Identifying Human Trafficking Networks in Louisiana by Using Authorship Attribution and Network Modeling

Human trafficking or modern slavery is a problem that has plagued every U.S. state, in both urban and rural areas. During the past decades, online advertisements for sex trafficking have rapidly increased in numbers. The advancement of the Internet and smart phones have made it easier for sex traffickers to contact and recruit their victims and advertise and sell them online. Also, they have made it more difficult for law enforcement to trace the victims and identify the traffickers. Sadly, more than fifty percent of the victims of sex trafficking are children, many of which are exploited through the Internet. The first step for preventing and fighting human trafficking is to identify the traffickers. The primary goal of this study is to identify potential organized sex trafficking networks in Louisiana by analyzing the ads posted online in Louisiana and its five neighboring states. The secondary goal of this study is to examine the possibility of using authorship attribution techniques (in addition to phone numbers and ad IDs) to group together the online advertisements that may have been posted by the same entity. The data used in this study was collected from the website Backpage for a time period of ten months. After cleaning the data set, we were left with 123,436 ads from 47 cities in the specified area. Through the application of network analysis, we found many entities that are potentially such networks, all of which posted a large number of ads with many phone numbers in different cities. Also, we identified the time period that each phone number was used in and the cities and states that each entity posted ads for, which shows how these entities moved around between different cities and states. The four supervised machine learning methods that we used to classify the collected advertisements are Support Vector Machines (SVMs), the Naïve Bayesian classifier, Logistic Regression, and Neural Networks. We calculated 40 accuracy rates, 35 of which were over 90% for classifying any number of ads per entity, as long as each entity (or author) posted more than 10 ads

The Novel in the Spanish Silver Age: A Digital Analysis of Genre Using Machine Learning

What distinguishes an adventure novel from a historical novel? Can the same text belong to several genres? More to one than to another? Have some existing genres been overlooked? To answer these and similar questions, the author combines methods from Linguistics (lexicography), Literary Studies (genre theory), and Computer Science (machine learning, natural language processing). Located in the interdisciplinary field of Digital Humanities, this study analyzes a newly developed corpus of 358 Spanish novels of the silver age (1880-1939), which includes authors like Baroja, Pardo Bazán, or Valle-Inclán. Calvo Tello's key result is a graph-based model of literary genre that reconciles recent theoretical approaches

The Novel in the Spanish Silver Age

What distinguishes an adventure novel from a historical novel? Can the same text belong to several genres? More to one than to another? Have some existing genres been overlooked? To answer these and similar questions, José Calvo Tello combines methods from Linguistics (lexicography), Literary Studies (genre theory), and Computer Science (machine learning, natural language processing). Located in the interdisciplinary field of Digital Humanities, this study analyzes a newly developed corpus of 358 Spanish novels of the silver age (1880-1939), which includes authors like Baroja, Pardo Bazán, or Valle-Inclán. Calvo Tello's key result is a graph-based model of literary genre that reconciles recent theoretical approaches

Epilepsy

With the vision of including authors from different parts of the world, different educational backgrounds, and offering open-access to their published work, InTech proudly presents the latest edited book in epilepsy research, Epilepsy: Histological, electroencephalographic, and psychological aspects. Here are twelve interesting and inspiring chapters dealing with basic molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying epileptic seizures, electroencephalographic findings, and neuropsychological, psychological, and psychiatric aspects of epileptic seizures, but non-epileptic as well

2023 SOARS Conference Program

Program for the 2023 Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research and Scholarship (SOARS

Magnetoencephalography

This is a practical book on MEG that covers a wide range of topics. The book begins with a series of reviews on the use of MEG for clinical applications, the study of cognitive functions in various diseases, and one chapter focusing specifically on studies of memory with MEG. There are sections with chapters that describe source localization issues, the use of beamformers and dipole source methods, as well as phase-based analyses, and a step-by-step guide to using dipoles for epilepsy spike analyses. The book ends with a section describing new innovations in MEG systems, namely an on-line real-time MEG data acquisition system, novel applications for MEG research, and a proposal for a helium re-circulation system. With such breadth of topics, there will be a chapter that is of interest to every MEG researcher or clinician

Measuring Behavior 2018 Conference Proceedings

These proceedings contain the papers presented at Measuring Behavior 2018, the 11th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research. The conference was organised by Manchester Metropolitan University, in collaboration with Noldus Information Technology. The conference was held during June 5th – 8th, 2018 in Manchester, UK. Building on the format that has emerged from previous meetings, we hosted a fascinating program about a wide variety of methodological aspects of the behavioral sciences. We had scientific presentations scheduled into seven general oral sessions and fifteen symposia, which covered a topical spread from rodent to human behavior. We had fourteen demonstrations, in which academics and companies demonstrated their latest prototypes. The scientific program also contained three workshops, one tutorial and a number of scientific discussion sessions. We also had scientific tours of our facilities at Manchester Metropolitan Univeristy, and the nearby British Cycling Velodrome. We hope this proceedings caters for many of your interests and we look forward to seeing and hearing more of your contributions