Trafficking Risks: AI for Proactive Protection (TRAPP)

Child trafficking happens across all regions and is a challenge every country faces. In India, the central and state governments have made combating it a priority, building child protection systems, and stronger detection and reporting. The state of Odisha in India has been active in this work through its Department of Women and Child Development (WCD) and its child protection structures. Departments at different administrative levels already hold valuable information that could help identify families at risk. Bringing that information together in one place could help officials reach vulnerable children and families earlier, before harm occurs.

The Trafficking Risks: AI for Proactive Protection (TRAPP) research team is working with the WCD in the state of Odisha, to develop an AI-based decision-support tool for preventing child trafficking. The AI tool will combine existing government data, such as WCD records, police data, census figures, and household surveys, to identify the households and villages most vulnerable to trafficking. Officials can then connect those families with welfare schemes and support programs early. WCD officials will see the results on a secure dashboard in the local language, Odia, with village-level maps and plain-language explanations of the risk factors behind each assessment. The tool is being designed jointly with the WCD and with teams at the district and block levels, and will be piloted in selected districts before being extended across the state. Dr. Eirliani Abdul Rahman is the Principal Investigator of TRAPP, which is being developed in partnership with the technology nonprofit SimPPL. The project is funded by the Baden-Württemberg Foundation and by Prof. Marc Ratkovic, Chair of Social Data Science at the University of Mannheim.

This project is spearheaded by Dr. Eirliani Abdul Rahman.

Eirliani is an outstanding scientist and the sole principal investigator of a research project called TRAPP (“Trafficking Risks: AI for Proactive Protection”), developing an AI tool to combat child trafficking at the MZES. She is co-Director of the Global Responsible Tech Lab (GRTL), together with Prof. Marc Ratkovic, Chair of Social Data Science at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim.
She is also a Research Affiliate at the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy and holds a doctorate in public health from Harvard University. Previously, Eirliani was a Senior Fellow at the Collaborative on Global Children's Issues at Georgetown University. A Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Eirliani is a member of Chatham House and was a former New America Open Technology Institute Fellow. She was a Prajna Leadership and Julio Frenk DrPH Fellow at Harvard and won the inaugural doctoral fellowship from the University of Konstanz’s Centre for Human | Data | Society in 2023. Since its inception in 2016, she was a founding member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council as an expert on child online safety.
In December 2022, Dr. Abdul Rahman made global headlines following her resignation from the council, speaking out against the meteoric rise in hate speech after Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform. Her work has been profiled by inter alia, the BBC, CBC, NPR, Slate, Harvard Public Health, the Sunday Times, and Business Insider. Her opinion pieces have been published by inter alia New America, Newsweek, Harvard Public Health, Chatham House and the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP).

This qualification has just earned her a grant from the Baden-Württemberg Foundation for herself and a team of scientists at the University of Mannheim for 3 years with an option for extension. Her project will be carried out in close cooperation with the Chair of Social Data Science and administered at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES).