Communications of the ACM
Fighting Crime at the Intersection of Science and Social Justice
Washington University in St. Louis researchers have developed a Web-based application that helps fight sex trafficking by targeting the locations where it usually occurs.
Credit: The Source (MO)
Researchers at the Washington University in St. Louis have developed TraffickCam, a Web-based application that helps fight sex trafficking by targeting places where it usually occurs.
"We are...making tools so everyone can contribute data to fight these horrible crimes...and...creating new image-analysis tools so law enforcement can best use these images in investigations," says Washington University professor Robert Pless. He says TraffickCam enables travelers to upload images of their hotel rooms to a database, and then law enforcement officers can search the database to identify where a particular photo was taken in order to determine if a sex trafficking victim has been there.
Pless says TraffickCam is a user-friendly, high-tech approach that enables citizens to help battle the fast-growing crime. "Just by taking four pictures of your hotel room, you can do something to legitimately make a difference in such an important issue," notes Washington University doctoral researcher Abby Stylianou.
TraffickCam users can provide an exact location and then upload the photos to the database, which is only accessible by law enforcement officers.
"What excites me about computer science--and computer vision in particular--is that it's actually trying to interact with the real world, and therefore solve a lot of real-world problems," Pless says.
From The Source (MO)
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