Taming technology

"You always hope that your work will eventually be used do some good in the world, and this was an amazing chance to make that hope real by creating tools that have the potential to aid investigations of child predators, find child victims and reduce the flow of child pornography on the Internet."


Kudos to Shumeet Baluja, Research Scientist and their team at Google. They are taming the technology to work for humanity and not against it. I have always believed that every technology was developed with all good intentions until it got into the wrong hands. The internet is an ocean of knowledge for many but for some it is a means seeking sadistic, inhumane pleasure knowing well that it is killing their own souls and also that of the innocent child. Many are minting money out of this appalling business and the world stands by, having lost all sensitivity.

Now the team at Google are building softwares to find child victims. This would also deter these criminals from posting pornographic material online so blatantly.

Since it was founded in 1984, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has reported more than 570,000 child exploitation leads to law enforcement agencies and assisted with more than 140,900 missing child cases, resulting in the recovery of more than 124,500 children.

The advent of the Internet has unfortunately provided child predators with a new avenue to exploit children. In August 2006, we joined NCMEC's Technology Coalition Against Child Pornography, teaming up with other tech industry companies to develop solutions that hinder predators' ability to use the Internet to exploit children or traffic in child pornography.

Shumeet Baluja, Ph.D., is currently a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, where he works on a broad set of topics ranging from image processing and machine learning to wireless application development and user interaction measurement. Shumeet was formerly the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of JAMDAT Mobile, Inc., where he oversaw all aspects of technology initiation, development and deployment.