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Brett McMillen, AWS | AWS re:Invent 2020


 

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm Lisa Martin. Joining me next is one of our cube alumni. Breton McMillan is back the director of us, federal for AWS. Right. It's great to see you glad that you're safe and well. >>Great. It's great to be back. Uh, I think last year when we did the cube, we were on the convention floor. It feels very different this year here at reinvent, it's gone virtual and yet it's still true to how reinvent always been. It's a learning conference and we're releasing a lot of new products and services for our customers. >>Yes. A lot of content, as you say, the one thing I think I would say about this reinvent, one of the things that's different, it's so quiet around us. Normally we're talking loudly over tens of thousands of people on the showroom floor, but great. That AWS is still able to connect in such an actually an even bigger way with its customers. So during Theresa Carlson's keynote, want to get your opinion on this or some info. She talked about the AWS open data sponsorship program, and that you guys are going to be hosting the national institutes of health, NIH sequence, read archive data, the biologist, and may former gets really excited about that. Talk to us about that because especially during the global health crisis that we're in, that sounds really promising >>Very much is I am so happy that we're working with NIH on this and multiple other initiatives. So the secret greed archive or SRA, essentially what it is, it's a very large data set of sequenced genomic data. And it's a wide variety of judge you gnomic data, and it's got a knowledge human genetic thing, but all life forms or all branches of life, um, is in a SRA to include viruses. And that's really important here during the pandemic. Um, it's one of the largest and oldest, um, gen sequence genomic data sets are out there and yet it's very modern. It has been designed for next generation sequencing. So it's growing, it's modern and it's well used. It's one of the more important ones that it's out there. One of the reasons this is so important is that we know to find cures for what a human ailments and disease and death, but by studying the gem genomic code, we can come up with the answers of these or the scientists can come up with answer for that. And that's what Amazon is doing is we're putting in the hands of the scientists, the tools so that they can help cure heart disease and diabetes and cancer and, um, depression and yes, even, um, uh, viruses that can cause pandemics. >>So making this data, sorry, I'm just going to making this data available to those scientists. Worldwide is incredibly important. Talk to us about that. >>Yeah, it is. And so, um, within NIH, we're working with, um, the, um, NCBI when you're dealing with NIH, there's a lot of acronyms, uh, and uh, at NIH, it's the national center for, um, file type technology information. And so we're working with them to make this available as an open data set. Why, why this is important is it's all about increasing the speed for scientific discovery. I personally think that in the fullness of time, the scientists will come up with cures for just about all of the human ailments that are out there. And it's our job at AWS to put into the hands of the scientists, the tools they need to make things happen quickly or in our lifetime. And I'm really excited to be working with NIH on that. When we start talking about it, there's multiple things. The scientists needs. One is access to these data sets and SRA. >>It's a very large data set. It's 45 petabytes and it's growing. I personally believe that it's going to double every year, year and a half. So it's a very large data set and it's hard to move that data around. It's so much easier if you just go into the cloud, compute against it and do your research there in the cloud. And so it's super important. 45 petabytes, give you an idea if it were all human data, that's equivalent to have a seven and a half million people or put another way 90% of everybody living in New York city. So that's how big this is. But then also what AWS is doing is we're bringing compute. So in the cloud, you can scale up your compute, scale it down, and then kind of the third they're. The third leg of the tool of the stool is giving the scientists easy access to the specialized tool sets they need. >>And we're doing that in a few different ways. One that the people would design these toolsets design a lot of them on AWS, but then we also make them available through something called AWS marketplace. So they can just go into marketplace, get a catalog, go in there and say, I want to launch this resolve work and launches the infrastructure underneath. And it speeds the ability for those scientists to come up with the cures that they need. So SRA is stored in Amazon S3, which is a very popular object store, not just in the scientific community, but virtually every industry uses S3. And by making this available on these public data sets, we're giving the scientists the ability to speed up their research. >>One of the things that Springs jumps out to me too, is it's in addition to enabling them to speed up research, it's also facilitating collaboration globally because now you've got the cloud to drive all of this, which allows researchers and completely different parts of the world to be working together almost in real time. So I can imagine the incredible power that this is going to, to provide to that community. So I have to ask you though, you talked about this being all life forms, including viruses COVID-19, what are some