Announcing: Thorn’s San Francisco Innovation Lab

The core mission of our work at Thorn revolves around using innovative technology to end the sexual exploitation of children. That’s why today we’re very proud to announce the launch of the Innovation Lab — a new think tank in San Francisco that will gather a team of engineers and data scientists to develop partnerships and create proactive tools to stop the sexual abuse of children.

The journey of the Innovation Lab started in October 2014, when we announced the Innovation Lab Fellowships to offer one-year fellowships for talented, passionate individuals with technical expertise. The launch of the Innovation Lab think tank is a natural next step in our commitment to make the internet a more hostile environment for child predators.

Explore. Experiment. Think Big.

The new team will gather to find solutions to a key set of challenges, including how to improve industry collaboration to identify child abusers, how facial recognition can be scaled to identify victims, and more.

Thorn co-founder Ashton Kutcher explained the motivation behind the Innovation Lab to CNNMoney: “We realized we weren’t moving fast enough. If we really want to get into the deeper side of this, we have to be as nimble as the people exploiting these children.”

The San Francisco Lab will allow us to bring together experts like never before, housing them under one roof for the kind of rapid innovation it will take to make an impact in the fight against child sexual exploitation.

The Innovation Lab wouldn’t be possible without the support of our partners including Google, Expedia, IAC, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon Web Services, Pinterest, and Sabre. Partners will not only provide financial donations, but also expertise, guidance and engineering support. We thank you for your commitment to ending child sexual exploitation, and look forward to our continued work together.

Stay up to date—learn more about how you can get involved and stay up to date important news in the fight against child sexual exploitation.