Team: Marinus Analytics | Origin: Pennsylvania | Participation: NSF I-Corps Participant, 2014
Credit: Marinus Analytics
In the last two years, the Marinus Analytics solution "Traffic Jam" has contributed to the identification of 6,800 victims of sex trafficking. While an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Marinus Analytics' President and Founder Emily Kennedy began researching human trafficking. She was connected with CMU's Robotics Institute and, with their help, developed Traffic Jam, a suite of analytics tools that use machine learning and artificial intelligence to "quickly turn big data into actionable intelligence to help save precious investigative time to rescue vulnerable victims." In 2014, Kennedy and her partners spun the research out of the university into the startup Marinus Analytics, which came to receive National Science Foundation SBIR funding in the coming years.
Kennedy attributed her company's success to the support of the NSF: "All of this [success in assisting law enforcement in recovering human trafficking victims] would not have been possible without the support of the National Science Foundation who believed in our mission of AI for social good."