Five tech solutions to global problems

01 Child abuse

Tech­no­log­i­cal advances have made the spread of infor­ma­tion far eas­i­er than ever before, but they have also enabled child sex­u­al abuse mate­r­i­al to be wide­ly shared online. The US-based Nation­al Cen­ter for Miss­ing and Exploit­ed Chil­dren has seen a major increase how many child sex­u­al abuse files they review. With the num­ber reach­ing 25 mil­lion in 2015, com­pared with 450,000 in 2004, it counts as one of the most press­ing social prob­lems today.

Found­ed by actors Demi Moore and Ash­ton Kutch­er in 2009, Thorn: Dig­i­tal Defend­ers of Chil­dren is a non-gov­ern­men­tal organ­i­sa­tion com­mit­ted to end­ing child sex exploita­tion and traf­fick­ing through inno­v­a­tive tech­no­log­i­cal tools. By cre­at­ing solu­tions based on deep-learn­ing and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence that are able to iden­ti­fy the most vul­ner­a­ble vic­tims of child abuse, law enforce­ment can focus on the most urgent cas­es.

Thorn’s efforts to speed up vic­tim iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, unset­tle the plat­forms spread­ing ille­gal con­tent, and ham­per child abusers is mak­ing a sig­nif­i­cant impact. In 2017, the organ­i­sa­tion was instru­men­tal in help­ing police iden­ti­fy 5,791 sex traf­fick­ing vic­tims, with their web-based tool, Spot­light, used by more than 5,000 US law enforce­ment offi­cers.

02 World hunger

More than 800 mil­lion peo­ple, or 11 per cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion, are suf­fer­ing from chron­ic hunger. After a decade-long fall in glob­al hunger lev­els, the Unit­ed Nations announced last year that the num­ber of peo­ple going to bed hun­gry is steadi­ly ris­ing. Despite enough food being pro­duced every year to feed all peo­ple on the plan­et and more, a small but sub­stan­tial amount of this is wast­ed, even in devel­op­ing coun­tries.

From using agri­cul­tur­al devices con­nect­ed to the inter­net of things (IoT) to gain insight into crop health in a bid to improve yield qual­i­ty, to reduc­ing the quan­ti­ty of lost and dam­aged food­stuffs by imple­ment­ing IoT mon­i­tor­ing devices in the entire dis­tri­b­u­tion ecosys­tem, IoT solu­tions can offer data-dri­ven insights and play a role in elim­i­nat­ing world hunger.

Accord­ing to busi­ness infor­ma­tion provider IHS Mark­it, the total num­ber of IoT devices is fore­cast to reach 125 bil­lion in 2030, up from 27 bil­lion in 2017, cre­at­ing an IoT net­work with unprece­dent­ed cov­er­age lev­els. Shar­ing real-time data about urgent food require­ments and wastage will make the dis­tri­b­u­tion of lim­it­ed food sup­plies as effec­tive as pos­si­ble.

03 Modern slavery

Mod­ern slav­ery and forced labour count among the biggest social prob­lems and are found to exist in more than 165 coun­tries across both the devel­op­ing and devel­oped world. The Mod­ern Slav­ery Act was intro­duced by the UK gov­ern­ment in 2015 to com­bat this glob­al injus­tice, but char­i­ty Focus on Labour Exploita­tion has called on com­pa­nies to do far more on this issue.

Due to poor pro­cure­ment prac­tices and unac­count­able sup­ply part­ners, some com­pa­nies have unknow­ing­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in uneth­i­cal sup­ply chains and, in the process, are exac­er­bat­ing social issues sur­round­ing mod­ern slav­ery. Smart pro­cure­ment solu­tions in tech­nol­o­gy great­ly improves the abil­i­ty of major com­pa­nies to achieve a com­pre­hen­sive view of often com­plex sup­ply chains and root out irre­spon­si­ble sup­pli­ers.

