Kyle Miller

Leveraging Publicly Available Data to Discern Patterns of Human-Trafficking Activity

We present a few data analysis methods that can be used to process advertisements for escort services available in public areas of the Internet. These data provide a readily available proxy evidence for modeling and discerning human-trafficking activity. We show how it can be used to identify advertisements that likely involve such activity. We demonstrate its utility in identifying and tracking entities in the Web-advertisement data even if strongly identifiable features are sparse. We also show a few possible ways to perform community- and population-level analyses including behavioral summaries stratified by various types of activity and detection of emerging trends and patterns.

Evaluation of coded aperture radiation detectors using a Bayesian approach

We investigate tradeoffs arising from the use of coded aperture gamma-ray spectrometry to detect and localize sources of harmful radiation in the presence of noisy background. Using an example application scenario of area monitoring and search, we empirically evaluate weakly supervised spectral, spatial, and hybrid spatio-spectral algorithms for scoring individual observations, and two alternative methods of fusing evidence obtained from multiple observations. Results of our experiments confirm the intuition that directional information provided by spectrometers masked with coded aperture enables gains in source localization accuracy, but at the expense of reduced probability of detection. Losses in detection performance can however be to a substantial extent reclaimed by using our new spatial and spatio-spectral scoring methods which rely on realistic assumptions regarding masking and its impact on measured photon distributions.

Quantifying the Relationship between Large Public Events and Escort Advertising Behavior

ABSTRACT We study online escort advertisement responses to large scale public events using a time series anomaly detection framework. We analyze advertisement volume, approximations of advertiser volumes, and further devise a measure for movement derived from the spatio-temporal behavior amongst related advertisements. Our results imply that a variety of events correlate with unusual increases in sex worker activity, including an influx of providers that are new to the respective event location. The findings indicate that there are strong market responses to some public events and that Super Bowl events which received heightened attention by authorities and news media due to a perceived link to human trafficking for sexual exploitation do not stand out amongst these events in the effect on the market that we measured.