Disrupting Wildlife Trafficking Networks Through Convergence of Physical and Virtual Ecosystems
This 18-month National Science Foundation-funded planning grant (Division of Information & Intelligent Systems Award IIS-2039951) is a new collaboration between University of Maryland, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Focused Conservation Solutions.
Our goal is to build research capacity for creating an integrative team of scientists, policymakers and domain experts to disrupt wildlife trafficking networks through convergence of physical and virtual ecosystems.
The knowledge gaps we are interested in are as follows: (1) The evidentiary burden of wildlife trafficking in physical and virtual ecosystems is heavy, disparate datasets are growing, while sense making lags. (2) Causality and inference can be difficult to establish in a data universe of often indistinguishable licit and illicit activity.
Our planning mission is to address how can new teams of operations engineers, computer scientists and social scientists algorithmically resolve and validate data for disrupting wildlife trafficking to help/support responses of authorities and experts?
Agenda for Workshop 2
