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As we recently discussed at the 23rd International Conference on Information Visualisation, one challenge with visualizing unstructured sources like news and social media is getting the right data. To remedy these problems, we created a subsystem to help domain experts who lack data science knowledge so they can easily build better classifiers once and only occasionally maintain them.

In examining how technology advancements play a crucial role in uncovering human trafficking, Medium’s OneZero notes how TellFinder “slaloms through terabytes of the deep web to search where Google can’t”.

The identification of an international sex trafficking network using TellFinder technology in 2017 led to more than a dozen, coordinated FBI-led sting operations on January 15, 2019.

Intelligence analysts, criminal investigators and legal practitioners frequently face complex cases with large volumes of ambiguous, uncertain, contradictory or inconclusive evidence. They must rapidly analyze the evidence, assess the situation and recommend options with clear justification to decision makers. Moreover, inherent human cognitive biases, such as neglect of probability, confirmation bias and recency bias further complicate objective analysis.

Data from TellFinder was admitted as evidence for the first time in a US court in a 2019 human trafficking trial in the Ninth Judicial Circuit of Florida.