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Features Editor: Lee Garber, lgarber@computer.org

IN THE

Artificial Intelligence Helps Police Serve and Protect

George Lawton

idly growing amounts of data that they must analyze and correlate in an attempt to prevent and solve crimes. To help address these problems, law-enforcement agencies are increasingly looking to artificial intelligence. Police have been using AI, in technologies such as facial recognition, to make sense of data for some time. Now, though, they are using more sophisticated approaches to analyze large amounts of data from multiple sources and to make their analyses faster, as well as more meaningful and actionable. This is key to improving police work, said Dale Peet, senior industry consultant at analytics-software vendor SAS, which makes products for law-enforcement agencies. Better approaches such as predictive analytics and speech analysis, along with better tools for organizing criminal-history, geographic, and other
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aw-enforcement agencies face many challenges, including lower budgets that demand greater efficiency. In the process, they must deal with rap-

databases, make it easier and more effective to use AI in law enforcement than in the past, said Jeff Vining, research director with marketresearch fi rm Gartner. However, AI systems can be expensive and difficult to use. Also, lawenforcement agencies can be possessive of and reluctant to share information, which could limit AIs usefulness.

Cops and AI
With the New York Police Departments development of the CompStat system, agencies have used computerassisted data analysis since 1995. As part of the system, the NYPD loaded crime-related information into databases and used computers to analyze it. They created sophisticated maps and charts of crime in the city,
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allowing them to identify trends. Many have credited CompStat with helping to reduce New York Citys murder rate. Many major police departments around the world have adopted CompStat. However, the system relies on human pattern recognition and does not use predictive analysis. The systems that law-enforcement agencies are using today are more sophisticated and powerful. And there are many more data sources than in the past, including other law-enforcement agencies, individuals with mobile devices, surveillance cameras, and written documents. Improvements in AI techniques for law enforcement, such as better ontologies for describing crime-related patterns and better techniques for extracting data from existing databases, are all taking police beyond CompStats capabilities, said University of Arizona professor Hsinchun Chen. Chen is director of the schools Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and developer of the Coplink data-analysis product for police, which IBM now sells. Better AI-based reasoning techniques help crime-analysis tools recognize patterns faster. Knowledgemanagement improvements make it
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easier to store and deliver information relevant for AI processing. Improved visualization tools help analysts make better sense of the tools findings. Predictive Analysis Police are increasingly using predictiveanalysis techniquessuch as linear regression, time-series analysis, and machine learningalong with information from multiple databases to assess crime hot spots and determine where new problems are likely to occur, said Gartners Vining. Major predictive-policing software vendors include IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAS. SASs Memex system uses AI-based techniques such as linguistic analysis to help understand the data hidden in the many text documents available to police. Santa Clara University researchers have borrowed algorithms from earthquake research to make predictive policing more accurate in a system that the Santa Cruz (California) Police Department is testing. The scientists looked at models describing the way in which earthquakes tend to cause aftershocks in nearby areas. They found that, in some cases, criminal activity was also likely to have repercussions in predictable areas, such as gang violence sparking retaliation. Santa Clara University assistant professor George Mohler said his research team improved the computational models that describe how criminals are likely to behave in the future based on past experience and environmental factors such as the time of day. Their approach uses AI techniques such as intelligent agents, point processes for determining probabilities, stochastic networks, and reaction-diffusion models. Reaction-diffusion models typically explain how the concentration
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of one or more substances distributed in space changes under the influence of chemical reactions and diffusion. The same approach could also be applied to the way crime is affected by external factors such as the weather. IBMs Crime Information Warehouse IBMs Crime Information Warehouse integrates existing crime-incident data with various backend databases to improve police effectiveness. The system analyzes new information and lets police analyze trends or perform predictive analytics to identify crime tendencies. Police can view data based on various factorsincluding location, priority, and offender-victim relationshipto help make better decisions. The IBM warehouse can also aggregate data from the companys Smart Surveillance System, which uses machine vision to analyze content from a network of video cameras. Analysis of CommunitySupplied Data Cummings Engineering is working with law-enforcement officers on the companys Grass Roots Intelligence Program. The GRIP software platform extends the neighborhood-watch concept by collecting data from human sources, assessing the informations credibility, and automatically directing it to the most appropriate official, explained CEO Darren Cummings. Community residents can report possible criminal activity via a free GRIP application on their smartphones or other mobile devices, as Figure 1 shows. GRIPs software analyzes and evaluates these reports, makes connections that might not be obvious, and produces actionable intelligence. GRIP technology uses AI-based techniques such as neural networks
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Figure 1. Cummings Engineerings Grass Roots Intelligence Program. GRIP lets community residents report possible criminal activity via a free application on their mobile devices. Police use AI-based software to evaluate such reports.

