How AI can help halt human sex trafficking – by identifying victims' hotel rooms from pics

AI is the latest recruit in the ongoing efforts to stamp out the scourge of human trafficking – by helping police figure out which hotels victims are being held. Hundreds of thousands of people are shuttled across borders every year against their will and exploited, most of them young women coerced into prostitution. Traffickers often take photos of their victims in hotel rooms to use in online escort ads. Now, boffins are trying to use machine-learning software to help cops and non-profits identify where these victims are being held based on patterns discerned from the ad images. A group of researchers from George Washington University, Temple University, and Adobe in the US have built a large dataset containing over a million images from 50,000 hotels across different countries.