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Splunk Equips Global Emancipation Network to Fight and Eliminate Human Trafficking

Global Emancipation Network Splunk End Human Trafficking

September 05, 2018  SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE) –

Global Emancipation Network Introduces Minerva, a Human Trafficking Investigation Platform Powered by Splunk, to Facilitate Collaboration across Public, Private and Nonprofit Sectors  (Source)

Splunk Inc., first in delivering “aha” moments from machine data, today announced its participation in launching a new technology platform from Global Emancipation Network aimed at fighting human trafficking with data analytics from Splunk technology. The human trafficking investigation platform Minerva uses advanced data analytics to enable information-sharing and collaboration across local and federal law enforcement, government agencies, nonprofit and commercial organizations and academic institutions. Minerva is powered by Splunk® Enterprise and funded in part by Splunk Pledge, a Splunk4Good initiative where Splunk is committing to donate $100 million over a 10-year period to nonprofit and higher education organizations making a difference to society. Watch the Global Emancipation Network video to learn more about how Splunk supports the Global Emancipation Network to use data analytics and intelligence to fight against human trafficking and exploitation.

“The Global Emancipation Network is a powerful example of how, through the power of data, we can solve the world’s most complex and notoriously opaque problems”  Tweet this

“My life mission and that of Global Emancipation Network is to completely eradicate human trafficking with a weapon not yet used properly in the fight: data and analytics,” said Sherrie Caltagirone, founder and executive director, Global Emancipation Network. “By arming law enforcement and its allies with newly-accessible critical information, we are going to disrupt this heinous multi-billion dollar black market industry which affects millions of lives. Thank you to Splunk for its endless support of our mission through technology, community and collaboration.”

Global Emancipation Network grants Minerva access to organizations with valid counter-trafficking missions in order to host and explore millions of trafficking-related data records and use customized search, alerting, geolocation and other platform capabilities. Using Splunk Enterprise and third-party integrated technologies, Minerva protects case-sensitive information and monitors usage patterns to help keep user information private, safe and secure. Leading public, private and nonprofit organizations have already been accepted to the platform as early users.

“The Global Emancipation Network is a powerful example of how, through the power of data, we can solve the world’s most complex and notoriously opaque problems,” said Doug Merritt, President and CEO, Splunk. “The Global Emancipation Network is making a worldwide impact, and Splunk is proud to support their efforts to eradicate human trafficking through technology.”

Minerva is equipped with data-processing capabilities to extract and organize information from a variety of data sources. Capabilities include:

  • Advertisement analysis: Analyzes advertisements from the deep and open web, where most trafficking cases originate, and extracts data such as user, location, account and other identifying information.
  • Image processing tools: Processes images of victims to reduce the time users spend analyzing photographs and manually linking them to advertisements. Minerva integrates image analysis tools to tag photographs with characteristics to expedite database search, and reverse image search to identify similar images.
  • Text analysis tools and natural language processing: Extracts text in images from advertisements and flags correlations with missing persons reports and other valuable information.
  • Multi-tenant system informing trend analysis: Allows all Minerva users to store their information securely on the same database at the same time, enabling secure, multi-agency collaboration on shared investigations.

Unlike many private organizations and governments that attempt to disrupt human trafficking, Global Emancipation Network makes Minerva available free of charge to qualified organizations with valid human trafficking investigation programs so that users can leverage insights to support their own efforts. Visit the Global Emancipation Network website to learn more and apply for Minerva access.

To apply for a free Splunk Enterprise license and learn more about Splunk’s commitment to research, education and positive social impact, visit the Splunk Pledge website.

About Splunk Inc.

Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLK) turns machine data into answers. Organizations use market-leading Splunk solutions with machine learning to solve their toughest IT, Internet of Things and security challenges. Join millions of passionate users and discover your “aha” moment with Splunk today: http://www.splunk.com.

 

 

Splunk, Splunk>, Listen to Your Data, The Engine for Machine Data, Splunk Cloud, Splunk Light and SPL are trademarks and registered trademarks of Splunk Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective owners. © 2018 Splunk Inc. All rights reserved.

Global Emancipation Network and Deep Vision AI Announce Partnership to End Human Trafficking

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(PRWEB) APRIL 20, 2018  (Source)

Deep Vision AI will provide its Visual Intelligence engine to power Global Emancipation Network’s counter-human trafficking analytics and intelligence platform, beginning April 17th, 2018.

 

Global Emancipation Network (GEN) and Deep Vision AI announce a partnership to deploy cutting-edge visual recognition tools into GEN’s analytics platform, Minerva. In the first week of working together the partnership has already demonstrated immediate impact.

