RAFFIC V IS : Fighting Human Trafficking through Visualization
Catalina Vajiac, Andreas M. Olligschlaeger, Yifei Li, Pratheeksha Nair, Meng-Chieh Lee, Namyong Park, Reihaneh Rabbany, Duen Horng Chau, C. Faloutsos
Abstract
Law enforcement can detect human trafficking (HT) in online escort websites by analyzing suspicious clusters of connected ads. Given such clusters, how can we interactively visualize potential evidence for law enforcement and domain experts? We present TRAFFICVIS, which, to our knowledge, is the first interface for cluster-level HT detection and labeling. It builds on state-of-the-art HT clustering algorithms by incorporating metadata as a signal of organized and potentially suspicious activity. Also, domain experts can label clusters as HT, spam, and more, efficiently creating labeled datasets to enable further HT research. TRAFFICVIS has been built in close collaboration with domain experts, who estimate that TRAFFICVIS provides a median 36x speedup over manual labeling.