#anti aging games tedx | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

humantraffickingproject · 4 years

Text

AI Is Helping Us Combat The Economic Problem Of Human Trafficking@Jun Wu

Jun Wu Contributor as written in Forbes

When we think of human trafficking, we often think about the despondent faces of women and children who live in slums all over the world. What if human trafficking is much closer to home than we think? In 2019, Markie Dell, stood on the TEDx stage to recount her experience of being a domestic human trafficking victim. She was an awkward teenager who was groomed by a girl that she befriended at a birthday party. She was subsequently kidnapped, drugged, sexually violated, intimidated at gunpoint into dancing in strip clubs for an entire year. She didn’t know that she was a human trafficking victim until a police officer handed her a book called, “Pimpology”. Then, she knew that she was being human trafficked. According to the Polaris Project, most human trafficking victims are trafficked by their romantic partners, spouses, family members, including parents. In the U.S., in 2018, there were 23,078 survivors identified and 10,949 cases of human trafficking. Even then, these cases are often drastically underreported.

Barbara Amaya ran away from home at the age of 12 after family members would not believe her reports of abuse from her own family. She was picked up at Dupont Circle, Washington DC by a couple that sold her to a human trafficker in New York. The trafficker reprogrammed her and trauma bonded with her. He kept her for 10 years working for him. In her TedTalk, she said, “Does it matter, if it’s one person or a million? Are you not going to care because it’s a lot of children versus just one?”

Human Trafficking Underlies a System of Illegal Organizations and Economic Activities

Just like the COVID-19 pandemic that brought all of our global citizens together, human trafficking is often linked to global transnational organized crime. These organizations often infiltrate the real economy and impact GDP. Just like drug trafficking, human trafficking presents lucrative profit-taking opportunities for transnational organized crime. Profits are often so lucrative that in the U.S., a trafficked teen can fetch the pimp as much as six figures a year. It’s not hard to see why vulnerable domestic populations can present themselves as enormous opportunities for the trafficker. Children and families that use the social welfare system are vulnerable targets for traffickers. States that have a large number of families living below and on the poverty line are most vulnerable. In recent years, on social media, families have posted about their concerns with possible human traffickers following them at big box stores. Potential traffickers can follow victims around and use a variety of tactics to engage and gain access to their children.

We look at human trafficking as a part of a broad range of criminal activities of a business. It’s a part of our money laundering investigations. Identifying people and businesses involved in human trafficking often helps us identify other criminal activities as well. Alma Angotti, Partner, Practice-Leader - Global Investigations and Compliance at Guidehouse

In recent years, countries such as the U.S., Canada and Australia are becoming money laundering havens. Anonymous corporate ownership makes oversight into shell corporations difficult. Investigating cases of money laundering, law enforcement increasingly discover agents of domestic human trafficking are part of a larger criminal enterprise. Unfortunately, domestic human trafficking is often seen as a more lucrative business venture than transnational human trafficking because there’s no port of entry or checkpoints to pass through when transporting from state to state. That lowers the cost significantly.

Big Data and AI are Changing the Game

Historically, when it comes to investigating domestic human trafficking cases, law enforcement has focused on locating victims and helping them escape their traffickers. In the last 10 years, in the U.S., these operations have rescued thousands of trafficking victims. They’ve had a huge impact on solving the human trafficking problem. However, they are not enough. As long as there are vulnerable populations and a supply/demand marketplace, traffickers will take advantage. With Big Data and AI, law enforcement can finally take a different approach and focus on identifying the larger crime organizations that are involved.

Big Data and AI enable us to have an impact on human trafficking today that we couldn’t 8 years or 10 years ago. As a behavioral scientist, I can draw inferences from behaviors I can see about the behaviors that I can’t see. Machine learning can help us understand patterns in seconds that a human might take several life spans to be able to understand. Dr. Gary M. Shiffman, Founder of Giant Oak

Under the umbrella of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in recent years, innovative technologies were developed that are used by companies such as Marinus Analytics and Giant Oak to help law enforcement have an unprecedented view of criminal organization’s activities. This involves giving law enforcement the big picture of a criminal organization’s activities as well as the ability to pinpoint leads that will enable law enforcement to identify possible criminal relationships and activities. Human trafficking, as a business for criminal organizations have a retail component to their business. Unlike drug trafficking, the data for human ads displayed, communications of a possible sale are often publicly available over the Internet.