of the things that you think we can see? I expect this to facilitate. Yeah. >>So earlier in the year we took the, um, uh, genetic code or NIH took the genetic code and they, um, put it in an SRA like format and that's now available on AWS and, and here's, what's great about it is that you can now make it so anybody in the world can go to this open data set and start doing their research. One of our goals here is build back to a democratization of research. So it used to be that, um, get, for example, the very first, um, vaccine that came out was a small part. It's a vaccine that was done by our rural country doctor using essentially test tubes in a microscope. It's gotten hard to do that because data sets are so large, you need so much computer by using the power of the cloud. We've really democratized it and now anybody can do it. So for example, um, with the SRE data set that was done by NIH, um, organizations like the university of British Columbia, their, um, cloud innovation center is, um, doing research. And so what they've done is they've scanned, they, um, SRA database think about it. They scanned out 11 million entries for, uh, coronavirus sequencing. And that's really hard to do in a typical on-premise data center. Who's relatively easy to do on AWS. So by making this available, we can have a larger number of scientists working on the problems that we need to have solved. >>Well, and as the, as we all know in the U S operation warp speed, that warp speed alone term really signifies how quickly we all need this to be progressing forward. But this is not the first partnership that AWS has had with the NIH. Talk to me about what you guys, what some of the other things are that you're doing together. >>We've been working with NIH for a very long time. Um, back in 2012, we worked with NIH on, um, which was called the a thousand genome data set. This is another really important, um, data set and it's a large number of, uh, against sequence human genomes. And we moved that into, again, an open dataset on AWS and what's happened in the last eight years is many scientists have been able to compute about on it. And the other, the wonderful power of the cloud is over time. We continue to bring out tools to make it easier for people to work. So what they're not they're computing using our, um, our instance types. We call it elastic cloud computing. whether they're doing that, or they were doing some high performance computing using, um, uh, EMR elastic MapReduce, they can do that. And then we've brought up new things that really take it to the next layer, like level like, uh, Amazon SageMaker. >>And this is a, um, uh, makes it really easy for, um, the scientists to launch machine learning algorithms on AWS. So we've done the thousand genome, uh, dataset. Um, there's a number of other areas within NIH that we've been working on. So for example, um, over at national cancer Institute, we've been providing some expert guidance on best practices to how, how you can architect and work on these COVID related workloads. Um, NIH does things with, um, collaboration with many different universities, um, over 2,500, um, academic institutions. And, um, and they do that through grants. And so we've been working with doc office of director and they run their grant management applications in the RFA on AWS, and that allows it to scale up and to work very efficiently. Um, and then we entered in with, um, uh, NIH into this program called strides strides as a program for knowing NIH, but also all these other institutions that work within NIH to use the power of the cloud use commercial cloud for scientific discovery. And when we started that back in July of 2018, long before COVID happened, it was so great that we had that up and running because now we're able to help them out through the strides program. >>Right. Can you imagine if, uh, let's not even go there? I was going to say, um, but so, okay. So the SRA data is available through the AWS open data sponsorship program. You talked about strides. What are some of the other ways that AWS system? >>Yeah, no. So strides, uh, is, uh, you know, wide ranging through multiple different institutes. So, um, for example, over at, uh, the national heart lung and blood Institute, uh, do di NHL BI. I said, there's a lot of acronyms and I gel BI. Um, they've been working on, um, harmonizing, uh, genomic data. And so working with the university of Michigan, they've been analyzing through a program that they call top of med. Um, we've also been working with a NIH on, um, establishing best practices, making sure everything's secure. So we've been providing, um, AWS professional services that are showing them how to do this. So one portion of strides is getting the right data set and the right compute in the right tools, in the hands of the scientists. The other areas that we've been working on is making sure the scientists know how to use it. And so we've been developing these cloud learning pathways, and we started this quite a while back, and it's been so helpful here during the code. So, um, scientists can now go on and they can do self-paced online courses, which we've been really helping here during the, during the pandemic. And they can learn how to maximize their use of cloud technologies through these pathways that we've developed for them. >>Well, not education is imperative. I mean, there, you think about all of the knowledge that they have with within their scientific discipline and being able to leverage technology in a way that's easy is absolutely imperative to the timing. So, so, um, let's talk about other data sets that are available. So you've got the SRA is available. Uh, what are their data sets are available through this program? >>What about along a wide range of data sets that we're, um, uh, doing open data sets and in general, um, these data sets are, um, improving the human condition or improving the, um, the world in which we live in. And so, um, I've talked about a few things. There's a few more, uh, things. So for example, um, there's the cancer genomic Atlas that we've been working with, um, national cancer Institute, as well as the national human genomic research Institute. And, um, that's a very important data set that being computed against, um, uh, throughout the world, uh, commonly within the scientific community, that data set is called TCGA. Um, then we also have some, uh, uh, datasets are focused on certain groups. So for example, kids first is a data set. That's looking at a lot of the, um, challenges, uh, in diseases that kids get every kind of thing from very rare pediatric cancer as to heart defects, et cetera. >>And so we're working with them, but it's not just in the, um, uh, medical side. We have open data sets, um, with, uh, for example, uh, NOAA national ocean open national oceanic and atmospheric administration, um, to understand what's happening better with climate change and to slow the rate of climate change within the department of interior, they have a Landsat database that is looking at pictures of their birth cell, like pictures of the earth, so we can better understand the MCO world we live in. Uh, similarly, uh, NASA has, um, a lot of data that we put out there and, um, over in the department of energy, uh, there's data sets there, um, that we're researching against, or that the scientists are researching against to make sure that we have better clean, renewable energy sources, but it's not just government agencies that we work with when we find a dataset that's important. >>We also work with, um, nonprofit organizations, nonprofit organizations are also in, they're not flush with cash and they're trying to make every dollar work. And so we've worked with them, um, organizations like the child mind Institute or the Allen Institute for brain science. And these are largely like neuro imaging, um, data. And we made that available, um, via, um, our open data set, um, program. So there's a wide range of things that we're doing. And what's great about it is when we do it, you democratize science and you allowed many, many more science scientists to work on these problems. They're so critical for us. >>The availability is, is incredible, but also the, the breadth and depth of what you just spoke. It's not just government, for example, you've got about 30 seconds left. I'm going to ask you to summarize some of the announcements that you think are really, really critical for federal customers to be paying attention to from reinvent 2020. >>Yeah. So, um, one of the things that these federal government customers have been coming to us on is they've had to have new ways to communicate with their customer, with the public. And so we have a product that we've had for a while called on AWS connect, and it's been used very extensively throughout government customers. And it's used in industry too. We've had a number of, um, of announcements this weekend. Jasmine made multiple announcements on enhancement, say AWS connect or additional services, everything from helping to verify that that's the right person from AWS connect ID to making sure that that customer's gets a good customer experience to connect wisdom or making sure that the managers of these call centers can manage the call centers better. And so I'm really excited that we're putting in the hands of both government and industry, a cloud based solution to make their connections to the public better. >>It's all about connections these days, but I wish we had more time, cause I know we can unpack so much more with you, but thank you for joining me on the queue today, sharing some of the insights, some of the impacts and availability that AWS is enabling the scientific and other federal communities. It's incredibly important. And we appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa, for Brett McMillan. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.

Published Date : Dec 10 2020

SUMMARY :

It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS It's great to see you glad that you're safe and well. It's great to be back. Talk to us about that because especially during the global health crisis that we're in, One of the reasons this is so important is that we know to find cures So making this data, sorry, I'm just going to making this data available to those scientists. And so, um, within NIH, we're working with, um, the, So in the cloud, you can scale up your compute, scale it down, and then kind of the third they're. And it speeds the ability for those scientists One of the things that Springs jumps out to me too, is it's in addition to enabling them to speed up research, And that's really hard to do in a typical on-premise data center. Talk to me about what you guys, take it to the next layer, like level like, uh, Amazon SageMaker. in the RFA on AWS, and that allows it to scale up and to work very efficiently. So the SRA data is available through the AWS open data sponsorship And so working with the university of Michigan, they've been analyzing absolutely imperative to the timing. And so, um, And so we're working with them, but it's not just in the, um, uh, medical side. And these are largely like neuro imaging, um, data. I'm going to ask you to summarize some of the announcements that's the right person from AWS connect ID to making sure that that customer's And we appreciate your time.

