Human Trafficking is global, multi-billion dollar criminal industry that impacts the lives of nearly 40.3 million victims. Millions of these victims are exploited in the commercial sex trade. Each day hundreds of thousands of escort ads are posted, and behind many of these ads are victims of sex trafficking.
Marinus Analytics’s President and Founder Emily Kennedy began researching human trafficking as an undergraduate studying Ethics, History, & Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University after witnessing human trafficking firsthand on a trip to Eastern Europe when she was a teenager. Because of that extensive research on sex trafficking, Kennedy was connected with CMU’s Robotics Institute where she leveraged their help to develop Marinus Analytics’s flagship tool Traffic Jam.
The Value of NSF Funding
The path to spin a company out of Carnegie Mellon and ultimately found Marinus Analytics was not easy. “We were beginning to think that we’d never find funding for such a small market, even though we knew our impact could be huge,” Kennedy shared about her company’s initial steps to founding. During the 2020 Congressional Hearing on The Role of Technology in Countering Trafficking in Persons, Kennedy attributed her company’s success to the support of the National Science Foundation. “All of this [success in assisting law enforcement in recovering human trafficking victims] would not have been possible without the support of the National Science Foundation who believed in our mission of AI for social good.”
Kennedy went on to describe the crucial gap that the National Science Foundation bridges between scientific research and operational impact, particularly in the high risk, high reward research and development that Marinus does. Even then, getting the NSF funding wasn’t a given. Kennedy describes how Marinus Analytics’s first application for the program’s Phase I funding proposal was rejected and how she and her team worked with the NSF program director to rethink and improve their second application that was ultimately successful.
The Value of NSF’s I-Corps Program
Kennedy attributes her success not only to the funding her team received from the National Science Foundation, but the training program they participated in before funding was ever received. Kennedy, in her opening statement in the Congressional Hearing, said “The I-Corps Program meets a crucial need for commercialization of university research, because it provides a training ground before entrepreneurs launch.” The Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program functioned as a commercialization bootcamp for university research in the lab, Kennedy explained. The program helped her and her team figure out their audience, learn how to listen to their customers, and ensure that their technology wasn’t just used, but had an impact.
Impact of NSF
NSF funding is directed toward high risk, high reward ventures whose success is also measured by its social impact. Marinus Analytics has successfully developed and deployed Traffic Jam, a suite of analytics tools that use Machine Learning and AI to quickly turn big data into actionable intelligence to help save precious investigative time to rescue vulnerable victims. Traffic Jam has empowered the identification of 6,800 victims of sex trafficking, just in the last 2 years.
Traffic Jam offers a variety of tools to hundreds of law enforcement officers and analysts not only in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom and Canada. Traffic Jam is also used daily by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to identify and rescue missing children.
Traffic Jam also helps investigators identify and dismantle large organized crime networks. Traffic Jam was used to identify an organized crime ring which was indicted in January 2019 on charges of operating Asian brothels in 12 United States cities and Toronto. The nationwide sting operation included the takedown of nearly 500 website domains. The computer systems utilized by the illicit organization logged more than 30,000 customer phone numbers with details of prostitution dates. Six people were charged with running the sex trafficking organization, which recruited and exploited foreign national women primarily from China to engage in sex trafficking activities.
Lifesaving successes like these originating in Traffic Jam are ultimately thanks to the National Science Foundation’s support and funding that Marinus Analytics leveraged to successfully deploy Traffic Jam to global social impact.