Publications

Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery that involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purposes of involuntary labor and sexual exploitation. It affects tens of million of victims worldwide and generates tens of billions of dollars in illicit profits annually. While agencies across the U.S. Government employ a diverse range of resources to combat human trafficking in the U.S. and abroad, trafficking operations remain challenging to measure, investigate, and interdict. Within the Department of Homeland Security, the Science and Technology Directorate is addressing these challenges by incorporating computational social science research into their counter-human trafficking approach. As part of this approach, the Directorate tasked an interdisciplinary team of national security researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center, to undertake a detailed examination of the human trafficking response across the Homeland Security Enterprise. The first phase of this effort was a government-wide systems analysis of major counter-trafficking thrust areas, including law enforcement and prosecution; public health and emergency medicine; victim services; and policy and legislation. The second phase built on this systems analysis to develop a human trafficking technology roadmap and implementation strategy for the Science and Technology Directorate, which is presented in this document.

Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery that involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purposes of involuntary labor and sexual exploitation. It affects tens of million of victims worldwide and generates tens of billions of dollars in illicit profits annually. While agencies across the U.S. Government employ a diverse range of resources to combat human trafficking in the U.S. and abroad, trafficking operations remain challenging to measure, investigate, and interdict. Within the Department of Homeland Security, the Science and Technology Directorate is addressing these challenges by incorporating computational social science research into their counter-human trafficking approach. As part of this approach, the Directorate tasked an interdisciplinary team of national security researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center, to undertake a detailed examination of the human trafficking response across the Homeland Security Enterprise. The first phase of this effort was a government-wide systems analysis of major counter-trafficking thrust areas, including law enforcement and prosecution; public health and emergency medicine; victim services; and policy and legislation. The second phase built on this systems analysis to develop a human trafficking technology roadmap and implementation strategy for the Science and Technology Directorate, which is presented in this document.

XLab is an early warning system that addresses a broad range of national security threats using a flexible, rapidly reconfigurable architecture. XLab enables intelligence analysts to visualize, explore, and query a knowledge base constructed from multiple data sources, guided by subject matter expertise codified in threat model graphs. This paper describes a novel system prototype that addresses threats arising from biological weapons of mass destruction. The prototype applies knowledge extraction analytics—including link estimation, entity disambiguation, and event detection—to build a knowledge base of 40 million entities and 140 million relationships from open sources. Exact and inexact subgraph matching analytics enable analysts to search the knowledge base for instances of modeled threats. The paper introduces new methods for inexact matching that accommodate threat models with temporal and geospatial patterns. System performance is demonstrated using several simplified threat models and an embedded scenario.