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Brad Myles, Polaris | AWS Imagine Nonprofit 2019


 

>> Announcer: From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS IMAGINE Nonprofit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in the waterfront in Seattle, Washington, it's absolutely gorgeous here the last couple of days. We're here for the AWS IMAGINE Nonprofit event. We were here a couple weeks ago for the education event, now they have a whole separate track for nonprofits, and what's really cool about nonprofits is these people, these companies are attacking very, very big, ugly problems. It's not advertising, it's not click here and get something, these are big things, and one of the biggest issues is human trafficking. You probably hear a lot about it, it's way bigger than I ever thought it was, and we're really excited to have an expert in the field that, again, is using the power of AWS technology as well as their organization to help fight this cause. And we're excited to have Brad Myles, he is the CEO of Polaris and just coming off a keynote, we're hearing all about your keynote. So Brad, first off, welcome. >> Yeah, well thank you, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so Polaris, give us a little bit about kind of what's the mission for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> Yeah, so Polaris, we are a nonprofit that works full-time on this issue. We both combat the issue and try to get to long-term solutions, and respond to the issue and restore freedom to survivors by operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline for the United States, so, it's part kind of big data and long-term solutions, and it's part responding to day-to-day cases that break across the country every day. >> Right, in preparing for this interview and spending some time on the site there was just some amazing things that just jump right off the page. 24.9 million people are involved in this. Is that just domestically here in the States, or is that globally? >> That's a global number. So when you're thinking about human trafficking, think about three buckets. The first bucket is any child, 17 or younger, being exploited in the commercial sex trade. The second bucket is any adult, 18 or over, who's in the sex trade by force, fraud, or coercion. And the third bucket is anyone forced to work in some sort of other labor or service industry by force, fraud, or coercion. So you've got the child sex trafficking bucket, you've got the adult sex trafficking bucket, and then you've got all the labor trafficking bucket, right? You add up those three buckets globally, that's the number that the International Labour Organization came out and said 25 million around the world are those three buckets in a given year. >> Right, and I think again, going through the website, some of the just crazy discoveries, it's the child sex trafficking you can kind of understand that that's part of the problem, the adult sex trafficking. But you had like 25 different human trafficking business models, I forget the term that was used, for a whole host of things well beyond just the sex trade. It's a very big and unfortunately mature industry. >> Totally, yeah, so we, so the first thing that we do that we're kind of known for is operating the National Human Trafficking Hotline. The National Human Trafficking Hotline leads to having a giant data set on trafficking, it's 50,000 cases of trafficking that we've worked on. So then we analyzed that data set and came to the breakthrough conclusion that there are these 25 major forms, and almost any single call that we get in to the National Hotline is going to be one of those 25 types. And once you know that then the problem doesn't seem so overwhelming, it's not, you know, thousands of different types, it's these 25 things, so, it's 18 labor trafficking types and seven sex trafficking types. And it enables a little bit more granular analysis than just saying sex trafficking or labor trafficking which is kind of too broad and general. Let's get really specific about it, we're talking about these late night janitors, or we're talking about these people in agriculture, or we're talking about these women in illicit massage businesses. It enables the conversation to get more focused. >> Right, it's so interesting right, that's such a big piece of the big data trend that we see all over the place, right? It used to be, you know, you had old data, a sample of old data that you took an aggregate of and worked off the averages. And now, because of big data, and the other tools that we have today, now actually you can work on individual cases. So as you look at it from a kind of a big data point of view, what are some of the things that you're able to do? And that lead directly to, everyone's talking about the presentation that you just got off of, in terms of training people to look for specific behaviors that fit the patterns, so you can start to break some of these cases. >> Exactly, so, I think that the human trafficking field risks being too generic. So if you're just saying to the populace, "Look for trafficking, look for someone who's scared." People are like, that's not enough, that's too vague, it's kind of slipping through my fingers. But if you say, "In this particular type of trafficking, "with traveling magazine sales crews, "if someone comes to your door "trying to sell you a magazine with these specific signs." So now instead of talking about general red flag indicators across all 25 types, we're coming up with red flag indicators for each of the 25 types. So instead of speaking in aggregate we're getting really specific, it's almost like specific gene therapy. And the data analysis on our data set is enabling that to happen, which makes the trafficking field smarter, we could get smarter about where victims are recruited from, we could get smarter about intervention points, and we could get smarter about where survivors might have a moment to kind of get help and get out. >> Right, so