Import AI 426: Playable world models; circuit design AI; and ivory smuggling analysis

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Tackling ivory smuggling with image recognition models:
…Augmenting human experts via AI…
Researchers with Microsoft and the University of Washington have used some basic AI techniques and off-the-shelf components to better study the trade in illegal ivory smuggling, illustrating how modern AI technology is useful for a broad range of fields. The researchers used AI and a small amount of expert human labor to automatically identify signatures inscribed into the stolen ivory, which they were then able to use to better understand smuggling networks.

What they did: The researchers built a system "for extracting and analyzing handwritten markings on seized elephant tusks, offering a novel, scalable, and low-cost source of forensic evidence."
They did this using an underlying dataset of 6,085 photographs collected from eight large seizures of ivory. They used an object detection model (MM-Grounding-Dino) to extract over 17,000 individual markings on the ivory, then labeled and described these using a mixture of expert human labeling and a supervised learning model. This ultimately helped them identify 184 recurring "signature markings" on some of the tusks, including 20 signatures which were observed in multiple seizures.

Why this matters: "Within a seizure, the occurrence frequency of signature markings can provide an indication as to the role played by the entities that the markings represent," the authors write. "The distribution of marking frequencies can help uncover the number of individuals moving ivory from its source to where it’s being consolidated for export." Additionally, "Handwriting evidence can also fill in the gaps for seizures where genetic data is entirely unavailable. For example, seizure 2 was never genotyped, but it was exported from the same country as seizure 8. Our handwriting analysis identified 10 shared signature markings in these seizures. The number of shared signatures strongly suggests a connection between these seizures."
In a more zoomed out way, this research shows how AI helps to scale scarce humans (e.g., people who focus on computationally-driven analysis of the ivory trade) to help them do more - another neat illustration of how AI is increasingly working as a universal augment to any skill.
Read more: AI-Driven Detection and Analysis of Handwriting on Seized Ivory: A Tool to Uncover Criminal Networks in the Illicit Wildlife Trade (arXiv).

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