Semi-Supervised Learning for Detecting Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is one of the most atrocious crimes and among the challenging problems facing law enforcement which demands attention of global magnitude. In this study, we leverage textual data from the website "Backpage"- used for classified advertisement- to discern potential patterns of human trafficking activities which manifest online and identify advertisements of high interest to law enforcement. Due to the lack of ground truth, we rely on a human analyst from law enforcement, for hand-labeling a small portion of the crawled data. We extend the existing Laplacian SVM and present S3VM-R, by adding a regularization term to exploit exogenous information embedded in our feature space in favor of the task at hand. We train the proposed method using labeled and unlabeled data and evaluate it on a fraction of the unlabeled data, herein referred to as unseen data, with our expert's further verification. Results from comparisons between our method and other semi-supervised and supervised approaches on the labeled data demonstrate that our learner is effective in identifying advertisements of high interest to law enforcement

MIST: Missing Person Intelligence Synthesis Toolkit

Each day, approximately 500 missing persons cases occur that go unsolved/unresolved in the United States. The non-profit organization known as the Find Me Group (FMG), led by former law enforcement professionals, is dedicated to solving or resolving these cases. This paper introduces the Missing Person Intelligence Synthesis Toolkit (MIST) which leverages a data-driven variant of geospatial abductive inference. This system takes search locations provided by a group of experts and rank-orders them based on the probability assigned to areas based on the prior performance of the experts taken as a group. We evaluate our approach compared to the current practices employed by the Find Me Group and found it significantly reduces the search area - leading to a reduction of 31 square miles over 24 cases we examined in our experiments. Currently, we are using MIST to aid the Find Me Group in an active missing person case.

A Non-Parametric Learning Approach to Identify Online Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is among the most challenging law enforcement problems which demands persistent fight against from all over the globe. In this study, we leverage readily available data from the website "Backpage"-- used for classified advertisement-- to discern potential patterns of human trafficking activities which manifest online and identify most likely trafficking related advertisements. Due to the lack of ground truth, we rely on two human analysts --one human trafficking victim survivor and one from law enforcement, for hand-labeling the small portion of the crawled data. We then present a semi-supervised learning approach that is trained on the available labeled and unlabeled data and evaluated on unseen data with further verification of experts.