MLBytes Speaker Series: Matthew Barnes

Over the past decade, our lab at CMU along with many partnering organizations have scraped and indexed billions of online escort advertisements for the purpose of policing human trafficking. The huge volume and complexity of data makes it impossible for law enforcement officers to manually digest. In this talk, I'll reveal how we used a suite of machine learning tools -- including deep learning, natural language processing, record linkage and massively scalable hashing techniques -- to provide human trafficking advertisement search, analysis and prediction capabilities to dozens of law enforcement agencies across the country. The production system, developed by a spin-off of the lab, has successfully rescued hundreds of victims using these machine learning tools.