CINA Distinguished Speaker Series with Abby Stylianou

TraffickCam: Identifying Where Victims of Human Trafficking and Child Sexual Abuse are Photographed

Join us on Wednesday, January 29 for the upcoming virtual CINA Distinguished Speaker Series event featuring Dr. Abby Stylianou, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Saint Louis University, and a Fellow of the Taylor Geospatial Institute as she discusses “TraffickCam: Identifying Where Victims of Human Trafficking and Child Sexual Abuse are Photographed.”

This event will take place virtually via MS Teams. The information to attend virtually will be sent to participants upon registration. Faculty, students, industry, and government attendees are welcome.

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Abstract

Victims of child sexual abuse and human trafficking are often photographed in hotel rooms. Identifying the hotels in these photographs is a top priority for investigators and prosecutors — they show where a victim has been and where their abused may move them or others in the future. In this talk, Dr. Abby Stylianou will introduce TraffickCam, platform for identifying the locations in these victim images. The platform includes a crowd-sourcing mobile application to collect images of hotel rooms from the traveling public that is currently used by over 250,000 individuals who upload photos specifically to help combat trafficking. The data from this app, combined with millions of publicly available images from travel websites, support a first-in-the-world system for image search to identify hotels in trafficking imagery that is deployed at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Dr. Stylianou will present the technical details behind this search system and the research that’s led to its current capabilities, share lessons learned about real world investigative image search from years of working with the analysts at NCMEC, and discuss the challenges and opportunities in this space in the current AI ecosystem.

Speaker Biography:
Dr. Abby Stylianou is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Saint Louis University, and a Fellow of the Taylor Geospatial Institute. Dr. Stylianou’s research lies at the intersection of multimodal image retrieval, fine grained visual categorization, and explainable AI. In recent years, Dr. Stylianou’s research has focused on building citizen science data collection applications and global scale image search tools, specifically to support the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s investigations of child sexual abuse and human trafficking. Dr. Stylianou is generally excited about applications of computer vision and machine learning that have the potential to benefit society in some way. Beyond the work to help in investigations of child sexual abuse and human trafficking, she has worked on developing systems for making measurements of the natural environment in time-lapse imagery to understand climate change, observing how individuals interact with the world around them in outdoor webcam images to support better design of the built environment, and developing new vision and machine learning algorithms and systems for agriculture and plant breeding to develop more sustainable, more resilient, and healthier crops. Dr. Stylianou is the Communications Officer for the IEEE Technical Community on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, and regularly serves as Social Media Chair and Area Chair for a variety of premier computer vision conferences, including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV and WACV.