If you are going to traffick humans, there needs to be a retail component of what you are doing. There needs to be a mechanism for traffickers to put up ads and make known that they have humans for sale. This is an opportunity where you have public facing data in web pages, on social media, in ads, in chats, etc.. This has to be publicly available to facilitate purchase. Dr. Gary M. Shiffman, Founder of Giant Oak

In 2012, a student, Emily Kennedy from Carnegie Mellon University started to look into the issue of human trafficking and found that AI technology can be used to leverage the retail component of the Human Trafficking business to uncover human trafficking operations. She started Marinus Analytics, a company that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning in their software Traffic Jam to comb through publicly available data all over the Internet to help to identify patterns of human trafficking. Law enforcement agencies in several countries use Traffic Jam to follow up on leads generated and conduct rescue operations. This year, Marinus Analytics is a semi-finalist in the prestigious IBM Watson AI XPrize, a competition that rewards technologists who use AI to solve global issues.

Computer vision can identify the same pattern in many different photos, like the pattern in a hotel bedspread. This helps law enforcement identify multiple victims advertised and sold from the same hotel room. Emily Kennedy, President & Co-Founder of Marinus Analytics

Traffic Jam Visual

Image from Marinus Analytics

We’ve had a lot of success working with law enforcement in the U.S. to help to recover victims of human trafficking. Now, we are expanding our work abroad and partnering with law enforcement overseas to help them gain insights into large organized crime groups. Emily Kennedy, President & Co-Founder of Marinus Analytics

Non-profit organizations such as the Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative help to partner with law enforcement agencies and private sector companies to pool together resources in the fight against human trafficking.

We have many partners that collaborate with us to develop innovative ways in which we can us their software, tools, and resources in the fight against human trafficking. Many of the companies that we work with are practicing corporate responsibility around a number of issues, not only human trafficking. Our partnerships are mutually beneficial to the organizations we collaborate with as we help to introduce them to other organizations, financial institutions and law enforcement while receiving their assistance and resources in combating trafficking. Aaron Kahler, Founder and CEO of Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative (ATII)

One of the apps that the Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative developed is an app that can be used on the victim’s cell phones. Victims can scan QR codes that are put up in the bathrooms of hotels, and other highly suspicious public places. Once the data is received, law enforcement can follow up on the lead by requesting a subpoena immediately to obtain cell phone records to verify whether it is indeed criminal activity. Once that occurs, victims can be rescued immediately as opposed to waiting for days.

Private and Public Sector Cooperation Enables Technology

Money laundering is at the center of any crime organization. When profits from illegitimate businesses mix with profits from legitimate businesses, it’s difficult to untangle the web of financial transactions inside the organization. Forensic Accounting is often used to track the finances of crime organizations. In the last few years, law enforcement built tools to uncover patterns of irregular financial activities. However, public sector technology still relies on data reported by the private sector banking industry.

The problem with detecting human trafficking is that it’s not easy to identify what is a good transaction from a bad one. You can have an example of a business that’s booking hotel rooms frequently. That’s showing up on bank records. With AI and machine learning, you can bring in other information to associate that with information related to human traffickers. Alma Agnotti, Partner, Practice-Leader - Global Investigations and Compliance at Guidehouse

In the U.S., per the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), each bank is required to send a Suspicious Activities Report (SAR) to government agencies as a part of enforcing money-laundering laws. The accuracy of this report becomes increasingly important when AI and machine learning are involved.

If your system or your bank is 95% wrong in your Suspicious Activities Report (SAR) from last year, by the way this is the standard right now, then when you bring in machine learning, you are going to very efficiently re-create all the mistakes that you made last year. Dr. Gary M. Shiffman, Founder of Giant Oak

In March 2019, Dr. Shiffman testified in front of the House Subcommittee on National Security, International Development, and Monetary Policy about the importance of data cooperation between private sector banks and public sector law enforcement agencies. The legislative intent for the suspicious activities report is to help law enforcement agencies to identify terrorism, money laundering, drug trafficking, and human trafficking. But, the current implementation prevents the banks from obtaining relevant data to build good models to generate the right data to send to law enforcement to impact investigations.