I got to dig into the magazine salesperson, 'cause I think we've all had the kid-- >> Brad: Have you had a kid come to you yet? >> Absolutely, and you know, you think first they're hustlin' but their papers are kind of torn up, and they've got their little certificate, certification. How does that business model work? >> Yeah, so that's one of the 25 types, they're called mag crews. There was a New York Times article written by a journalist named Ian Urbina who really studied this and it came out a number of years ago. Then they made a movie about it called "American Honey," if you watch with a number of stars. But essentially this is a very long-standing business model, it goes back 30 or 40 years of like the door-to-door salesperson, and like trying to win sympathy from people going to door-to-door sales. And then these kind of predatory groups decided to prey on disaffected U.S. citizen youth that are kind of bored, or are kind of working a low-wage job. And so they go up to these kids and they say, "Tired of working at the Waffle House? "Well why don't you join our crew and travel the country, "and party every night, and you'll be outdoors every day, "and it's coed, you get to hang out with girls, "you get to hang out with guys, "we'll drink every night and all you have to do "is sell magazines during the day." And it's kind of this alluring pitch, and then the crews turn violent, and there's sometimes quotas on the crew, there's sometimes coercion on the crew. We get a lot of calls from kids who are abandoned by the crew. Where the crew says, "If you act up "or if you don't adhere to our rules, "we'll just drive away and leave you in this city." >> Wherever. >> Is the crews are very mobile they have this whole language, they call it kind of jumping territory. So they'll drive from like Kansas City to a nearby state, and we'll get this call from this kid, they're like, "I'm totally homeless, my crew just left me behind "because I kind of didn't obey one of the rules." So a lot of people, when they think of human trafficking they're not thinking of like U.S. citizen kids knocking on your door. And we're not saying that every single magazine crew is human trafficking, but we are saying that if there's force, and coercion, and fraud, and lies, and people feel like they can't leave, and people feel like they're being coerced to work, this is actually a form of human trafficking of U.S. citizen youth which is not very well-known but we hear about it on the Hotline quite a lot. >> Right, so then I wonder if you could tell us more about the Delta story 'cause most of the people that are going to be watching this interview weren't here today to hear your keynote. So I wonder if you can explain kind of that whole process where you identified a specific situation, you train people that are in a position to make a difference and in fact they're making a big difference. >> Yeah. So the first big report that we released based on the Hotline data was the 25 types, right? We decided to do a followup to that called Intersections, where we reached out to survivors of trafficking and we said, "Can you tell us about "the legitimate businesses that your trafficker used "while you were being trafficked?" And all these survivors were like, "Yeah, sure, "we'll tell you about social media, "we'll tell you about transportation, "we'll tell you about banks, "we'll tell you about hotels." And so we then identified these six major industries that traffickers use that are using legitimate companies, like rental car companies, and airlines, and ridesharing companies. So then we reached out to a number of those corporate partners and said, "You don't want this stuff on your services, right?" And Delta really just jumped at this, they were just like, "We take this incredibly seriously. "We want our whole workforce trained. "We don't want any trafficker to feel like "they can kind of get away with it on our flights. "We want to be a leader in transportation." And then they began taking all these steps. Their CEO, Ed Bastian, took it very seriously. They launched a whole corporate-wide taskforce across departments, they hosted listening sessions with survivor leaders so survivors could coach them, and then they started launching this whole strategy around training their flight attendants, and then training their whole workforce, and then supporting the National Human Trafficking Hotline, they made some monetary donations to Polaris. We get situations on the Hotline where someone is in a dangerous situation and needs to be flown across the country, like an escape flight almost, and Delta donated SkyMiles for us to give to survivors who are trying to flee a situation, who needs a flight. They can go to an airport and get on a flight for free that will fly them across the country. So it's almost like a modern day Underground Railroad, kind of flying people on planes. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So they've just been an amazing partner, and they even then took the bold step of saying, "Well let's air a PSA on our flights "so the customer base can see this." So when you're on a Delta flight you'll see this PSA about human trafficking. And it just kept going and going and going. So it's now been about a five-year partnership and lots of great work together. >> And catching bad guys. >> Yeah, I mean, their publicity of the National Human Trafficking Hotline has led to a major increase in calls. Airport signage, more employees looking for it, and I actually do believe that the notion of flying, if you're going to be a trafficker, flying on a Delta flight is now a much more harrowing experience because everyone's kind of trained, and eyes and ears are looking. So you're going to pivot towards another airline that hasn't done that training yet, which now speaks to the need that once one member of an industry steps up, all different members of the industry need to follow suit. So we're encouraging a lot of the other airlines to do similar training and we're