Thamme Gowda, Weiqiu You, Constantine Lignos, Jonathan May. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

We have constructed an information extraction system called the Mars Target Encyclopedia that takes in planetary science publications and extracts scientific knowledge about target compositions. The extracted knowledge is stored in a searchable database that can greatly accelerate the ability of scientists to compare new discoveries with what is already known. To date, we have applied this system to ~6000 documents and achieved 41-56% precision in the extracted information.

NASA has acquired more than 22 million images from the planet Mars. To help users find images of interest, we developed a content-based search capability for Mars rover surface images and Mars orbital images. We started with the AlexNet convolutional neural network, which was trained on Earth images, and used transfer learning to adapt the network for use with Mars images. We report on our deployment of these classifiers within the PDS Imaging Atlas, a publicly accessible web interface, to enable the first content-based image search for NASA’s Mars images.

Web-based human trafficking activity has increased in recent years but it remains sparsely dispersed among escort advertisements and difficult to identify due to its often-latent nature. The use of intelligent systems to detect trafficking can thus have a direct impact on investigative resource allocation and decision-making, and, more broadly, help curb a widespread social problem. Trafficking detection involves assigning a normalized score to a set of escort advertisements crawled from the Web -- a higher score indicates a greater risk of trafficking-related (involuntary) activities. In this paper, we define and study the problem of trafficking detection and present a trafficking detection pipeline architecture developed over three years of research within the DARPA Memex program. Drawing on multi-institutional data, systems, and experiences collected during this time, we also conduct post hoc bias analyses and present a bias mitigation plan. Our findings show that, while automatic trafficking detection is an important application of AI for social good, it also provides cautionary lessons for deploying predictive machine learning algorithms without appropriate de-biasing. This ultimately led to integration of an interpretable solution into a search system that contains over 100 million advertisements and is used by over 200 law enforcement agencies to investigate leads.