Prof Simon Andrews invited to talk about Detecting Organised Crime on Social Media

Professor Simon Andrews, the Technical Lead for CENTRIC (Centre of Excellence for Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence and Organised Crime Research) was invited to speak at University of Sheffield Information School (iSchool) where he gave a talk entitled: Organised Crime and Social Media: detecting and corroborating weak signals of Human Trafficking online.

The talk described an approach for detecting the presence or emergence of Organised Crime (OC) via signals on Social Media.  This approach shows how words and phrases, used by members of the public in Social Media, can be treated as weak signals of OC, enabling information to be classified according to a taxonomy of OC.

Formal Concept Analysis is used to group information sources, according to Crime and Location, thus providing a means of corroboration and creating ‘OC Concepts’ that can be used to alert police analysts to the possible presence of OC. The analyst, using a map-based user interface, is able to ‘drill down’ into an OC Concept of interest, discovering additional corroborated information that may be pertinent to the crime.

Open Source data, involving possible weak signals of Trafficking in Human Beings is used to illustrate the system. The work presented in the talk is the result of project funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme.

 

The full research paper is available here.