Jove
Visualize
Contact Us

Related Experiment Videos

Structure and dynamics mapping of illicit firearms trafficking using artificial intelligence models.

Willy A Valdivia-Granda1

  • 1Orion Integrated Biosciences Inc., Manhattan, KS, United States.

Frontiers in Big Data
|October 13, 2025
PubMed
Summary

Illicit firearms trafficking is a growing global threat, with reports increasing tenfold and expanding to over eighty countries. This study uses AI to analyze news, revealing maritime routes and links to other crimes.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Known and Unknown Transboundary Infectious Diseases as Hybrid Threats.

Frontiers in public health·2021
Same author

What We Need to Consider During and After the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic.

Vector borne and zoonotic diseases (Larchmont, N.Y.)·2020
Same author

Biodefense Oriented Genomic-Based Pathogen Classification Systems: Challenges and Opportunities.

Journal of bioterrorism & biodefense·2015
Same author

Biosurveillance enterprise for operational awareness, a genomic-based approach for tracking pathogen virulence.

Virulence·2013
Same author

Bioinformatics for biodefense: challenges and opportunities.

Biosecurity and bioterrorism : biodefense strategy, practice, and science·2010
Same author

Transcriptional interactions during smallpox infection and identification of early infection biomarkers.

Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing·2007
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Area of Science:

  • Criminology
  • Computational Social Science
  • International Security

Background:

  • Illicit firearms trafficking poses significant global health, trade, and security risks.
  • Understanding its network structure is challenging due to fragmented, multilingual, and biased news reports.
  • Latin America faces a disproportionate impact from firearms trafficking.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To operationalize the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS) for analyzing illicit firearms trafficking.
  • To develop an automated, multilingual pipeline using BERT architecture and zero-shot prompts for entity resolution.
  • To transform fragmented news into structured, auditable indicators for reproducible analysis.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized a three-part analytic pipeline with BERT architecture and zero-shot prompts for entity resolution.
Keywords:
BERTICCSentity resolutionfirearms traffickinggeocodesnamed entitiestimestampszero-shot prompts

Related Experiment Videos

  • Converted multilingual news reports into structured JSON data with named entities, geocodes, and timestamps.
  • Applied the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS) framework.

    • Main Results:

    • Identified 8,171 firearms trafficking reports from 2014 to July 2024, with a tenfold increase in incidents.
    • Geographic scope expanded from twenty to over eighty countries, with a 155% rise from 2022 to 2023.
    • Revealed a maritime bias, with ports used six times more than land or air routes, and linked trafficking to drug trafficking, homicide, and terrorism.

    Conclusions:

    • This study presents the first automated, multilingual application of ICCS to firearms trafficking using modern language technologies.
    • The developed pipeline enables early warning systems, enhances cross-border coordination on trafficking routes, and supports intervention evaluation.
    • Structured data transforms media narratives into actionable evidence for strategic, tactical, and operational decision-making in combating organized crime.