Final spaces for our tech vs illegal wildlife crime roundtable
15 Jun 2018 01:58 PM
techUK is hosting a roundtable next week on how tech solutions can be applied to the fight against illegal wildlife crimes and we still have a few spaces remaining.
The workshop is taking place 10am - 12pm on Wednesday 20 June and we're particularly keen to SMEs active in the device, blockchain/DLT, finance and supply chain verification spaces to get involved. The discussion will be held alongside leading conservation charities, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, academia and some leading tech companies. The discussion will be framed around some key challenges outlined below. If you want to attend please email craig.melson@techuk.org for more info or see the event page here.
The five challenges that tech can help address and which guide the discussions are below.
1 Education and training to build capacity around tools.
- Insufficient capacity, resources and training aids for rollout and sector needs to better support NGOs, law enforcement and Governments.
- How can we build a community of practice around key tools to aid education, training of infield capacity and collaboration to achieve wide scale adoption?
- Where can the sector help?
2 Sustained access to secure infrastructure and collaborative information networks, including cloud computing, Machine Learning tools, Satellites access.
- Access to platforms when funding expires
- Lack of expertise and analytical capability on the front line and in NGOs
- Poor ICT and connectivity
- Opening up opportunities without experts and ensure architectures are in place
- Unlocking existing APIs and platforms and making people aware of their capabilities.
3 Open data and shared databases.
- To analyse data sets and detect illegal activity, better collection, storage and sharing of data as well as accessible, secure, curated databases are required.
- How to enable conservationists and law enforcement to collectively submit and collaborate on data.
4 Affordability
- Budgets tend to be small and time-limited, so NGOs and Governments can’t get locked in to long term costs they can’t maintain.
- Costs of equipment, services, infrastructure and satellite data are high and ongoing running costs become prohibitive.
- How can tech provide affordable/free equipment, services, expertise and network infrastructure.
5 Accelerating ‘fit for purpose’ innovation
- Tools are often not fully configured for contexts they are deployed.
- More capacity and support is needed to make available tech fit for purpose and ready.
- An effective technology accelerator that can help shape tools and make them fit for purpose?
- Creating architectures and blueprints for key tools so engineers can easily engage in a small piece of development to advance the whole?
- How to build more capacity to direct appropriate development?