Speaking & Press
Ms. Emily Kennedy has a deep wealth of experience with thought leadership, awareness-building, and press engagements regarding topics of human trafficking, artificial intelligence, and social impact.
“Emily is deceptive. Here is this likeable young woman who seems very pleasant and harmless. Then she starts speaking and her passion, commitment, and intellect come shining through, and she ends up bringing tears to the eyes of the audience and people to their feet in a standing ovation. She is a major voice for her generation combining technology with social good. She does so with a spirit of grace and compelling curiosity that envelop the listener in a subtle yet very powerful way. ”
Dietrich College Alumna Fights Human Trafficking With AI
For some students, a senior honors thesis can become much more than a capstone project. Emily Kennedy, a 2012 Carnegie Mellon University alumna and president and co-founder of Marinus Analytics, transformed her work into a company that develops sophisticated machine learning tools to stop human trafficking…More.
She Tracks Down Sex Traffickers
In middle school, Emily Kennedy thought sex trafficking “was the worst fate I could think of.” Now she’s the CEO of Marinus Analytics, a tech company that’s helping cops send traffickers to jail...Listen to the Podcast.
This Startup Is Using Facial Recognition to Fight Human Trafficking
During a trip to Eastern Europe when she was 16, Emily Kennedy, founder and chief executive of startup Marinus Analytics, was passing through a small town with just a few stoplights. At one of those lights, a group of children slammed up against her car, clamoring to wash the windows. It made her uneasy. “After we passed through, a friend of ours who was from the area told us that those kids were trafficked by the Russian mob to beg on the street and get tips and that if they didn’t make enough money by the end of the day to meet their daily quota, they would be punished"...More.
“Emily Kennedy received our first-ever standing ovation during the HPE CIO Summit General Session in 2018. Since then I have also had the privilege of working with her as a speaker at our largest annual customer event and our annual Women’s Innovation Council. The reaction from the audience is always the same, awestruck and a deep respect for the work she’s doing through Marinus Analytics. Emily is an amazing speaker and humanizes AI in a way that connects with all attendees.”
The Wunderkind
Emily Kennedy was in Junior High when she heard about human trafficking for the first time through a youth leader at her church in the San Francisco Bay area... Kennedy majored in Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. And when the time arrived for her to write her honors thesis, her attention turned to trafficking again...More.
CMU spinoff uses facial recognition to stop human trafficking
“Traffic Jam is the beginning of applied artificial intelligence to find victims of sex trafficking online,” Ms. Kennedy said in a statement. “We are proud to assist the important work done by investigators across the world.”...More.
Thomson Reuter's Anti-Slavery Summit, Hong Kong
Emily spoke on how artificial intelligence and facial recognition have been used to fight human trafficking. She also spoke on the panel, "Technology and Data Driving Change, discussing the next generation of these evolving crimes and the methods being developed to fight them. See these two videos below.
Stopping the Spread of Sex Trafficking: Law Enforcement Cracking Down on Pimps
A national raid last month netted 150 pimps and rescued 149 children...Software called "Traffic Jam" is helping police find pimps by analyzing their online ads. "It enables us to track these pimps even when they're trying to throw off law enforcement." ...Watch Video.
San Antonio enlists group with elite skill set to take down sex trafficking networks
Kennedy...explains, "we use artificial intelligence to connect the dots automatically for law enforcement. So, with the click of a button, they can just plot this--see when and where this group has been--what phone numbers they've been using.’ The technology saves critical time. Within only a few short days in the training, it aided in a potential sex trafficking case in San Antonio. Kennedy says, "We've actually seen this analysis take days and even weeks off the investigative timeline. It gets them to the victims faster" ...Watch Video.
Study Takes Look at How Big Events Fuel U.S. Sex Trafficking
“It is possible that lawmakers, researchers, law enforcement and first responders who overcommit to the Super Bowl are missing other events or occurrences of large-scale activity related to sex trafficking,” said Emily Kennedy, one of the report’s researchers and CEO of Marinus Analytics, a startup that assists law enforcement agencies working on human trafficking cases...More.
Machine Learning: A New Weapon In The War Against Forced Labor And Human Trafficking
“Every day, there are hundreds of thousands of ads online that sell sex, and behind those are many victims of human trafficking,” says Emily Kennedy, founder and CEO of Marinus Analytics, a Pittsburgh startup that grew out of the research Kennedy began when she was a student at Carnegie Mellon University...More.
The Young Woman Who Created A New Way to Bust Sex Trafficking Rings
Since 2012 Kennedy has been talking at conferences and helping train other professionals. She remarked about going to her first detectives conference and how attendees didn't quite know what to make of her. "I was always a curiosity," she said. "I don't look like a detective." It's true: She's not a detective. She's the technological brains behind a tool detectives so desperately need. And while she has people's attention she'll continue going to conferences and stings, and being that smart and unassumingly powerful person in the background...More.
This Girl's Senior Project Became a Law Enforcement Tool to Stop Sex Trafficking
What started as Emily Kennedy’s senior project at Carnegie Mellon University has evolved into a world-class database that provides law enforcement officials with the tools to combat human trafficking. According to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, “Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery in which traffickers use force, fraud, or coercion to control victims for the purpose of engaging in commercial sex acts or labor services against his/her will"...More.
CMU grad builds cybersleuthing tool to snare sex traffickers
“She got help from some people in our lab with the initial prototype and she ran with it from there. But having the technology isn’t enough; you need someone really passionate to carry the ball … and Emily really made this happen on her own"...More.