Using intelligent agents to identify missing and exploited children

Recent high-profile stings and convictions in the USA have amply demonstrated the Internet's rapid expansion and its increasing use by pedophiles and other sexual predators. Unfortunately, inadequate manpower and fiscal support often mar federal and state investigative operations, and the Internet's ever-expanding growth will only make these efforts more difficult in the future. However, modern computer technology, especially the Internet and agent based software, might help ongoing and future investigations. As part of a National Institute of Justice grant, Analytic Services (Anser) is developing an intelligent-software-agent system that uses the Internet to locate missing and exploited children. We focused our agents in two areas: knowledge discovery and predictive data mining (KD&PDM) for intranet data sources and Web analytics, and intelligent search and discovery (IS&D) for the Internet. Our system is, so far, only an alpha system. We haven't used it with a customer, even though several have expressed interest in its usage after viewing some of its findings and demonstrations. We still need to provide a user interface (the system is completely customizable) and we continue to test the various agents over the Internet, in chat rooms, and in intranets.