Scientists Use AI To Track Hotel Rooms Used For Child Sex Trafficking

Normally, child sex traffickers contact their clients and provide them with victims’ photos in the hotel rooms that these victims are being held captive. To help search and rescued kidnapped children, a team of engineers at the Washington University developed an AI system which is capable of recognizing a hotel room’s features from a photo and identifying the possible location. With this system, investigators can have new leads in searching for kidnapped children.

Up until now, the app is only available for law enforcement or specific groups such as NCMEC (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) in case sensitive content like photos of victims are spread on the internet.

The idea behind this is to provide the AI algorithm with various hotel room photos, so that it could identify and recognize the background of a victim’s photo. Since hotel chains usually follow one design, it may be easy to learn their features. Abby Stylianou, an engineer participating in the project, said:

The project comes amid a time when hotels across the globe are joining hands in stopping sexual slavery by teaching their employees looking for signs which include never-removed “do not disturb” signs and frequent sheet changes.

Since 2016, 50,000 crowdsourced photos have been collected by the system. Eight months ago, the team all agreed that the system was ready for testing and then was handed to NCMEC. But no one has revealed whether the tool has made a success or not.

Staca Shehan, NCMEC’s executive director, shared that: