Intelligent data scanner can detect signs of organised crime

It has been developed by a consortium of companies, law enforcement agencies, and intelligence analysts. It includes the European Police Office (Europol), the Civil Guard (Spain's Guardia Civil), West Yorkshire Police (United Kingdom), the Bavarian Police (Germany) and the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI), as well as some universities, with the UGR among them.

Said project, lead by professor María José Martín Bautista and markedly multidisciplinary in its nature, has counted with the participation of researchers from the department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, and from the Andalusian Institute of Criminology. Both of them have their headquarters in the University of Granada.

The scanning system consists of several components (developed by various European research organisations), which combined can monitor the Internet and automatically produce alerts about scenarios that could favor the rise of threats related with organised crime.

The implemented prototype uses the latest technologies in the field of natural language semantic filtering, knowledge representation, data mining, information fusion, and Big Data intelligence analysis.

As María José Martín Bautista explains, the main goal of ePOOLICE "is the development of tools for anticipating and more effectively battling the establishment and expansion of organised crime groups devoted to crimes such as human and drug trafficking, the production and distribution of child pornography, and cybercrimes."

One of the virtues of this system is being able to create a safe environment to utilise the data. The researchers have taken into account, during the whole process, the necessity of preserving the constitutional right to privacy and, at the same time, using the latest technological breakthroughs to ensure the citizens' safety.