TellFinder Technology

The TellFinder product suite scales to terabytes of messy unstructured data, with a domain-tailored ML enrichment, easy search-and-refine workflow, rich visual analytics, and with reports and exports to act on findings.

Advanced Search

Quickly search through archived web data by searching names, addresses, other attributes, and even images using a Google-like interface.

Aggregate Data

Web results with common attributes are grouped into “personas” to help identify key people and organizations.

Relate Personas & Attributes

Quickly investigate relationships between personas that shared extracted attributes such as phone numbers, emails, addresses, or even similar images.

Discover Trends and Outliers

Data summaries identify top sites, commenters, and spot outliers on geographic and temporal aspects. Analyze further with the help of artificial intelligence to automatically flag high-risk or high-value indicators based on language or image content.

Publications

Unmasking Human Trafficking Risk in Commercial Sex Supply Chains with Machine Learning

The covert nature of sex trafficking provides a significant barrier to generating large-scale, data-driven insights to inform law enforcement, policy and social work. We leverage massive deep web data (collected globally from leading commercial sex websites) in tandem with a novel machine learning framework to unmask suspicious recruitment-to-sales pathways, thereby providing the first global network view of trafficking risk in commercial sex supply chains.

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TellFinder: Discovering Related Content in Big Data

In this paper, we present lessons learned in the development of TellFinder, a tool designed to explore domain-specific web crawls using graph analysis and multi-modal visualization. The initial application of the tool was to help combat human trafficking through entity resolution and characterization based on data from sex ads crawled from a variety of publicly available sites.

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