The banks spend a lot of money generating SARs everyday to send it to FinCEN. In the absence of knowing which of their SARs are highly valued or not valued, the banks do not send SARs that are valuable and can impact outcomes. There needs to be a three way communication loop established between banks, regulators (FinCEN) and law enforcement. Law enforcement can inform on what data they’d like to see and the banks can cooperate in sending that information through the regulators. Dr. Gary M. Shiffman, Founder of Giant Oak

Technological Cooperation Implies Responsibility

As AI and machine learning proliferate into corporate settings, there’s a real sense that the world is working closely together. A programmer in India may assist in a project located in the U.S..That project can be deployed in Europe where most of the user base are located. The underlying data that AI and machine learning learns from can come from anywhere in the world. The world’s problems such as human trafficking, money laundering, drug trafficking and terrorisms become problems in every country and can affect the activities in many industries regardless of the size of the company and the size of the marketplace. Responsibility still resides on the humans that are making judgments on when to use the technology and how to use the technology.

People who are in favor of technology and against technology are both a little bit wrong. By that, I mean that technology, AI and machine learning, at its core is pattern recognition. You need a good training set to identify the pattern that you want to find. You need clean data that you can run your algorithm through to identify the pattern. There could be problems in your training data. There could be problems in the data that you are running your algorithm against. You need a human in the loop to ensure that someone’s applying human reasoning, common sense, and judgement to the inputs and output. Dr. Gary M. Shiffman, Founder of Giant Oak

The human factor in the usage of technology not only impacts the outcome of human trafficking investigations but ultimately has a real impact on the GDP of specific countries. From government’s loss of tax revenue, to decreased sector competition and innovation, to loss of investment, to increase in uncertainty of market conditions, there are many reasons why GDP depends on a healthy economy with minimal criminal activities. When law enforcement and financial institutions look at human trafficking investigations as entrepreneurial business activities of criminal organizations, then it’s easy to realize the potential impact on the domestic economy as well as on the global economy. So, who is ultimately responsible for solving this problem of human trafficking? As machine learning and AI tells us, in the age of innovation, we have powerful technological tools to impact outcomes. But ultimately, it’s still all of us who are responsible for our collective problem of human trafficking.

Jun Wu is a Hybrid Journalist for Technology, AI, Data Science. She has a background in programming and statistics.

https://www.humantraffickingproject.com/ai-is-helping-us-combat-the-economic-problem-of-human-traffickingjun-wu/

#humantraffickinghelp #humantraffickingnews

1 note · View note

videotransitionscomm212 · 5 years

Text

The Pursuit of Happiness and Entitlement of our Youth

The Declaration of Independence talks about the pursuit of happiness, a fundamental right for all Americans. The pursuit of something means that you follow your dreams and work hard to create something that makes you happy. This feeling of something being owed to our youth without putting in the work, is the pursuit of nothing. Take a look at our youth today and it’s easy to see a sense of entitlement within them. I recently heard four boys arguing, none of them over the age of 18. The boys had taken a job over the summer, roofing and learning a trade, their argument was over not being paid $40+ an hour like the older employees. They felt that it was unfair that they were only making $26 an hour as a teenager. I asked them if they thought they should learn the trade before they are maxed out in pay and they told me that it’s hard work and they will end up doing most of the labor so they deserve more money than someone that’s done it for 20+ years, but not working as hard.

Not understanding how the boys could think this way, I dug deeper by looking at an article from Time magazine, “Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation.” Our youth is what can be considered the Millennial generation, Time magazine described this group as anyone born from 1980-2000 (Time Magazine, 2013). This article made the comparison of photos in the home within the 1950’s to now as well as political views and civic engagement from then to now. In the 1950’s there were only a few photos in the home, most of them related to the entire family while today’s “Me Generation” has an average of 85 photos in the home all surrounding the individual person and or their pets. This self-centered “Me Generation” is one of the least politically involved groups, as well as being less involved in their communities or volunteering their time for anything, with that being said it’s easy to see how what we considered private media from the past has changed drastically and become public media with the help of social media platforms and the Millennial generation (Time Magazine, 2013).

To better understand this, we must look to what has changed over the years that has caused our youth to be less active within the communities or with each other and has caused them to be more alone than ever before, even causing more mental health issues, like depression. The invention of the internet is a good place to start, we might even go back to the start of video games or the invention of the television. No matter where we start, it all boils down to the fact that with great inventions and technological advances, there will always be unknown side effects. The entitlement of our youth is a side effect.

