Criminal intelligence – Valcri

White Paper WP-2017-011: Applying Visual Interactive Dimensionality Reduction to Criminal Intelligence Analysis

Ms Haider — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 11:04:45 +0000

VALCRI provides a challenging and overwhelming high-dimensional dataset that comprises of hundreds of extracted semantic features in addition to the usual spatiotemporal information or metadata. To overcome the curse of dimensionality and to generate low-dimensional representations of these semantic features we apply interactive high-dimensional data analysis techniques with the goal of obtaining clusters of similar crime reports. However, it is still a challenge for crime analysts to make sense of the results and to provide useful interactive feedback to the system. Therefore, we provide several tightly integrated interactive visualizations that allow the analysts to identify clusters of similar crimes from different perspectives and interactively focus their analysis on features or crime records of particular interest.

Keywords

Criminal Intelligence, High-Dimensional Data Analysis, Feature Extraction, Dimensionality Reduction, Visual Analytics

VALCRI WHITE PAPER SERIES

VALCRI-WP-2017-011 Interactive Visual Dimension Reduction

White Paper WP-2017-008: Improving Professional Training in Criminal Intelligence Analysis

Ms Haider — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 09:49:13 +0000

The training and development of criminal intelligence professionals has long suffered from a range of challenges including the absence of rigorous training standards and a failure to embrace new disciplines or branches of knowledge. This has undermined analysts’ abilities to keep pace with the evolution of crime. The VALCRI syllabus was developed to address this problem by providing instruction in a holistic set of organisational, operational, informational, technological and cognitive skills. We outline the evolution of this syllabus and what we hope to achieve through its delivery.

Keywords

Criminal intelligence, law enforcement intelligence, intelligence training, professional development, analytic training, intelligence analysis, VALCRI Project

VALCRI WHITE PAPER SERIES

VALCRI-WP-2017-008 Training

How Analysts Think: Inference Making Strategies

valcriTeam — Fri, 30 Oct 2015 18:38:56 +0000

B. L. W. Wong and N. Kodagoda, “How Analysts Think: Inference Making Strategies,” Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 269–273, 2015.

Abstract

In this paper we present early observations of how seven criminal intelligence analysts think and how they make inferences. We used the Critical Decision Method to identify the causal mechanisms of how they think and reason, i.e. how they organize, structure and assemble their information, understandings and inferences. We envisaged that this would enable us to design software to support the structuring of arguments and the evidential reasoning process. Our early observations suggest that analytic reasoning is not straight-forward, but appears chaotic and haphazard, and sometimes cyclic; and that inference making – abduction, induction and deduction – are not independent processes, but are closely intertwined. These processes interact dynamically, each producing outcomes that become anchors used by the others.

Keywords – Criminal intelligence, evidential reasoning, analytical reasoning, inference making, induction, deduction, abduction, anchors, critical decision method, fluidity and rigor.