“Visual intelligence from Deep Vision provides the transformative ability for users to gain real-time insight into their image sets and video feeds. The increased ability to prioritize and filter results based on analytics such as age, gender, or ethnicity reduces the time it takes for operational partners to find relevant images and, ultimately, save lives,” said founder and Executive Director of GEN, Sherrie Caltagirone.

“In our first week of joint work, Deep Vision’s facial recognition tools enabled Global Emancipation Network to identify an individual, as well as a network of potential traffickers and victims. This case has been referred to law enforcement for further investigation,” added Sherrie.

Deep Vision’s system that recognizes and identifies visual clues, identifies facial matches, and categorizes visual data, is empowering GEN’s users to prioritize leads and facilitate the identification of persons of interest. These AI powered visual tools will significantly speed up the outreach and response time, two critical components to find victims of human trafficking.

“Deep Vision is extremely excited to partner with Global Emancipation Network in the effort to stop human trafficking across the globe. We believe that Artificial Intelligence is a tool for common good and deploying our AI powered solutions on the Minerva platform will directly result in less people trapped in the network of human trafficking,” said Deep Vision Head of Business Development, Jameel Ghata.

Human trafficking is the world’s fastest-growing criminal economy generating $150 billion annually, representing a massive challenge to counter-trafficking stakeholders. Traffickers currently enslave between 20 million and 45 million people around the world. Organizations around the world maintain separate directories of missing and potentially trafficked persons and often lack the tools and resources to efficiently process the data which would enable connecting these individuals to digital evidence. The integration of Deep Vision AI in Minerva empowers these organizations to link images of missing persons to aggregated advertisements of trafficked individuals.

“This collaboration is bringing us great satisfaction, it gives us the chance to apply our Artificial Intelligence expertise to social good and such a relevant cause as rescuing the victims of modern-day slavery,” said Agustin Caverzasi, Co-founder of Deep Vision.

About Deep Vision AI:

Deep Vision AI, Inc. is a leading computer vision company based in the U.S and Argentina. Deep Vision excels at providing intelligent video and image analytics that facilitate new ways of understanding and analyzing visual data. Deep Vision provides AI powered visual intelligence to a broad set of partners and our solutions help our clients operate more efficiently and effectively, create new products, and accelerate business models. Our core AI solutions focus on facial demographics (detecting age and gender), facial verification (recognizing faces), vehicle recognition (recognizing year, make, model and views), brand recognition (brand exposure and retention), visual context (providing context tags of images) and visual search (to discover similar faces, vehicles, objects, etc).

For additional information on Deep Vision AI, visit http://www.deepvisionai.com

About Global Emancipation Network:

Global Emancipation Network is a data analytics and intelligence nonprofit dedicated to countering human trafficking around the world. Minerva, the multi-tenant data analytics platform created and hosted by Global Emancipation Network, empowers users across the anti-trafficking stakeholder community to find trafficking victims, stop traffickers, and inform resources and policy.

For additional information on Global Emancipation Network, visit http://www.globalemancipation.ngo

Global Emancipation Network and Splunk Partner

25 September 2017  The Global Emancipation Network and Splunk through Splunk4Good are proud to partner and together use the power of data analytics to end human trafficking.  Splunk announced a $100m philanthropic pledge for global research, social impact and educational initiatives.  The Global Emancipation Network is proud to be one of the first Splunk partners in this initiative to tackle the third greatest criminal enterprise in the world and a source of modern evil.  See our video below.  Learn More

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Using Big Data to Stop Human Trafficking with Microsoft Azure

Around the world, over 21 million adults and children are the victims of human trafficking. Of that, less than 50,000 are rescued. This devastating criminal industry must conduct business in the shadows, but even though the operations are not always easily identifiable in public, human trafficking networks develop patterns that can be tracked. Nonprofit organizations like the Global Emancipation Network identify these patterns to aid law enforcement with taking down human trafficking operations globally.

The Global Emancipation Network uses big data, collecting streams of information from law enforcement agencies, businesses, other nonprofit organizations, and ordinary people to identify patterns that are indicative of human trafficking operations.

It might surprise you to know that the Global Emancipation Network is a fairly new nonprofit, launching from its sister organization Orphan Secure in March of 2016. The organization is made up of around 25 part-time volunteers that all work remotely since the organization does not have a headquarters.

“Everything is entirely volunteer right now. Currently, we don’t even have an operating budget so any costs have been coming out of my own pocket,” Sherrie Caltagirone, the Executive Director of the Global Emancipation Network, explains.

“Everything is entirely volunteer right now. Currently, we don’t even have an operating budget so any costs have been coming out of my own pocket.”

