Tackling complex societal issues with ethical AI 

We’re delighted to announce the launch of STRIAD:Honeycomb, our latest Ethical AI tool helping companies and organisations harness data to better understand and respond to complex societal challenges. Honeycomb merges our deep subject matter expertise – covering issues from human trafficking to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) risks – with advanced data science components, all packaged into a user-friendly web app and grounded in our robust approach to the development and use of ethical AI.

Why did we develop Honeycomb?

From human trafficking and forced labour, to climate change and gender-based violence, to ESG risks, organisations still struggle with getting a grip on data to understand the issues and risks permeating the social and business environment. Risk management, planning, and resourcing remain a big sticking-point. 

Without a data-driven evidence basis, organisations struggle to make good decisions, gain buy-in from partners, communicate with internal and external audiences, engage communities, deliver effective change in the real world, and figure out where to target future resources. 

What’s more, whilst the volume of information increases exponentially, most organisations’ data processing capabilities stay linear. Less time to dig through more noise means a longer Time To Knowledge (TTK), delayed decisions, and greater downstream costs. 

Something has to change. 

What can Honeycomb do?

• Drive meaningful, effective insights: Many AI tools promise to streamline how organisations use and apply data-driven insights, but the insights they produce often aren’t fit for purpose. We wanted to deploy our many years of in-depth subject expertise directly into the design and development of Honeycomb, in order to drive meaningful insights that can actually be used.

• Support efficient decision-making: Organisations are racing to understand and respond to complex societal challenges and business risks but they’re still struggling to harness the right data to understand what’s happening. We wanted to build a tool that helps reduce the overhead in processing data to support decision-making in a more effective and efficient way.

Key features 

• Document Explorer delivers our purpose-built Natural Language Processing (NLP) toolkit – built and trained using our unique combination of sociotechnical know-how and our wealth of subject matter expertise – into a clean and fluid user interface. It gives users an efficient way to sift through volumes of qualitative/text to find what matters, saving untold hours and streamlining the analytical process. 

• Interactive Maps let users swiftly search and visualise a variety of multi-source geospatial data for getting that wider contextual understanding of a given area, such as points of interest (such as businesses) and social-economic-demographic data.  

• Data Upload enables organisations to integrate their own proprietary data into Honeycomb and process insights in both Document Explorer and Maps. For organisations who’re struggling to make real use of their qualitative (text) and quantitative data, Honeycomb’s the answer. 

• Actionable Insights help organisations make better, clearer decisions. Honeycomb incorporates our full spectrum of experience and expertise across AI ethics, data protection, subject matter expertise, sociotechnical methods. We also subject Honeycomb to our rigorous data protection and ethics impact assessments, to ensure users are provided with data-driven insights that are responsible, relevant, understandable, and explainable.  

What makes Honeycomb ethical?

Way too often we see technology companies create AI solutions that fail to adequately consider their impact on individuals and societies. At Trilateral Research, we're working to change this. We’ve been conducting cutting-edge research and delivering guidance on ethical AI, privacy, and data protection for many years. So, when it came time to build Honeycomb, we embedded our know-how right into the design and development process. In addition, all data collection and processing in Honeycomb is GDPR compliant, and Honeycomb also follows privacy-by-design principles.​ Read more about our approach to Ethical AI here.

If you’d like to find out how Honeycomb supports corporate social responsibility, check out our latest blog post. 

You can find out more about Honeycomb and how it works here.

If you’d like to see Honeycomb in action, join us at 14:00 UKT every Thursday starting 13 April 2023.