Big Data Analytics Helps India Nonprofit Prevent Human Trafficking

Human Trafficking is one of the largest problems the world faces today. But My Choices Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in India, is using big data analytics to help fight it. How are they doing it? With technology partners, effective education and outreach.

While many organizations work to rescue girls and prosecute the traffickers, Operation Red Alert, a program of My Choices Foundation, is a prevention program designed to help parents, teachers, village leaders and children to understand how the traffickers work so they can block their efforts. Poor village girls are typically targeted by traffickers with promises that the girls are being offered wonderful opportunities for an education, jobs or marriage. But with over 600,000 villages in India, Operation Red Alert needed help to determine which areas were most at risk to prioritize their education efforts.

Check out this video that explains how My Choices Foundation took Big Data and helped make an impact by saving lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUUl_sqP31E

My Choices Foundation works with Quantium, an Australian analytics company that develops ground-breaking analytical applications that give insights into consumer needs, behaviors, and media consumption by analyzing consumer transaction data. Quantium used Cisco UCS hardware and MapR software to build this robust platform.

Quantium brings together proprietary data, technology and innovative data scientists to enable the development of ground-breaking analytical applications, and develops insights into consumer needs, behaviors, and media consumption by analyzing consumer transaction data. Quantium upgraded its legacy server platform with Cisco® UCS to gain centralized management and the computing power needed to process complex algorithms in a dense, scalable form factor that also reduces power consumption. Cisco Nexus® 9000 switches provide a simplified network with the scalable bandwidth to meet their current and future requirements. The MapR Converged Data Platform enables organizations to create intelligent applications that fully integrate analytics with operational processes in real time. The MapR Platform provides the multi-tenancy, high-speed performance and scale needed to power the Operation Red Alert data platform.

Rigorous testing by Quantium demonstrated that the MapR-Cisco platform decreased query processing time by 92 percent, a performance increase of 12.5 times the legacy platform. With the Cisco-MapR solution, Quantium’s data scientists can design complex queries that run against multi-terabyte data sets and get more accurate results in just minutes rather than hours or days. In addition, the more powerful platform drives innovation because scientists can shorten development time by testing alternative scenarios quickly and accurately.

“UCS gives us the agility that’s key to supporting our iterative approach to analytics,” said Simon Reid, Group Executive for Technology at Quantium. “For example, with the analytics for Operation Red Alert we’re fine-tuning the algorithm, adding more hypothesis and more granular data to improve our predictive capabilities. MapR adds performance security and the ability to segregate multiple data sets from multiple data partners for Operation Red Alert.”

Human Trafficking Statistics

Human trafficking is the second largest and fastest growing crime industry in the world today.

Every three minutes a girl in India is sold into slavery: the average age is twelve years old.

200,000 Indian children are tricked, kidnapped or coerced into slavery every year.

Fewer than one percent of these girls are ever rescued.

Public awareness is the most effective barrier to human trafficking.

Follow @CiscoUCS to stay up to date on the latest ways that Cisco big data is making a difference.

For more information, check out Cisco’s Press Release, Quantium’s UCS case study, their Cisco UCS customer testimonial video, MapR’s blog post or the last Quantium blog post I wrote about them. And don’t forget to check out other Cisco customer stories.

#bigdata

#OperationRedAlert

Additional Resources

Learn more about: My Choices Foundation and Operation Red Alert

Read: Operation Red Alert Impact Report

View: Operation Red Alert videos

View video: The technology behind the scenes of Operation Red Alert and follow Cisco on Instagram to learn more

Read: Quantium case study

View: Cisco Quantium video

Learn more about: MapR

Learn more about: Cisco UCS

Learn more about: Cisco Data Center and Virtualization