A lot of social media users who post a photo on Instagram or share their thoughts on Twitter or Facebook will receive instant gratification, however, real life leaves something that demands more work and is less desired. While sitting at a computer or on cell phones, we must all realize at some point, that we are not special, and nothing comes cheap. As was said by a teacher at Wellesley High School, David McCullough Jr. to the graduating class of 2012, “You’re not special, you’re not exceptional, contrary to what your nine soccer trophies say” (McCullough, 2012). McCullough said this to show how the Millennial generation expects something for every little thing they do, they expect to be told they are special, they believe the world owes them something just because they are alive and breathing. He finishes by saying “Climb [the mountain] it, so you can see the world, not so it can see you” (McCullough, 2012), he said this so this younger generation can stop being so self-centered and take a moment to look at the bigger picture, to see the world. This commencement speech goes to show the type of attitude this generation has and how the media has changed the expectations of these young people. We don’t put on our capes and fly into battle, so when we are at work this feeling of being more than we are dilutes who we really are and what we are capable of. Social media builds us up so we can all aspire to be a superhero, the next Jason Bourne, or go on our next adventure on the Millennium Falcon, but the reality is much more boring than that. Social media, from Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, all of these platforms offer the illusion of escape from the lives we live. Cell phones give us a gateway into another world that changes the way we think in the real world.

In our Declaration of Independence, we are granted the opportunity for the pursuit of happiness. The media portrays this as something that will fall in our laps with no actual work needed. There are those of us that are able to understand this pursuit of happiness, making us well rounded; while the rest of us are so close minded that we can’t see past ourselves. Being an adult means making decisions that will affect how people feel and react to day to day challenges. The task of learning how to really see things for what they are and being able to be empathetic towards others is something that is getting lost and forgotten in our society. Other than sleep, most of the youth of today spend more time online than doing anything else.

Being able to think and learn how to pay attention to things that make you well rounded, like making the decisions on what you worship, where you find meaning in life, the unconscious settings within us that make us the most important thing in the world can be changed. It takes us being aware of what is going on around us and taking part in things that matter, yet to many people, social media is becoming the only thing that matters. By losing ourselves in social media, we are giving ourselves away to the platforms that hold our attention. If a person spends all day on Facebook uploading their life's worth of photos so that everyone can see everything about them, they might not realize that Facebook now controls and copies everything uploaded (Eising, 2019). Sadly, I haven't been able to find a single social media platform that does not ask for you to sign away your rights in order to use their site. I look at all of this and can’t help but wonder if the pursuit of happiness means anything to our youth.

Psychologist and author Dr. Juli Slattery believe that empathy is the number one element missing in the entitlement issues surrounding our youth (Slattery, 2019). American Psychologist Dr. Michele Borba and Dr. Slattery both wrote books pertaining to the fact that you can’t read someone's emotions by looking down at a phone screen. Borba thinks it was around the year 2000 that people got plugged into the web and it's only gotten worse. Studies show that social media causes more and more youth to be more anti-social, depending on how much screen time they have. The idea is to have more real-life face to face interactions in order for the youth to learn how to relate to others in a more positive way (Shwartz, 2017).

All the research I have been able to find so far tells me that the more engrossed our youth are in social media, the more we will all suffer for it. It seems that the pursuit of happiness for our youth is something to be expected and not earned. Social media offers too much of a break and not enough reality for our youth to understand what they are missing and giving up. For every photo, message, tweet, and snap posted, someone is monitoring. I don’t think that it's too late to make changes.

Adam Barnett

A TedX video that was not mentioned in my paper that’s very relevant to the topic and a great video is Brene Brown’s “The power of vulnerability”. This video talks about empathy and the power of vulnerability and can directly relate to many of us.

For more information on the topics discussed in my paper please look to the work cited page for full articles.

Works Cited

Brown, Brené. “The Power of Vulnerability.” TED, TED, June 2010, https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_the_power_of_vulnerability?language=en#t-1200302.

Eising, Mary. “Copytrack Explains: Is Facebook a Copyright Thief?” COPYTRACK, Copytrack, 3 May 2019, https://www.copytrack.com/does-facebook-own-my-pictures/.

McCullough, David. 30 Nov. 2019, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_lfxYhtf8o4.

“Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation.” Time Magazine, 20 May 2013, https://time.com/247/millennials-the-me-me-me-generation/.

Shwartz, Alon. “Our Kids Are Losing Their Empathy & Technology Has A Lot to Do With It.” Medium, Medium, 20 Sept. 2017, https://medium.com/@alonshwartz/our-kids-are-losing-their-empathy-technology-has-a-lot-to-do-with-it-7f18f2654a7f.

Slattery, Juli. “Bucking the Entitlement Trend.” Focus on the Family, 10 Nov. 2019, https://www.focusonthefamily.com/parenting/bucking-the-entitlement-trend/.

0 notes