100,000 happy pictures: a new tool in the cyber 'arms race' against child sexual abusers

Leading Senior Constable Dr Janis Dalins is looking for 100,000 happy images of children – a toddler in a sandpit, a nine-year-old winning an award at school, a sullen teenager unwrapping a present at Christmas and pretending not to care. The search for these safe, happy pictures is the goal of a new campaign to crowdsource a database of ethically obtained images that Dalins hopes will help build better investigative tools to use in the fight against what some have called a "tsunami" of child sexual assault material online. Dalins is the co-director of AiLecs lab, a collaboration between Monash University and the Australian federal police, which builds artificial intelligence technologies for use by law enforcement. In its new My Pictures Matter campaign, people above 18 are being asked to share safe photos of themselves at different stages of their childhood. Once uploaded with information identifying the age and person in the image, these will go into a database of other safe images.