Our Mission
Marinus Analytics is an internationally-recognized, woman-owned and lead, artificial intelligence company focused on protecting the vulnerable and ending systemic exploitation. We help public, private and regulatory bodies to detect, understand, map and tackle emergent online harms to the public, including to children and young people.
Our mission is to serve those working on the frontlines of public safety in both the public and private sector. We do this by deploying technology to help them detect and disrupt human trafficking, child sex trafficking and abuse, and cyber fraud.
That social mission is a part of our company DNA and inspired our formation.
It is a mission that has led world-changing social impact bodies like the United States National Science Foundation and Bank of New York Mellon to invest in our work.
It is why we continuously re-invest all of our own available resources in the effort to create the best tools for public servants on the frontlines of our world’s most pressing problems.
And it is why our talented team of engineers and data scientists are always willing to go the extra mile, inspired as they are by the urgency and value of what they do.
Marinus Analytics serves clients in several countries around the world, including in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom and will soon be opening its London office.
WHAT WE DO
We are technology pioneers, deploying SaaS applications mostly in the public sector.
We offer information discovery solutions to get actionable insights out of big data for detectives, social workers, cyber fraud investigators and all those responsible for tackling online harms on their sites and platforms.
Our flagship tool, Traffic Jam, revolutionizes the way our partners are able to stop and prevent human trafficking, recover victims, and dismantle organized criminal networks, by deploying graph analytics to detect organized crime and purpose-driven algorithms to identify vulnerability indicators, informing frontline professionals of hidden exploitation.
We have expanded our mission into new areas, including building tailored tools to help social workers, enriching outcome analysis and enhancing motivational interviewing in the field. We also empower government agencies and regulators who enforce cyber-crime and online harms regulations with the information they need to identify the largest streams of cyber fraud and online scams. These new areas further our mission of protecting the vulnerable and ending systemic exploitation across the globe.
Marinus Analytics has grown rapidly since its 2014 founding. A spinoff from The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the company has grown to serve the public and private sectors across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
Our Solutions
Traffic Jam
Every day, there are hundreds of thousands of ads online selling sexual services. Behind many of these are victims of human trafficking. The company’s flagship tool, Traffic Jam, uses Artificial Intelligence to help law enforcement find victims and enable them to take down organized criminal networks. Traffic Jam is a suite of analytics tools developed to help save precious investigative time to rescue vulnerable victims by quickly turning big data into actionable intelligence.
Cyber Fraud
Taking down organized crime isn’t easy, especially when it involves hundreds or even thousands of data points. In our human trafficking work, we have found online ads linked to cyber fraud in the United States, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom, including duplicate ads placed simultaneously on both continents. The activity of some of these ads suggests they may be funding organized crime. Here’s what we’re doing to combat this emerging threat.
HOW WE PLAY OUR ROLE
We recognize that AI is transformational, opening up whole new frontiers of human progress and potential, but also that the speed of technology-facilitated change can be rapid and raise important questions of legitimate public interest.
That’s why we take seriously our obligation to innovate responsibly.
In providing support to those on the frontlines of public safety:
Our Traffic Jam tool draws only on data from the public internet. We do not access any private communications or surveillance data.
We don’t advocate for, or engage in, unrestricted, widespread use of facial recognition. We advocate for limited use in our case: to help stop exploitation using publicly available data on the internet.
Due to the importance and ethical value of our work, as well as our reputation in this space, Amazon selected us as one of only 3 organizations that would be allowed to continue use of Rekognition tools to aid in the recovery of sex trafficking victims and rescue of missing children, during their police moratorium on use of this technology (which they further extended in May 2021).
We only access data from hotspots of potential exploitation on the Internet that are directly relevant to our mission. We do not explore the wider internet on the speculative basis that its data may prove useful at some point in future.
Access to our tools is limited to those with specialized functions related to the investigation or prevention of major trafficking, missing children, or child abuse and neglect cases.
We also maintain a commitment to the highest possible standards of data privacy and security, as well as adhering to emerging ethical standards on use of these powerful technologies.
OUR IMPACT
Our technology leads to victims being recovered and to criminals being caught.
In one case in 2018, Traffic Jam was used by law enforcement officers to put together a case against someone who was trafficking 20 women for sex, making upwards of $250,000 a year in the process. The trafficker is now serving a 30-year prison term and his victims are no longer exposed to his violence and intimidation.
“Traffic Jam was critical in locating all of the information needed for us to identify the victims. I can’t speak highly enough about the platform’s capabilities and how much we depend on it in our cases”
More recently, in 2020, the First Appearance feature in Traffic Jam--which highlights potential new entrants to the sex industry--resulted in the recovery of a missing 17-year-old within a week of her going missing.
Traffic Jam also saves time. In 2020 alone, it saved an estimated 70,000 investigative hours. It is 60x faster than manual search, speeds up investigations, reduces time spent on routine tasks, and has been known to enable a case against a trafficker to be put together in 3 months that would typically have taken 2 years.
With 2,500 users already trained in multiple jurisdictions, stories like these are set to multiply.
Sex trafficking is a $99 billion industry worldwide and we know there is a lot more work to do. But we also know our technology is already making a difference.
