STRIAD:HONEYCOMB
Shining light on a hidden crime.
Countering human trafficking through Ethical AI
Through a combination of Ethical AI and sociotechnical methods, STRIAD:Honeycomb optimises limited anti-trafficking resources by surfacing otherwise hidden patterns, trends, and insights; helps victims of trafficking by aligning support packages with what victims’ actually need; enhances prevention and protection efforts by informing opportunities for more targeted and effective partnerships; and helps drive effective policy change through providing a data-driven evidence basis.
The Problems
The estimated annual cost to the UK economy from national and transnational crime, of which human trafficking represents a huge part.
The total expenditure to counter modern slavery by law enforcement agencies across government in England and Wales in the 2015/16 financial year.
The annual costs to the UK from human trafficking for sexual exploitation
people living in modern slavery in 2021 (Walk Free)
Victims’ experiences matter
Survivors’ experiences contain a wealth of potential insights, from where their exploitation journey started, the nature of the abuse they suffered, who and what they encountered, and their needs for support. Unfortunately, these experiences are often an afterthought when trying to understand the crime.
Hidden connections conceal crucial insights on trafficking and slavery
Given large amounts of information, it’s incredibly difficult for law enforcement and safeguarding professionals to spot connections and patterns amidst the noise. This is compounded by the phenomenon of “I’ll know what I’m looking for when I see it”, which eats up time and personnel capacity.
The unending battle against time and resources
While information, data, reporting, and response pressures increase almost unendingly, time and resources do not. The volume of information increases exponentially, but most organisations’ data processing capabilities remain linear. Staff have less time to dig through more noise. Something has to change.
Can’t access data? Then it may as well not exist
In a challenging regulatory environment, made more so by legal and reputational risks (not to mention public scrutiny) and a general apprehension about sharing data, valuable insights often remain locked away in multiple data silos across public sector and third sector organisations – and even within organisations themselves.
Why Honeycomb
Honeycomb helps organisations optimise limited anti-trafficking resources by surfacing otherwise hidden patterns, trends, and insights across huge volumes of text data and structured data. With Honeycomb’s natural language processing (NL) tools, smooth search functionality, clear and understandable data visualisations, and user-friendly UI, organisations can reduce the time needed to get the insights that matter and ensure that resources are being allocated to deliver real-world impact.
Many organisations still struggle with integrating victims’ experiences into the decision-making process, which risks a mis-match between what survivors need and the services being provided. With Honeycomb, organisations can analyse victim narratives, stories, and statements at scale to better understand the trends, patterns, and prevalence of victims’ needs across time and place. Armed with these insights, organisations can better design support packages and programmatic activities using a clearer picture of what people need.
Despite today’s apparent ease and speed of global communication, getting actionable information to the right people and partners remains a challenge. When time and resources are limited, organisations need a strong basis for better determining which other organisations, agencies and bodies to partner with, and for what purposes. Through surfacing insights on locations, victim demographics, exploitation types and trends, recruitment methods, transport routes and other components of the wider human trafficking process, Honeycomb helps organisations enhance prevention and protection efforts by informing opportunities for more targeted and effective partnerships.
In an era of heightened complexity and public scrutiny, it’s increasingly risky to depend on unquestioned assumptions, out-of-context anecdotes, fragmented perspectives, and ‘established wisdom’. These may feel comfortable and familiar, but they can offer shaky grounds for making good decisions. Honeycomb helps organisations drive more effective counter-trafficking actions and policy change through providing an explainable, understandable, data-driven evidence basis that augments professionals’ judgements and experience to support decision-making.
Using data and AI in the right way is absolutely paramount for Trilateral Research. We place an acute emphasis on ensuring the highest standards of security, ethics, accessibility, understandability, and explainability in how we process and leverage data to support decision-making. From establishing robust data sharing agreements, to executing Ethics Impact Assessments (EIA) and Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIA), to integrating our in-house data protection and ethics resources directly into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and co-design process, our clients can have confidence and trust that their data is being handled safely, ethically, and responsibly. Read more about our approach to Ethical AI here
When it comes to human trafficking, we know what we’re talking about. Trilateral has over 10 years’ experience working in the human trafficking space. We’ve interviewed hundreds of trafficking victims (and traffickers themselves); built models to understand child soldier recruitment; consulted on the UK’s National Referral Mechanism (NRM); contributed to policy development for organisations including the UK Home Officer, military, NATO, and the Council of Baltic Sea States (CBSS); trained military/security actors and NGOs on countering human trafficking; and published numerous peer-reviewed articles. This expertise directly informs the design and development of Honeycomb, from data selection and curation, to labelling training data to support the development of natural language processing (NLP) models, to how insights are presented to users.
Honeycomb Essentials
Honeycomb Essentials provides the essential functionality and insights that organisations need to better understand human trafficking and its context.
