Bringing children home
A CMU spinoff goes after sex traffickers
Carnegie Mellon University spinoffs are celebrated for advancing the city’s high-tech economy, creating jobs and providing the public with slick new services. But one, Marinus Analytics, has earned praise for something far more important — finding children who have disappeared into sex trafficking rings.
In just a few years, Emily Kennedy has turned Marinus, which grew out of research for her undergraduate honors thesis, into an important resource for law enforcement agencies. The company’s newest tool, announced last Tuesday, is facial recognition software that can scour the internet for images of children in sex ads and compare them to photos of children reported missing. Marinus says the tool, called FaceSearch, can scan millions of online photos in seconds. A detective in Austin, Texas, is callingFaceSearch a game-changer.
Marinus already had been aiding law enforcement with its Traffic Jam products that mine the web for phone numbers and other clues to individuals operating trafficking rings, then associate that data with other online informationthat helps identify the perpetrators. The company also has worked on software aimed at thwarting sex traffickers’ attempts to make online data invisible to software-based searches. So far, the company has been used by more than 75 law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, and helpedto locate more than 120 victims.
Many more need help, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “Of the more than 18,500 endangered runaways reported to NCMEC in 2016, one in six were likely victims of child sex trafficking,” the organization says on its website. “Of those, 86 percent were in the care of social services when they went missing.”
Ms. Kennedy, who has received NationalScience Foundation and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency support for her work, has accomplished a great deal, yet still has almost all of her career ahead of her. That’s goodnews for vulnerable children.