Journal of Human Trafficking
Volume 1, Issue 1, 2015, Pages 65-85

Leveraging Publicly Available Data to Discern Patterns of Human-Trafficking Activity (Article)

Dubrawski A.* , Miller K. , Barnes M. , Boecking B. , Kennedy E.
  • a Auton Lab, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States
  • b Auton Lab, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States
  • c Auton Lab, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States
  • d Auton Lab, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States
  • e Auton Lab, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States

Abstract

We present a few data analysis methods that can be used to process advertisements for escort services available in public areas of the Internet. These data provide a readily available proxy evidence for modeling and discerning human-trafficking activity. We show how it can be used to identify advertisements that likely involve such activity. We demonstrate its utility in identifying and tracking entities in the Web-advertisement data even if strongly identifiable features are sparse. We also show a few possible ways to perform community- and population-level analyses including behavioral summaries stratified by various types of activity and detection of emerging trends and patterns. ©, Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Author Keywords

machine learning pattern mining escort advertisements Prostitution Human trafficking

Index Keywords

[No Keywords available]
Link
https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85003899798&doi=10.1080%2f23322705.2015.1015342&partnerID=40&md5=1ac051720f85889b998ba20099d636f0
DOI: 10.1080/23322705.2015.1015342
ISSN: 23322705
Cited by: 26
Original Language: English