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Competition To Identify Sexual Predators In Chat Logs
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from the University of Lugano, Switzerland, and other universities from the U.S. and Europe organize a competition to automatically identify sexual predators in chat logs. The task is described as: 'The goal of this sub-task is to identify classes of authors, namely online predators. You will be given chat logs involving two (or more) people and have to determine who is the one trying to convince the other participants(s) to provide some sexual favor. You will also need to identify the particular conversation where the person exploits his bad behavior.' Their data set covers hundreds of chat logs with dozens of true positives (i.e., chats where one is trying to hit on another)."
automatically identify sexual predators in chat logs
OK sounds good hate those guys
trying to convince the other partecipants(s) to provide some sexual favor
Whoa whoa who here, thats me and my wife not a bunch of predators.
Whoever would have guessed that the govt trying to get into my bedroom would mean they're scanning my chat logs.
I suppose Target store wants to monetize this too...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Not everyone who solicits sexual favors is a "predator". They seem to be making that leap.
What about an algorithm for detecting if one of the chatters is an adult who's posing as a 12-17 year-old for reasons of entrapment and TV ratings?
What if I am just trying to get laid? Seriously, how does one determine from chat text whether a person is a 'sexual predator' vs. someone who is just looking for a casual hookup? Wouldn't the approach be similar if not identical? I smell a FAIL.
Of course, the results of this 'competition' will likely get support from conservative, big brother regimes as a way to ring up innocent and horny people - particularly targeting young men - online.
Gender based stereotyping, convictions and punishment coming soon to the interwebs and country you live in. That's just wonderful!
She blinded me with science, she tricked me with technology. ~ Thomas Dolby
This looks like a not-too-well-prepared excercise as there is absolutely no definition of what they mean with "sexual predator," except that a sexual predator tries to gain some sort of a sexually-loaded response from the other side. The problem: what is considered a "sexually-loaded response," would e.g. a boyfriend asking his girlfriend for a bikini-picture qualify as a "predator" even though the act is perfectly common and acceptable, do they deem there is a possibility of a sexually-loaded conversation that still manages to say within the terms of "good behaviour" or are all sexually-loaded comments and conversations inherently "bad behaviour" etc. etc.
I have a feeling the whole point with this is to use the results for "protect the children" - politics in an effort to score brownie-points.
While cloaked in "won't somebody please think of the children" language, it appears to me that this project is really all about developing technology to rapidly scan a mountain of text conversations to identify any instances of behavior for which you have a few documented prototypes.
Swap in political activist, opposition party, occupy movement, flash mob, or hackers, and the project doesn't seem so appealing. The goal sounds like they would like to find an engine to which you could feed in a few examples and have a few thousand computers watching all conversations on the net.
Why would Universities participate in that? Are these people that naive? Why not spend the money on education materials, or web sites explaining the sexual predators techniques so at risk populations can be smarter, rather than helping governments build Skynet?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Facebook.
First, "being persistent" (common dating advice for men in earlier decades) became "stalking". Telling a woman she looked hot became "sexual harassment", even when the man had no power over the woman. Now, asking for sex makes you a "sexual predator". And if a woman agrees to sex, men have to worry that she may later claim she was raped.
The "sex is bad" side has won.
It isn't always obvious because efforts to get into someone's head aren't always obvious.
Some people will attempt to groom a chat participant - they will ask more or less innocuous questions, but occasionally throw in one that is just a shade less innocuous than the others. Over time they will push the limits, until eventually some of the most outrageous stuff seems like it's just par for the course from this person. They'll couch all of this in the guise of being a mentor or friend, will back off if their target gets a little iffy, but will try to reconcile and take another tack. When this method is used against a target from a vulnerable population (kids, for example) it's scary how effective it can be and how easily even people who are not in vulnerable groups get taken in (see: people who fall for scams).
Eventually predators will shift to a more active part once their target has been willing to talk openly about previously forbidden subjects, and they'll attempt to get a cam session, phonecall, pics, meetings, whatever. The target might agree to go on cam or to pics, and at that point the predator has them - "Hey, if you don't keep doing this I'll post those pics/videos everywhere" etc.
It's easy to recognize the obvious and unsubtle ones, but it's a lot harder to recognize (from a relatively small sample) the more crafty ones unless you're an outside observer. For example, if I were someone being groomed by a predator as I described, I might not balk at a question as to whether I had pubic hair since I'd already been conditioned to trust that person. But if I were an outside observer it would be obvious that is untoward - unfortunately for many people targeted by predators, no outside observer is there to kind of make them realize what's going on.
As a researcher who often works with young people who have been exploited or put at risk, I've been given chatlogs from predators like the ones I've described above and was just astonished at how things progressed. However, quite a few of the skeevy questions that were asked by predators were ALSO asked in completely innocuous relationships and in that context were not nearly as skeevy. Just flagging based on questions or terms isn't enough - it's a context that needs to be understood.
The goal, I imagine, in the case of this contest, would be to help automate the process of that "outside observer" to have the software check for suspicious behavior/history and throw a flag once it passes a certain threshold but BEFORE the target gets exploited, and possibly to minimize the number of false positives so that extensive resources aren't wasted on non-predatory relationships.
Ethical considerations aside, it's an interesting problem and could be applied to a number of areas where you're attempting to detect non-obvious manipulative behavior in any kind of multi-party interaction.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
And of course, its always more palatable to couch surveillance projects in "Somebody Please think of the Children" language.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Since when is one person chatting with another and asking for "sexual favors" suddenly a sexual predator? If I'm hitting on a person and ask to see a naughty pic this is predatory behavior? If the person is of age and I'm of age WTF is the issue? If they asks me for a pic and I'm interested am I being preyed upon somehow? What if I welcome this, what's the issue? The assumptions here are tremendous IMO! Please tell me age plays SOME factor in all of this sheesh!
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Agreed, I'd feel a lot better if part of this competition was zero (not "acceptably low") false positives. Some backwards places in the world (yes, I am speaking specifically of America) being accused of sex crimes is a Bad Thing and will ruin your entire life, even if the accusation is baseless. It is not acceptable to create an algorithm that will ruin innocent people's lives with some probability, if used for its intended purpose.
Thanks to the incomprehensible network of laws, chances are the victims of a false positive are already guilty of something else, so they deserve it.
And I guess America deserves it for continuing to vote Republocrat.
More Twoson than Cupertino
It's Alan Turing spinning in his grave.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
What, exactly, is wrong with trying to get sexual favours and how does that make one a "predator"?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.