DISN Wildlife - Abstract
This Disrupting Operations of Illicit Supply Networks (D-ISN) project aims to address the illegal trade in wild animals. Wildlife trafficking is one of the most common illicit activities globally and poses a substantial human cost along with detrimental social and economic impacts, including increased crime, violence, and environmental destruction. The COVID-19 pandemic, likely the result of a virus that spread to humans from a wildlife market, demonstrates that wildlife trafficking can have serious public health and biosafety implications. This project seeks to catalyze technological innovations by creating tools that empower domain experts to continuously discover and obtain actionable insights by exploring the wealth of data related to illicit networks that spread over multiple sources. The project will advance our Nation's ability to counter wildlife trafficking activities through novel approaches for data discovery, analytics, and modeling. The project will also promote the progress of research in criminal activities that have an online footprint. Data collected in the course of the project will be made publicly available through a dataset search engine, making it possible for researchers to enrich data-driven analyses through the dynamic discovery and linkage of previously unknown data, and allowing them to answer important questions. The project team's collaboration with non-governmental organizations and discussions with law enforcement agencies will facilitate an interactive process that can fine-tune disruption techniques and suggest pragmatic real-world implementation strategies and policy recommendations. The project uses an interdisciplinary approach – combining methods and tools from computer science and engineering as well as wildlife criminology to advance the state of the art and build fundamental knowledge in methods for the discovery and exploration of data related to illicit activities with an online footprint, as well as enhance wildlife trafficking research. Specifically, this project contributes new algorithms that provide capabilities to: 1) discover and automatically collect data related to wildlife trafficking from multiple platforms at an unprecedented scale; and 2) use these data to build computational models and study wildlife trafficking patterns and networks at the global level. Through the use of analytical techniques such as crime mapping, quantitative data analysis, and social network analysis, this project will address research questions related to the scale and the nature of illicit wildlife trade, network structures of online wildlife trafficking, and empirically-driven disruption models that can be used to best tackle them. The algorithms are adaptable to different domains and data, support the discovery of both unstructured data and structured datasets, and will serve as the basis for usable tools that empower domain experts to continuously discover and monitor relevant data.
Team

Juliana Freire
https://vgc.engineering.nyu.edu/~julianaJuliana is a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at New York University, and the Elected Chair of the ACM SIGMOD.

Jennifer Jacquet
https://jenniferjacquet.com/Jennifer Jacquet is a Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science at the University of Miami, and affiliated faculty with the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy. She is also Associate Research Director of the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN) at Brown University. From 2012–2022, she worked in the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University.

Gohar Petrossian
https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/gohar-petrossianDr. Gohar Petrossian is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, Director of the International Crime and Justice Master’s Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Deputy Executive Officer of the CUNY Graduate Center Criminal Justice Doctoral Program. Dr Petrossian is also the co-editor of the Problem-Oriented Policing Guides (at the popcenter.org) for Wilderness Problems.

Sunandan Chakraborty
https://sunchak.pages.iu.edu//Sunandan Chakraborty focuses on data science for social good. Building computational models that leverage vast data sets, he applies them to a broad spectrum of problems in social and environmental science, agriculture, health, and other fields. He draws on diverse data sets (news, social media, images, etc.) and uses tools such as big data analytics, machine learning, information extraction, and time series analysis to compile information and discover knowledge that can lead to solutions.

Juliana Barbosa
https://github.com/julesbarbosaJuliana is a Research Scientist at New York University - Visualization Imaging and Data Analysis Center

Kinshuk Sharma
https://github.com/kinshuk1207Kinshuk Sharma is a PhD candidate in Data Science at Indiana University Indianapolis. His research develops multimodal AI frameworks that combine computer vision and natural language processing. He aims to create scalable, explainable, and efficient AI systems that address real-world challenges in wildlife conservation and other fields.

Spencer Roberts
https://github.com/julesbarbosaJuliana is a Research Scientist at New York University - Visualization Imaging and Data Analysis Center

Joshua Lang
https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/joshua-langJoshua A. Lang is a doctoral student in the Criminal Justice program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and CUNY Graduate Center. He earned his Bachelor's degree in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the University of Maryland – College Park and his Master’s in Criminal Justice from John Jay College of Criminal Justice and CUNY Graduate Center. Joshua’s research interests include temperament-based theory of antisocial behavior, juvenile delinquency, school-based crime prevention, theoretical integration, wildlife crime, and mental health within the criminal justice system. Joshua is in the process of receiving his Ph.D. within the following year.

Eduarda Ramos
https://github.com/julesbarbosaJuliana is a Research Scientist at New York University - Visualization Imaging and Data Analysis Center

Ulhas Gondhali
https://scholars.jgu.edu.in/display/n14426Ulhas Gondhali is a Ph.D. candidate at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. His research examines the intersections of illegal wildlife trade, illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, maritime security, and transnational organized crime.

Julia von Ferber
Julia von Ferber, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor for the Department of Security, Fire and Emergency Management (SFEM) at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Her research focuses on applying Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) to measure crime in privately owned public spaces and cybercrime. Since 2018, Julia has taught courses in cyber-crime, cyber-crime investigations, cyber-security, and research methods and statistics. Julia completed her doctorates in Criminal Justice and holds an advanced certification in Data Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Publications
- Sunandan Chakraborty, Spencer N Roberts, Gohar A Petrossian, Monique Sosnowski, Juliana Freire, Jennifer Jacquet (2025). "Prevalence of endangered shark trophies in automated detection of the online wildlife trade." Biological Conservation [Link]
- Sharma K, Barbosa JS, Roberts S, Gondhali U, Petrossian G, Jacquet J, Freire J, Chakraborty S.(2025). "Descriptive Analysis of Online Wildlife Products Using Vision Language Models." Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies. (Accepted)
- Jarbosa JS, Gondhali U, Petrossian G, Sharma K, Jennifer J, Chakraborty S, Juliana J.(2025). "A Cost-Effective LLM-based Approach to Identify Wildlife Trafficking in Online Marketplaces (Data-Driven Applications). Proceedings of 2025 SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data. (Accepted) [Link] [Code]
News
1. Juliana Barbosa, Eduarda Ramos, Gohar Petrossian, and Juliana Freire presented at the Tandon Research Excellence Expo (HILTS) (April, 2025)

2.Gohar Petrossian presented at the 2025 FBI New York Transnational Organized Crime Eastern Hemisphere (TOC-E) Academic Conference (February 3-4, 2025).
3. Gohar Petrossian served as a panelist/discussant at the Wildlife and Environmental Crime Summit hosted by Homeland Security Investigations (September 4-5, 2024).

4. Ulhas Gondhali presented a poster at the American Society of Criminology (2024).
5. Gohar Petrossian and Sunandan Chakraborty attended and presented NSF DISN Conference 2023

NSF Conference Poster
6.Juliana Barbosa presented at the InfoWild Workshop (HIS Conference 2023)
A Flexible and Scalable Approach for Collecting Wildlife Advertisements on the Web
Resources
This project is funded by the NSF