seeing some others do that, which is great. >> Yeah, and how much of it was from the CEO, or did he kind of come on after the fact, or was there kind of a champion catalyst that was pushing this through the organization, or is that often the case, or what do you find in terms of adoption of a company to help you on your mission? >> That's a great question. I mean, the bigger picture here is trafficking is a $150 billion industry, right? A group of small nonprofits and cops are not going to solve it on their own. We need the big businesses to enter the fight, because the big businesses have the resources, they have the brand, they have the customer base, they have the scale to make it a fair fight, right? So in the past few years we're seeing big businesses really enter the fight against trafficking, whether or not that's big data companies like AWS, whether or not that's social media companies, Facebook, whether or not that's hotel companies, like Wyndham and Marriott, airlines like Delta. And that's great because now the big hitters are joining the trafficking fight, and it happens in different ways, sometimes it's CEO-led, I think in the case of Delta, Ed Bastian really does take this issue very seriously, he was hosting events on this at his home, he's hosted roundtables of other CEOs in the Atlanta area like UPS, and Chick-fil-A, and Home Depot, and Coca-Cola, all those Atlanta-based CEOs know each other well, he'll host roundtables about that, and I think it was kind of CEO-led. But in other corporations it's one die hard champion who might be like a mid-level employee, or a director, who just says, "We really got to do this," and then they drive more CEO attention. So we've seen it happen both ways, whether or not it's top-down, or kind of middle-driven-up. But the big picture is if we could get some of the biggest corporations in the world to take this issue seriously, to ask questions about who they contract with, to ask questions about what's in their supply chain, to educate their workforce, to talk about this in front of their millions of customers, it just puts the fight against trafficking on steroids than a group of nonprofits would be able to do alone. So I think we're in a whole different realm of the fight now that business is at the table. >> And is that pretty much your strategy in terms of where you get the leverage, do you think? Is to execute via a lot of these well-resourced companies that are at this intersection point, I think that's a really interesting way to address the problem. >> Yeah, well, it's back to the 25 types, right? So the strategies depend on type. Like, I don't think big businesses being at the table are necessarily going to solve magazine sales crews, right? They're not necessarily going to solve begging on the street. But they can solve late night janitors that sometimes are trafficked, where lots of big companies are contracting with late night janitorial crews, and they come at 2:00 a.m., and they buff the floors, and they kind of change out the trash, and no one's there in the office building to see those workers, right? And so asking different questions of who you procure contracts with, to say, "Hey, before we contract with you guys, "we're going to need to ask you a couple questions "about where these workers got here, "and what these workers thought they were coming to do, "and we need to ID these workers." The person holding the purse strings, who's buying that contract, has the power to demand the conditions of that contract. Especially in agriculture and large retail buyers. So I think that big corporations, it's definitely part of the strategy for certain types, it's not going to solve other types of trafficking. But let's say banks and financial institutions, if they start asking different questions of who's banking with them, just like they've done with terrorism financing they could wipe out trafficking financing, could actually play a gigantic role in changing the course of how that type of trafficking exists. >> So we could talk all day, I'm sure, but we don't have time, but I'm just curious, what should people do, A, if they just see something suspicious, you know, reach out to one of these kids selling magazines, or begging on the street, or looking suspicious at an airport, so, A, that's the question. And then two, if people want to get involved more generically, whether in their company, or personally, how do they get involved? >> Yeah, so there are thousands of nonprofit groups across the country, Polaris is in touch with 3,000 of them. We're one of thousands. I would say find an organization in your area that you care about and volunteer, get involved, donate, figure out what they need. Our website is polarisproject.org, we have a national Referral Directory of organizations across the country, and so that's one way. The other way is the National Human Trafficking Hotline, the number, 1-888-373-7888. The Hotline depends on either survivors calling in directly as a lifeline, or community members calling in who saw something suspicious. So we get lots of calls from people who were getting their nails done, and the woman was crying and talking about how she's not being paid, or people who are out to eat as a family and they see something in the restaurant, or people who are traveling and they see something that doesn't make, kind of, quite sense in a hotel or an airport. So we need an army of eyes and ears calling tips into the National Human Trafficking Hotline and identifying these cases, and we need survivors to know the number themselves too so that they can call in on their own behalf. We need to respond to the problem in the short-term, help get these people connected to help, and then we need to do the long-term solutions which involves data, and business, and changing business practice, and all of that. But I do think that if people want to kind of educate themselves, polarisproject.org, there are some kind of meta-organizations, there's a group called Freedom United that's