Case Study: Thorn scales its data science team and quadruples simultaneous projects with Domino Data Lab

Applying Data Science to Fight Child Abuse

Thorn is a Los Angeles–based nonprofit that builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse, using tools like Spotlight to help law enforcement and agencies find victims. Facing a small core team and a rotating, geographically dispersed group of Ph.D. students and volunteers, Thorn struggled with limited compute resources, insecure workflows around sensitive data, slow onboarding, and knowledge silos that made work hard to reproduce or hand off.

Adopting the Domino data science platform gave Thorn a secure, centralized environment with access controls, standardized compute, experiment tracking, and easy sharing, so volunteers could work on real data without compromising security. The platform freed engineers from tool maintenance, improved reproducibility and collaboration, sped onboarding, and allowed the data science team to scale (from one to seven people and quadrupling concurrent projects), enabling more high‑impact work and plans to expand further.

Thorn

Ruben van der Dussen

Director of Innovation Lab