Sift through vast amounts of text with a few clicks
Using Trilateral’s in-house natural language processing (NLP) toolkit, built and trained using our unique combination of sociotechnical know-how and subject matter expertise, Honeycomb Essentials helps users sift through huge volumes of text data to find what matters, saving untold hours and streamlining the analytical process.
Mapping the human trafficking environment
Honeycomb Essentials‘ map module lets users search and visualise structured and unstructured data insights, including points of interest, hotspots, socio-economic and demographic data, and location-based insights from news content. Data is pre-loaded for the UK and Ireland, while additional data can be ingested and visualised to meet organisations’ specific needs and insights.
Out-of-the-box data coverage
Honeycomb Essentials includes the essential data coverage needed to better understand and contextualise the human trafficking landscape. Honeycomb’s Document Explorer integrates news feeds out-of-the-box, and users own text data can also be uploaded and analysed using Honeycomb’s NLP tools. The Maps module includes geospatial data on social, economic, and demographic factors relevant to human trafficking, along with locations of places of interest (such as businesses).
Responsible, relevant, understandable, explainable, digestible, actionable – essential
Honeycomb Essentials incorporates Trilateral’s full spectrum of experience and expertise (covering ethics innovation, data protection, subject matter expertise, sociotechnical methods, and Ethical AI), along with robust data protection and ethics compliance, to ensure users are provided with insights and outputs that are responsible, relevant, understandable, explainable, digestible, and actionable. Read more about our approach to Ethical AI here.
A secure web app with a small footprit
Honeycomb Essentials was built using Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) for security and scalability. What’s more, Honeycomb has earned the coveted AWS Qualified Software badge, meaning our customers and users can be assured of Honeycomb’s well-designed infrastructure behind the scenes. Despite this, Honeycomb operates as a lightweight web application – all you need is an internet-connected computer
Honeycomb Enterprise
Co-design, development, and deployment of a tailor-made Honeycomb application to meet your specific needs.
Using our 10+ years of subject matter expertise in human trafficking plus our Ethical AI technical skillset, we design and deploy advanced purpose-built Honeycomb Enterprise applications. From multi-source data integration and data processing; to obtaining high-value data by navigating the legal and regulatory environment; to building customer-defined modules and components; Honeycomb Enterprise is uniquely placed to deliver significant value through actionable insights, optimising resources, saving time, and shedding light on the hidden realities of human trafficking in your areas of concern.
Honeycomb Enterprise offers customers a bespoke, tailor-made suit of tools and insights, all packaged with in Honeycomb’s user-friendly and accessible interface. Client journey includes:
Understanding the problem, including key insights/information requirements, business aims, success criteria, and any constraints.
Data collection, including client data, partner data, and open source data (as needed).
Data processing, including anonymisation (if needed), cleaning, and transformation.
Data science model development, including training, building, and tailoring NLP tools and outputs using our 10+ years’ subject matter expertise.
Web application development and deployment.
Training and customer onboarding.
For all our Enterprise customers, we first recommend a feasibility study. Here, we assess the availability and quality of data in relation to the customer’s needs, information requirements, and insights. The outputs of this study include:
- A refined set of key information requirements .
- A feasibility report outlining the availability, quality, and limitations of available data, including recommendations.
- A detailed cost proposal.
Problem
Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and Greater Manchester Police (GMP) wanted to enhance their understanding and prevention of human trafficking by obtaining insights from victims’ stories and case notes, but lacked the text analysis tools and time to do so. Moreover, some of the insights needed were distributed across different data sources amongst civil society partners (such as Causeway) in the region, making it difficult for GMCA and GMP to obtain a comprehensive, victim-centred view of human trafficking in the Greater Manchester area.
Solution
Leveraging the award winning expertise of our data protection service, Trilateral first established robust data sharing agreements with GMCA, GMP, Causeway, and other local partners to ensure data could be shared in a responsible, legal, and ethical manner. Using its unique combination of human trafficking domain expertise and sociotechnical methods, Trilateral anonymised (where needed), cleaned, and processed the data. Working closely with our in-house subject matter experts in human trafficking, we then trained and built a suite of ethical AI tools to extract insights across several high-priority thematic areas, validating these with end users along the way.
Impact
With Honeycomb, GMCA and GMP will be able to analyse their existing victim stories data in completely new ways, reveal insights and trends that were previously hidden, and dramatically reduce the time required to generate data-driven analytical products and briefings. As additional data sources are integrated, GMCA and GMP will be able to obtain a granular, singular, silo-free situational understanding of human trafficking in the Greater Manchester area.
Trilateral have engaged with our partnership to understand what we are trying to achieve and are building a solution to enable that to happen. They have the expertise and approaches to translate complex requirements into tangible outputs that can be used to make a real world difference to how we tackle modern slavery and human trafficking.
