Dr. Eirliani Abdul Rahman

Human Trafficking Risks: AI for Proactive Protection in India and Beyond

Why This Work Matters

Every 15 minutes, a child is abducted in India. One in four is never found. Law enforcement agencies want to intervene earlier — but their case records are fragmented across agencies, their tools are reactive, and they have no way to anticipate where trafficking networks will strike next.

We're supporting this work because the technology to change that already exists — what's missing is a system built with and for the people on the ground. Dr. Abdul Rahman brings a decade of direct experience combating child trafficking, the research credentials to build this rigorously, and the institutional relationships in India to make it real.

The Work

Dr. Abdul Rahman will advance TRAPP — Trafficking Risks: AI for Proactive Protection — a decision-support platform being piloted with the Government of Odisha, India. TRAPP integrates civil society case records, police operational data, and district-level socioeconomic indicators into a secure platform that generates district-level vulnerability heatmaps and AI-driven narrative explanations of trafficking risk.

During the Fellowship year, the focus is on building the foundation: formalizing the state partnership, standardizing over 20,000 case records from civil society partners, producing the first district heatmap prototype, and developing a multilingual chatbot interface in Odia and Hindi so officers can query risk data and plan operations without technical expertise. By May 2027, the goal is a working prototype validated through co-design sessions with Odisha police — the first step of a six-year program backed by 1.8 million Euros in funding from the Baden-Wuerttemberg Foundation.

The Fellow

EAR

Dr. Eirliani Abdul Rahman

Co-Founder & Co-Director, Global Responsible Tech Lab · University of Mannheim

Eirliani is an Indigenous Malay woman from Singaporeand one of the most recognized voices in the global Trust and Safety field. She began this work in 2015 when Nobel Peace laureate Kailash Satyarthi asked if she'd lead a campaign against child sexual abuse on his behalf. The #FullStop to #childsexualabuse campaign reached 16 million people in six weeks and won her the BMW Foundation Responsible Leaders Award. She spent the following decade working for Satyarthi's foundation on child trafficking before turning to the AI tools that could help stop it.

In December 2022, she was one of three women who resigned from Twitter's Trust and Safety Council to protest the rise in hate speech following the platform's acquisition — an act that drew international press coverage and documented platform responses. She subsequently gave oral evidence before the UK House of Commons on social media's role in the 2024 riots, briefed the German Federal Foreign Office, and has spoken at the Munich Security Conference and the Bled Strategic Forum.

She holds a doctorate in public health from Harvard, a master's from the London School of Economics, and a degree in economics and politics from the University of Warwick. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and co-director of the Global Responsible Tech Lab at the University of Mannheim.