Watch, a web service that can track the movement of fishing boats around the world. In this fishing vessel movement, we analyzed whether there is a characteristic movement in fishing boats that are forced to work in cooperation with Greenpeace, a nature conservation organization, and the Environmental Justice Foundation.

As a result of analyzing the movement of fishing boats that are engaged in forced labor, they succeeded in finding distinctive movement patterns, such as fishing for long periods of time or fishing farther from the port than other fishing boats. He learned this pattern with the help of a Google data scientist to develop an AI that can identify forced labor fishing boats with 92% accuracy.

As a result of finding fishing vessels that are likely to be engaged in forced labor by reading tracking data of 16,000 fishing vessels from 2012 to 2018, it was detected that 14-25% of fishing vessels were suspected to be doing forced labor. done. It is possible that up to 100,000 people will be forced to work. In addition, as a result of analyzing the data, it was revealed that fishing boats that performed forced labor are scattered all over the world, and that forced labor is being carried out a lot, especially in fishing boats for squid fishing.

He said he hopes to collect more data and increase AI accuracy to improve working conditions, liberate forced labor victims, and eventually become a deterrent to human rights violations of forced labor. Related information can be found here .