Skip to main content

To catch an online predator: New A.I. scours chatrooms looking for sex offenders

There’s a new weapon in the war against sex offenders preying on unwitting child victims online — and it comes in teh form of a smart algorithm.

Created by researchers from Purdue University, the artificial intelligence-powered Chat Analysis Triage Tool (CATT) is designed to help law enforcement more easily discover instances of grooming online. Because of the sheer amount of conversation that takes place on the internet, it aims to do a job that would be impossible to carry out without an entire army of dedicated humans: To monitor online conversations and highlight instances in which adults are behaving in a suspiciously inappropriate way.

“CATT analyzes the chats between minors and different types of child sex offenders, specifically offenders [who aim to] meet up with minors for sex in the real world, and fantasy-driven offenders [interested in] cybersex fantasy,” Kathryn Seigfried-Spellar, assistant professor of computer and information technology at Purdue, told Digital Trends. “Law enforcement are bombarded with cases of child sexual solicitation, so our tool triages these cases for law enforcement by analyzing the chats based on differences in language, to provide a risk assessment score on the likelihood that these individuals [might be] a contact-driven offender.”

The algorithm was developed by analyzing 4,353 messages in 107 different chat sessions that involved sex offenders who were later arrested. According to its creators, the tool is robust enough that it can understand messages even when they obfuscate their meaning using acronyms or shorthand — or simply just straightforward spelling errors.

In the future, the researchers say that CATT could also be used to teach undercover officers to better portray underage victims online by revealing constantly changing factors like language, emojis, and acronyms.

“This will be a free tool for law enforcement, and we ask that agencies who are interested in testing our tool reach out to us this summer,” Seigfried-Spellar said. “We are looking for partners to share data and test our tool, so we can have CATT ready for deployment by the end of this year.”

A paper describing the research, “Exploring Detection of Contact vs. Fantasy Online Sexual Offenders in Chats with Minors,” was published in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect.

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
IBM’s A.I. Mayflower ship is crossing the Atlantic, and you can watch it live
Mayflower Autonomous Ship alone in the ocean

“Seagulls,” said Andy Stanford-Clark, excitedly. “They’re quite a big obstacle from an image-processing point of view. But, actually, they’re not a threat at all. In fact, you can totally ignore them.”

Stanford-Clark, the chief technology officer for IBM in the U.K. and Ireland, was exuding nervous energy. It was the afternoon before the morning when, at 4 a.m. British Summer Time, IBM’s Mayflower Autonomous Ship — a crewless, fully autonomous trimaran piloted entirely by IBM's A.I., and built by non-profit ocean research company ProMare -- was set to commence its voyage from Plymouth, England. to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. ProMare's vessel for several years, alongside a global consortium of other partners. And now, after countless tests and hundreds of thousands of hours of simulation training, it was about to set sail for real.

Read more
Can A.I. beat human engineers at designing microchips? Google thinks so
google artificial intelligence designs microchips photo 1494083306499 e22e4a457632

Could artificial intelligence be better at designing chips than human experts? A group of researchers from Google's Brain Team attempted to answer this question and came back with interesting findings. It turns out that a well-trained A.I. is capable of designing computer microchips -- and with great results. So great, in fact, that Google's next generation of A.I. computer systems will include microchips created with the help of this experiment.

Azalia Mirhoseini, one of the computer scientists of Google Research's Brain Team, explained the approach in an issue of Nature together with several colleagues. Artificial intelligence usually has an easy time beating a human mind when it comes to games such as chess. Some might say that A.I. can't think like a human, but in the case of microchips, this proved to be the key to finding some out-of-the-box solutions.

Read more
Read the eerily beautiful ‘synthetic scripture’ of an A.I. that thinks it’s God
ai religion bot gpt 2 art 4

Travis DeShazo is, to paraphrase Cake’s 2001 song “Comfort Eagle,” building a religion. He is building it bigger. He is increasing the parameters. And adding more data.

The results are fairly convincing, too, at least as far as synthetic scripture (his words) goes. “Not a god of the void or of chaos, but a god of wisdom,” reads one message, posted on the @gods_txt Twitter feed for GPT-2 Religion A.I. “This is the knowledge of divinity that I, the Supreme Being, impart to you. When a man learns this, he attains what the rest of mankind has not, and becomes a true god. Obedience to Me! Obey!”

Read more