– Sian Payne, Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA)
Pricing
Essentials edition
- Secure, user-friendly web app
- Purpose-built NLP models
- Human trafficking news analysis
- Upload & analyse your documents
- Visualise geospatial data
- Supports data-driven reporting
- Civil society: £4,500 p/a
- Public sector: £6,000 p/a
- Private sector: £12,000 p/a
Enterprise edition
- Bring Your Own Data (BYOD)
- Customer-defined dashboards
- Niche customer-specific insights
- Integrate with your workflows
- Co-designed with you
- Plus: all Essentials functionality
£ Price on assessment
Making Honeycomb Ethical
Subject expertise
We apply rigor in our development and use of Honeycomb by actively engaging subject matter experts.
Safety first
We apply strong safety and security practices to avoid unintended results that create risks of harm, including emphasis on data anonymisation.
Transparency and explainability
Honeycomb includes information to enable understanding of what data is being processed and where insights are derived from.
STRIAD:Honeycomb Ecosystem
Cybersecurity gaps can cause significant financial costs, impact public trust, cause untold stress, and sap limited time from solving working on your biggest problems. Our Cybersecurity team helps ensure industry-standard levels of security for all our ethical AI solutions, from cloud infrastructure security and penetration testing, to endpoint security and secure client access.
Our expert Data Protection team develops legally compliant and ethical data sharing agreements that enable organisations to confidently share data. Our Data Protection team is available to answer your questions related to GDPR or any other data protection and privacy challenges.
Our Cybersecurity team provides critical data protection and cybersecurity support to STRIAD. From data sharing agreements to Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs), the team helps navigate the regulatory hurdles, data silos, and other barriers involved in getting valuable data into our customers’ hands in a safe, secure, and reliable way.
The Ethics Innovation team provides continuous ethics-by-design guidance and conducts an ethical impact assessment on all of Trilateral’s products. For Honeycomb, ethics means not only ethical data collection and processing, but also understanding the ethical issues inherent to the context of human trafficking as well as paying particular attention to societal, political and individual factors that characterise human trafficking.
Our Sociotech Insights Group (SIG) team provided social science expertise for understanding Honeycomb’s user needs and guiding the development of its technical capabilities. Honeycomb’s victim stories analysis tools employ a reference dataset in a text classification architecture, for which the SIG acquired and cleaned a large number of victim stories from key strategic partners. The team then created a labelling schema – based on user input and our own subject matter expertise – and annotated the data to build the classifier. Our team also collected, curation, cleaned, and created a range of datasets from open sources to support wider situational understanding of human trafficking.
Honeycomb is supported by our I&R team who contribute with cutting edge research that bridges the gap between academia and industry.
Our expert Data Protection team develops legally compliant and ethical data sharing agreements that enable organisations to confidently share data. Our Data Protection team is available to answer your questions related to GDPR or any other data protection and privacy challenges.
Our Cybersecurity team provides critical data protection and cybersecurity support to STRIAD. From data sharing agreements to Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs), the team helps navigate the regulatory hurdles, data silos, and other barriers involved in getting valuable data into our customers’ hands in a safe, secure, and reliable way.
The Ethics Innovation team provides continuous ethics-by-design guidance and conducts an ethical impact assessment on all of Trilateral’s products. For Honeycomb, ethics means not only ethical data collection and processing, but also understanding the ethical issues inherent to the context of human trafficking as well as paying particular attention to societal, political and individual factors that characterise human trafficking.
Honeycomb is supported by our I&R team who contribute with cutting edge research that bridges the gap between academia and industry.
STRIAD:Honeycomb Ecosystem
Cybersecurity gaps can cause significant financial costs, impact public trust, cause untold stress, and sap limited time from solving working on your biggest problems. Our Cybersecurity team helps ensure industry-standard levels of security for all our ethical AI solutions, from cloud infrastructure security and penetration testing, to endpoint security and secure client access.
Latest News
Latest data-driven insights into modern slavery victim demographics and case outcomes in greater Manchester
Shining light on a hidden crime in Greater Manchester
Training on human trafficking: a component of the human security operationalisation framework
What are the factors that make individuals vulnerable to human trafficking?
Our software is AWS Qualified Software
Today’s societal problems are complex and multi-faceted. Technology has the power to help in incredibly valuable ways, but we believe it’s people who are (and should) remain at the heart of solving our biggest problems and making the right decisions. That’s why our ethical AI products are embedded in an ecosystem of sociotechnical services, from data protection and privacy to in-depth subject matter expertise. Read more about our sociotechnical approach here.
HONEYCOMB Success Stories
Sian Payne
Partnership Officer for Programme Challenger, Greater Manchester Combined Authority
Trilateral have engaged with our partnership to understand what we are trying to achieve and are building a solution to enable that to happen. They have the expertise and approaches to translate complex requirements into tangible outputs that can be used to make a real world difference to how we tackle modern slavery and human trafficking.
Phill Clayton
CEO of City Hearts
Working with Julia and the team at Trilateral has been an excellent experience. They have helped us navigate the tricky waters of GDPR with a constant and persistent survivor centred approach. Their experience and expertise are second to none, taking complex issues and defining them in a practical impactful way. We are excited to be a partner on Honeycomb and to see the results take shape.
