LASIE bridges the gap between digital content analysis and the court of law
Will there be a ‘before and after’ LASIE? As the project proposal was being written in early 2014, it had become clear that the digital content-related workload, along with the requirements law enforcement investigators and analysts needed to comply with, were increasingly unbearable. Analysts had to search through extremely large collections of heterogeneous forensic data for evidence admissible in a court of law. And to do so, they could only count on applications unable to perform complex combinational analysis. “There was a concrete need to support analysts in the formulation of investigative hypothesis in order to reconstruct spatial and temporal crime storytelling, highlight the events, objects and people involved and provide suitable evidence for each of them,” says Silvia Boi, coordinator of LASIE on behalf of Italian company Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SPA. “Besides, forensic analysis required the likes of 3D reconstruction of the crime scene for more immersive capabilities, as well as a standard export format for evidence to be accepted by the court.” The LASIE framework was built to meet this demand. Its automated tools can manipulate, analyse and merge vast amounts of heterogeneous data (video, audio, text, biometric information, etc.) acquired from different sources. These include CCTV surveillance content, confiscated desktops and hard drives, mobile devices, the internet, social networks, handwritten and calligraphic documents. Once the results are available, the framework provides recommendations, guides the investigation process and draws inference based on relevant information extracted from the available data. “Search and retrieval capabilities have been enhanced through the provision of complex query formulations, multimodal search mechanisms and user-friendly visual analytics. LASIE also ensures that all legal and ethical restrictions are satisfied and that the computed evidence data can be presented in European courts of law,” Boi adds. Analysts were actively involved in the conception of LASIE, throughout the duration of what Boi says was a “long and complex project that met all of its planned milestones.” One example of this active participation was the UK Metropolitan Police and the Madrid Municipal Police, who helped define LASIE user requirements, closely followed the development phase and took part in two pilots in their respective countries. Following an excellent EC evaluation, LASIE partners have been pursuing their own initiatives and exploitation projects. “Several partners have been engaged in targeted communication actions toward their own audience, external companies, potential target users, as well as taking part in high profile events such as ICDP2018. Interested partners are also aiming to identify and evaluate available funding opportunities, such as the Fast Track to Innovation support programme, in order to bring LASIE to market readiness and start commercialisation,” Boi says. Detailed market analysis and exploitation plans have been prepared to pave the way to a quick commercialisation of the LASIE solution or sub-components. Partners have developed an exploitation-oriented analytical description of their components. A market analysis of key segments and sectors, related to forensic tools and security services and frameworks, has been conducted. This indicates an increasing market potential.
Keywords
LASIE, digital content analysis, forensics, data, analytics, court of law, evidence