“By effi­cient­ly cap­tur­ing infor­ma­tion from sup­pli­ers and com­ple­ment­ing it with third-par­ty data, such as sus­tain­abil­i­ty rat­ings from Eco­Vadis, organ­i­sa­tions can bet­ter eval­u­ate sup­pli­ers and ensure their sup­ply chains don’t sup­port prac­tices such as slav­ery and child labour,” says Alex Sar­ic at pro­cure­ment man­age­ment soft­ware com­pa­ny Ival­ua.

Mov­ing away from sim­plis­tic sup­ply chain checks will dam­age the wide­spread mod­ern slav­ery indus­try, which gen­er­ates $150 bil­lion each year, accord­ing to the Inter­na­tion­al Labour Orga­ni­za­tion.

04 Digital divide

The dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion has con­nect­ed bil­lions of peo­ple to the inter­net and paved the way for top tech solu­tions that have trans­formed count­less lives. Yet many indi­vid­u­als liv­ing in devel­op­ing coun­tries have been left behind as high-speed broad­band access remains prac­ti­cal­ly out of reach to entire nations and regions. This dig­i­tal divide is hold­ing back the eco­nom­ic growth of poor­er coun­tries as they are unable to take advan­tage of the oppor­tu­ni­ties found in the glob­al dig­i­tal ecosys­tem.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tions firm Viasat is help­ing reduce dig­i­tal inequal­i­ty by pro­vid­ing access to broad­band, through their satel­lite-enabled Com­mu­ni­ty Wi-Fi ser­vice, to iso­lat­ed regions across the world. Wifi hotspots in rur­al areas of the Unit­ed States and parts of Mex­i­co are being served by Viasat’s exist­ing satel­lite net­work, with mil­lions more peo­ple with­out inter­net access being able to make use of these ser­vices in 2020 when the newest ViaSat‑3 satel­lite comes online.

“Specif­i­cal­ly in Mex­i­co, we are using our exist­ing satel­lite net­work to deliv­er an inter­net ser­vice that can be deployed with min­i­mal local infra­struc­ture invest­ment and low ongo­ing costs, mak­ing it sim­ple for these com­mu­ni­ties to fund through the increased eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ties the con­nec­tion offers,” explains Kevin Cohen, Viasat’s gen­er­al man­ag­er of Com­mu­ni­ty Wi-Fi for the Amer­i­c­as.

05 Animal testing

Big data tech­nolo­gies are fun­da­men­tal­ly chang­ing how com­pa­nies in all indus­tries oper­ate due to their abil­i­ty to pro­vide action­able busi­ness insights and bet­ter under­stand cus­tomer behav­iour. By apply­ing these same data inter­ro­ga­tion tech­niques to pub­licly avail­able records, both gov­ern­ments and pri­vate enter­pris­es can gain a clear­er under­stand­ing of how to deal with press­ing social prob­lems.

Ani­mal test­ing is still wide­ly used in drug tri­als with gov­ern­ments, ani­mal wel­fare char­i­ties and oth­er non-gov­ern­men­tal organ­i­sa­tions main­tain­ing pres­sure on major phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies to reduce the num­ber of tests car­ried out. To under­stand the extent to which ani­mal tests are pre­dic­tive of human response, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal firm Bay­er and infor­ma­tion com­pa­ny Else­vi­er analysed more than 1.6 mil­lion pub­lic records.

“Our find­ings, which also have con­sid­er­able impli­ca­tions for improv­ing patient safe­ty, can help phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal firms decide which tests are appro­pri­ate and which might be ruled out to reduce unnec­es­sary test­ing on ani­mals. This will hope­ful­ly encour­age oth­er researchers to exam­ine pub­lic data to see what oth­er socio-eco­nom­ic issues can be addressed through prop­er data analy­sis,” says Dr Matt Clark, direc­tor of sci­en­tif­ic ser­vices at Else­vi­er.

01 Child abuse

02 World hunger