kind of starting a grassroots movement against trafficking, freedomunited.org. So lots of great organizations to look into, and this is a bipartisan issue, this is an issue that most people care about, it's one of the top headlines in the newspapers every day these days. And it's something that I think people in this country naturally care about because it references kind of the history of chattel slavery, and some of those forms of slavery that morphed but never really went away, and we're still fighting that same fight today. >> In terms of, you know, we're here at AWS IMAGINE, and they're obviously putting a lot of resources behind this, Teresa Carlson and the team. How are you using them, have you always been on AWS? Has that platform enabled you to accomplish your mission better? >> Yeah, oh for sure, I mean, Polaris crunches over 60 terabytes of data per day, of just like the computing that we're doing, right? >> Jeff: And what types of data are you crunching? >> It's the data associated with Hotline calls, we collect up to 150 variables on each Hotline call. The Hotline calls come in, we have this data set of 50,000 cases of trafficking with very sensitive data, and the protections of that data, the cybersecurity associated with that data, the storage of that data. So since 2017, Polaris has been in existence since 2002, so we're in our 17th year now, but starting three years ago in 2017 we started really partnering with AWS, where we're migrating more of our data onto AWS, building some AI tools with AWS to help us process Hotline calls more efficiently. And then talking about potentially moving our, all of our data storage onto AWS so that we don't have our own server racks in our office, we still need to go through a number of steps to get there. But having AWS at the table, and then talking about the Impact Computing team and this, like, real big data crunching of like millions of trafficking cases globally, we haven't even started talking about that yet but I think that's like a next stage. So for now, it's getting our data stronger, more secure, building some of those AI bots to help us with our work, and then potentially considering us moving completely serverless, and all of those things are conversations we're having with AWS, and thrilled that AWS is making this an issue to the point that it was prioritized and featured at this conference, which was a big deal, to get in front of the whole audience and do a keynote, and we're very, very grateful for that. >> And you mentioned there's so many organizations involved, are you guys doing data aggregation, data consolidation, sharing, I mean there must be with so many organizations, that adds a lot of complexity, and a lot of data silos, to steal classic kind of IT terms. Are you working towards some kind of unification around that, or how does that look in the future? >> We would love to get to the point where different organizations are sharing their data set. We'd love to get to the point where different organizations are using, like, a shared case management tool, and collecting the same data so it's apples to apples. There are different organizations, like, Thorn is doing some amazing big data-- >> Jeff: Right, we've had Thorn on a couple of times. >> How do we merge Polaris's data set with Thorn's data set? We're not doing that yet, right? I think we're only doing baby steps. But I think the AWS platform could enable potentially a merger of Thorn's data with Polaris's data in some sort of data lake, right? So that's a great idea, we would love to get to that. I think the field isn't there yet. The field has kind of been, like, tech-starved for a number of years, but in the past five years has made a lot of progress. The field is mostly kind of small shelters and groups responding to survivors, and so this notion of like infusing the trafficking field with data is somewhat of a new concept, but it's enabling us to think much bigger about what's possible. >> Well Brad, again, we could go on all day, you know, really thankful for what you're doing for a whole lot of people that we don't see, or maybe we see and we're not noticing, so thank you for that, and uh. >> Absolutely. >> Look forward to catching up when you move the ball a little bit further down the field. >> Yeah, thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. >> All right, my pleasure. He's Brad, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS IMAGINE Nonprofits, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (futuristic music)

Published Date : Aug 13 2019

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. and one of the biggest issues is human trafficking. for people that aren't familiar with the company. and it's part responding to day-to-day cases Is that just domestically here in the States, And the third bucket is anyone forced to work it's the child sex trafficking you can kind of understand so the first thing that we do that we're kind of known for and the other tools that we have today, for each of the 25 types. Absolutely, and you know, you think first they're hustlin' Where the crew says, "If you act up "because I kind of didn't obey one of the rules." most of the people that are going to be watching this interview So the first big report that we released and lots of great work together. all different members of the industry need to follow suit. We need the big businesses to enter the fight, in terms of where you get the leverage, do you think? So the strategies depend on type. or begging on the street, and the woman was crying Teresa Carlson and the team. and the protections of that data, and a lot of data silos, to steal classic kind of IT terms. and collecting the same data so it's apples to apples. and groups responding to survivors, Well Brad, again, we could go on all day, you know, when you move the ball a little bit further down the field. It's a pleasure to be here. thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.

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