What started as Emily Kennedy's senior project at Carnegie Mellon University, transformed in a world-class database that provides law enforcement officials with tools to fight human trafficking. According to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, "Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery in which traffickers use force, fraud, or coercion to control victims for the purpose of engaging in commercial sex acts or labor services against his/her will." In 2014, the center's hotline received 21,431 calls which resulted in 5,042 unique cases. In the United States, human trafficking is an epidemic, and Emily attributes it to the rise of the internet.
"Technology has empowered the work that pimps do to give them a wider audience," she told Broadly writer Cale Weissman. Because this technology has aided in the trafficking of undocumented immigrants, teenage runaways, and refugees, she figured the same resources could be employed by law officials to rescue them.
In 2011, when Emily began her research for the project, she scoured the Internet for sex ads, finding consistencies in writing style and information about the girls being trafficked. These ads offered clues about the pimps and about the young women they were trafficking. Next, Emily created artificial intelligence software that could analyze the data. The result is Traffic Jam, a web based program that allows users to search phone numbers associated with sex ads or unsolved cases.
After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, Emily was then hired at the university's Auton lab, which focuses on data analytics. Three years later, grants form the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation, Traffic Jam began to operate under the umbrella of Marinus Analytics, a data startup of which Emily is the Founder and CEO. Marius works with police precincts, prosecutor's offices, and non-profit victims' agencies to locate traffickers and liberate victims. Since developing Traffic Jam, Emily has located 120 victims of human trafficking and aided 75 law enforcement agencies in the United States. This year alone, 2,794 cases of human trafficking are reported to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center ad yet somany go unreported. While human trafficking is a huge issue, the technology powering Traffic Jam could also be applied in the future to track sales on the black market and monitor know extremists planning terror attacks.
No that is what we call a senior project!
xoxo, Kaila
** If you know anyone affected by trafficking, call 1-888-373-7888**
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