With no operating budget and no headquarters, the Global Emancipation Network faced the daunting task of finding an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solution that would give them all the power of a high performance computing cluster and the built-in tools to manage and analyze the data, without the high cost.

“In 2014, we started talking about the kind of platform we needed and looking at the nonprofit offerings out there. Essentially, we needed to create an integrated platform to host large-scale data that would be a very scalable storage solution with machine learning tools,” Sherrie continues, “Fortunately, several of our volunteers work at Microsoft so we were able to hear about some of the products offered by Microsoft Philanthropy and heard about their newest offering for nonprofits, Microsoft Azure.”

In September 2016, Microsoft Philanthropy announced it would offer an annual $5,000 Azure credit to nonprofits around the world, making the powerful cloud computing infrastructure much more accessible to the nonprofits sector.

The Global Emancipation Network uses Azure to collect raw data from a multitude of data sources using APIs. The raw data is stored in a space known as the Azure blob to be processed by the intelligence tool Splunk, and the R toolset, which are built into Azure. These tools are used to identify patterns in the massive amounts of data the organization collects and output analytics and graphical representations of the data, which goes to help other nonprofits that are working to stop human trafficking, like Orphan Secure, and law enforcement agencies.

As their organization grows and establishes connections to more data sources the Global Emancipation Network will be able to easily scale up within Microsoft Azure.

“We would not have been able to do what we are doing today without Azure. With the amount of data we are collecting and processing, it would be very inefficient to mine manually.” Sherrie says, crediting their success to Microsoft Azure and to Microsoft Philanthropy for all the help and support they received getting started.

“We would not have been able to do what we are doing today without Azure. With the amount of data we are collecting and processing, it would be very inefficient to mine manually.”

Download the PDF: Using Microsoft Azure and Big Data to Combat Human Trafficking

For more information, contact the Global Emancipation Network!

Global Emancipation Network and Recorded Future Announce Partnership

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON – May 25, 2016

Recorded Future and Global Emancipation Network today announced a technology partnership advancing novel applications of data science and natural language processing in the field of human rights.  The partnership provides Global Emancipation Network with access to comprehensive stores of open source and dark web data and allows for seamless API integration into Global Emancipation Network’s anti-human trafficking data analytics platform.  Recorded Future provides threat analysts and security operations teams with world-class, real-time threat intelligence and unrivaled insight into emerging global threats through their Web Intelligence Engine.  Global Emancipation Network, an international nonprofit, combats human trafficking by automating the processes by which victims of trafficking are identified and connecting them to law enforcement, rescue services, and rehabilitation service providers.  They are teaming up to push the boundaries of data analytics in social work and humanitarian crises.

Each year, over 20 million men, women, and children are trafficked around the world. Tragically, only about 45,000 of those victims are identified and recovered. This partnership allows for Global Emancipation Network to quickly and efficiently find victims whose services are being advertised online and to coordinate their rescue and rehabilitation through their network of victim service providers.  Manually, this process can take weeks or even months, during which time a trafficking victim is likely to have been resold and moved outside the geographic area.

“We’re very excited by the generous support of Recorded Future.  Integration with their complex data sources greatly enhances our ability to find victims of human trafficking and scale our life-saving work,” said founder and Executive Director of Global Emancipation Network, Sherrie Caltagirone.  “This partnership enables us to illustrate how data science can have a positive impact on the world of human rights and other nonprofit spaces.”

“We are honored to assist the Global Emancipation Network in their vital mission,” said Dr. Christopher Ahlberg, Co-Founder and CEO of Recorded Future. “To effectively combat this global problem at a massive scale requires automated intelligence analysis that reduces the time from identification and search to rescue.”

Recorded Future provides non-profits access to its product.

Recorded Future’s mission is to empower analysts with real-time threat intelligence, to defend their organizations against threats at the speed and scale of the Internet. With billions of indexed facts, and more added every day, its patented Web Intelligence Engine continuously analyzes the entire web to provide unmatched insight into emerging threats. Recorded Future helps protect four of the top five companies in the world, and over 12,000 IT security professionals use Recorded Future everyday.

For additional information about Global Emancipation Network, please visit www.globalemancipation.ngo.

For additional resources on Recorded Future, please visit www.recordedfuture.com.

PRESS CONTACTS

Sherrie Caltagirone
Executive Director
425.502.6930
sherrie@globalemancipation.ngo

Nagraj Seshadri
VP Marketing
Recorded Future
617.902.0350
nagraj@recordedfuture.com

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Global Emancipation Network, a registered 501(c)(3) charity, delivers cutting-edge data and technology to stakeholders across the globe, disrupting human trafficking networks, informing domestic and international policy, and supporting survivors of modern-day slavery.

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