Case Study: IST Research achieves real-time, data-driven impact against human trafficking and violent extremism with Elastic

IST Research - Customer Case Study

IST Research developed the Pulse Platform to address human security challenges—collecting and analyzing data from hard-to-reach populations and the open web to combat human trafficking, violent extremism, and support humanitarian and development efforts. The core challenge was aggregating and making sense of massive, fast-moving social and mobile data to identify bad actors and produce actionable intelligence for prosecutors, NGOs, and field teams.

Pulse fuses real-time web scraping, SMS-based engagement, and a unified analytics stack built around the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash) with supporting technologies like HDFS, Kafka, and Spark to provide searchable dashboards and geospatial visualizations. The system has aided prosecutions in New York and San Francisco, tracked ISIS recruitment, informed programs in Afghanistan, Uganda, and Liberia, won an Elastic Cause Award, and is being scaled to new countries and customers as it migrates toward Elastic Cloud.

IST Research

Michael Paley

IST Research