This project was intended to develop a first partnership between Pegasus Research & Technologies (PRT) and RALI in the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for helping first responders in an emergency situation to quickly fill out suspicious activity reports.

Suspicious Activity Reporting refers to the process by which members of the law enforcement and public safety communities as well as members of the general population communicate potentially suspicious or unlawful incidents to the appropriate authorities. SAR has been identified as one part of a broader Information Sharing Environment (ISE). The ISE initiative builds upon the foundational work by the US Departments of Justice and Homeland Security that have collaborated to create the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM).

The approach of the project has been to introduce artificial Intelligence technologies: 1) to enhance human-machine interactions, to get information into the system more rapidly and also to make it more readily available to the users; and 2) for advanced machine processing to data validation, fusion and inference to be performed on data collected from multiple sources.

We developed a prototype for a specialized editor allowing a user-friendly interaction to create SARs. The prototype is called XSDGuide. A demo video is available here.

This project (from November 2014 to March 2015) was supported by an Engage Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.