and predictive queries, which automatically generate reports from common questions a criminal investigator will likely have in a given situation. GRIP also uses data fusion to combine, organize, and analyze information from multiple sources. Video Analysis Machine-vision technology is helping agencies act on the vast amount of video they gather, from both public and private sources. For example, vision analysis is helping police stop shoplifting rings, which can be difficult to break up because they frequently steal items from stores in multiple jurisdictions. In such cases, said Roseville (California) Police Department Sergeant Darrin DeFreece, the department works with the 3VR Video Intelligence Management System
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(www.3vr.com). 3V Rs machinevision-analysis and indexing software uses machine vision to parse and index raw video from multiple cameras, making the material easier to analyze or share. The software can recognize faces, license plates, and object movement. Approximately 2,500 members from law enforcement agencies, banks, and retailers share such information via 3VRs CrimeDex network. DeFreece said these kinds of systems have helped make his 117-member departmentwhich has lost 10 percent of its police personnel over the last two yearsmore efficient. In one recent case, he noted, the agency shared a photo of a suspect identified by the 3VR software via CrimeDex. The mans parole officer in another county recognized him, which led to his arrest. Avatar on the Border University of Arizona researchers are combining data from multiple sensors and using AI techniques such as natural-language processing and vocal

analysis to try to identify deceptive behavior from people trying to cross national borders. The groups Avatar prototype kiosk monitors subjects via multiple cameras that use techniques such as machine vision to record and analyze data about factors like eyepupil size, voice tone, and words used. University of Arizona professor Jay Nunamaker said Avatar could be useful in areas other than border security, such as police interrogations and job interviews.

An Arresting Future
AI use by law-enforcement agencies appears likely to grow. The increase in smartphone adoption and users ability to send video and other information to police could make utilizing AI to analyze the data even more important. However, said Roseville Sgt. DeFreece, using AI techniques in law enforcement will require agencies to better coordinate with one another and with other departments in their jurisdictions. For example, he

explained, every stop light in his city has a camera, but they are typically watched only by traffic-signal technicians. His agency could benefit by working more closely with those technicians, he explained. Police also face challenges getting data from multiple sources, noted Cummings. Frequently, he explained, the information comes from different database platforms and thus requires time and money to integrate. According to the University of Arizonas Chen, AI tools are complex enough that only the most technically savvy police personnel can use them. He said it will prove challenging to make them useful for the other officers. Advanced AI tools can also be expensive. Nevertheless, the biggest challenge facing AI use in law enforcement is cultural, said DeFreece. Police tend to be suspicious and thus dont want to share information with other agencies, he explained. He added, We will need to get over this before we can take better advantage of the new technologies.

Researchers Advance AI by Studying US Football

George Lawton

cientists have used their analysis of US college football games to create a tool that uses AI techniques, such as machine learning and computer

vision, to understand an activity in one setting and apply the knowledge to another. The Digital Scout Project tool recognizes strategies used in a football game in ways that can also be used in a computer football-simulation game. The main goal was to see if the system could learn to control a team in a simulator more effectively than if it had never watched a prior football
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game, said Alan Fern, an Oregon State University (OSU) associate professor of computer science. He said this could be useful in many other settings. The OSU researcherswho studied film of the schools football games worked on the project with scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, the Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise (ISLE), the US Sandia National Laboratories, and Stanford University.

Cognitive Architectures and Transfer Learning

The OSU researchers note that football is a complicated activity that computers can struggle to comprehend.
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According to Fern, the Digital Scout Project requires deep semantic knowledge to understand how player movements on the screen relate to specific football plays and to discern patterns in the activities, as Figure 2 shows. In addition, the system must use multiple AI toolsincluding a statistical machine learning engine, a play-recognition and skill-learning engine, and a playexecution and play-adaptation engine to yield the desired results. The researchers used the Icarus cognitive architecture to describe the best way for the AI tools to talk to one another. The approach thereby integrates the tools into a processing pipeline that yields sophisticated reasoning. This enables the system to, in essence, capture knowledge from experience, map it from the source domain to the target domain, and use the information to improve overall performance with the latter. Icarus can assess a range of strategies being employed in a real game, in which there are 11 players on each side, and use them in simulated games that use eight players on a side. The DARPA-sponsored OSU project is an attempt to capture knowledge directly from the real world for use in other situations. This is transfer learningacquiring knowledge in one domain and using it to improve performance in anotherrather than the more common rote learning, explained Daniel Shapiro, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise (ISLE), a nonprofit organization dedicated to research and education in machine learning, AI, and cognitive science. In the past, researchers have looked at utilizing cognitive architectures to use knowledge learned from one body of texts or one board game to understand another. Shapiro said the OSU work is one of the first research projects to use machine vision as a source of input into a cognitive architecture.
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Figure 2. Oregon State Universitys Digital Scout Project uses AI tools to study plays in OSU football games. The system understands how on-screen player movements relate to specific football plays and discerns patterns in the activities. It then applies this knowledge to computer simulations of games.

The system utilizes computer vision to recognize different players, parse the action on the game video, and produce activity labelssuch as running, blocking, passing, and receiving about what players are doing. This results in a symbolic representation of the game, which the system uses to develop optimal plays and control players in the videogame.

Moving Forward
Fern said technologies such as OSUs could be useful in many applications, particularly those involving complex activities not organized optimally. For example, he explained, in a factory, you would like a robot to do more than just replicate an exact motion.
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You want it to understand that if an object is in the way of a task, the robot needs to move it first. Moreover, the learning capabilities could enable systems that improve security monitoring, interpret elderly peoples movements to make sure they havent fallen, or improve a factorys workflow. The OSU system could also help football coaches determine opposing teams strategies. The researchers are working with an undisclosed company to develop such a tool. Transfer learning isnt appropriate in all cases, however, and sometimes can interfere with the learning process, Fern noted. For example, transfer learning might not work well between two completely different domains.
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