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AI to the aid of child trafficking victims
Why is it in news?
- Scientists are hoping artificial intelligence can help identify and rescue child victims of sex trafficking via an app and more than a million crowd sourced pictures of hotel rooms.
More in news
- Researchers launched an app in 2016 to collect photographs of 50,000 hotels around the world that could be matched up with online advertisements placed by traffickers, who often use selfies taken by their victims in hotel rooms.
- Hotels-50K can be used to identify where trafficking victims are being held- and ultimately to rescue them.
- A huge number of pictures are put through an artificial intelligence engine called a deep convolutional neural network.
- The initiative comes as hotels around the world are making efforts to stop sexual slavery, teaching employees signs to look for, including frequent sheet changes and “do not disturb” signs that are never removed.
- According to the International Labor Organization, there are 4.5 million people in sexual slavery around the world.
- The idea is to be able to pick out the specific hotel room and use the information to attempt a rescue.
- By getting 150,000 people all over the world to download their app, TraffickCam, and take hundreds of thousands of pictures, it is easier to get the same view that a trafficking victim’s selfie taken for an ad is likely to have.
Source
The Hindu