It would be just great if Sherlock Holmes from the works of Arthur Conan Doyle was a real person. This detective, who can easily solve the most cunning crimes, would certainly bring a lot of benefits to our society. Yes, only now it is just a fiction of a writer who lived at the beginning of the 20th century. However, no one prevents scientists from creating a computer semblance of such a detective in the form of advanced artificial intelligence. Something similar was tried by the staff of Middlesex University in North London.
The problem with investigating many crimes is that a huge amount of collected information and evidence is scattered across different police departments. Due to the poorly functioning process of information exchange between these departments, evidence can easily simply get lost in the gears of the giant mechanism of the legal machine, which will confuse investigators or even lead to the closure of the case. Despite the fact that computers have made life much easier for police officers and detectives, this system is still far from perfect.
Middlesex University is one of several higher education institutions currently involved in the development of the VALCRI system. The acronym stands for Visual Analytics for sense-making in Criminal Intelligence analysis. The system is a kind of automated Sherlock Holmes, which examines huge amounts of data stored in police databases, builds connections between interrogations of suspects, examines photographs from crime scenes, looks at videos, and then tries to link the studied evidence to each other and come to some inference.
Work on the project began back in 2014, when scientists from Middlesex University received a grant for its implementation in the amount of $ 17 million. Since then, the system has acquired new abilities and gradually developed. VALCRI examines the personal files of criminals and divides their patterns of behavior into separate categories. According to the criminal's handwriting, the system will almost instantly offer investigators several of the most suitable candidates who were capable of committing the crime. Moreover, the information will be offered to police officers in an intuitive and very user-friendly graphical interface.
The system is currently undergoing preliminary testing in the UK. But it is possible that over time the system will be adopted by other states as well.
SERGEY GRAY
