Newsletter #2 - SPIRIT PROTOTYPE 2

SPIRIT has entered the final stage of development. Now is the time for all partners to make the extra mile and strive to render superior excellence, in this very demanding and yet simple in its perception research and innovation project. A word on recent achievements:

Following the delivery of:

a rapid end users’ prototype (M12) (Year 1 Prototype, July 2019)

a proof of concept prototype (M18) (an updated Year 1 Prototype deployed to end users, March 2020);

the foundational baseline system (M24) Year 2 Prototype, involving new image related services has been deployed to LEA premises after a period of consolidation. To that end, in December 2020, SPIRIT delivered to LEAs the Year 2 Prototype, successfully deploying it to: Thames Valley Police UK, West Midlands Police UK and STAD Antwerp Police BE. In following, within January 2021, the system was deployed to the Hellenic Border Police GR. Evaluation and assessment of the current build is ongoing and the LEAs remain committed to working in partnership with technical partners to maximise SPIRIT tools capability and to scope further developmental opportunities to enhance and refine the end user experience. Deployment to other partner LEAs (Polish Police Academy and the Serbian Police) are still facing some practical and legal issues. Nonetheless an Early Adopters Forum has been established, where the SPIRIT-Tools platform will be presented for evaluation. In the upcoming period SPIRIT will be upgrading the system to the final system backbone. (M30), to involve new services employing machine learning techniques to act as consultation tools suggesting stronger evidential links among extracted social graphs objects. We will inform you of this exciting evolution in the next Newsletter bulletin.

Stay Safe wherever you are!!

Costas Davarakis,

SPIRIT Technical Coordinator (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Face Recognition Tools

One of the major new functionalities was the introduction of face recognitions tools into the SPRIIT platform. Investigators can enable and apply the new tools to any data source currently available in the SPIRIT system. Due to a unified data processing approach the tools can easily be applied to other new data sources that might be integrated into SPIRIT in the future as well. Prototype 2 already introduces such new data source by now allowing investigators to upload media data (e.g. face image) and include into the data set under investigation. The face recognition process itself is divided into two stages. The first stage is what we call face extraction. When ingesting new data into the system, e.g. by issuing a crawling, a refined search task or a file upload, SPIRIT runs the extraction on that data and detects the face region in images and classifies the age and gender. The second stage is the actual face matching phase. Here the system provides fine grained (down to the face level) selection of the query face as well as the set of faces to match against the query face(s). SPIRIT implements the face recognition tool with privacy and ethical constraints in mind. The tools ensure that no data is stored that is unlikely to contribute to the case (e.g. have a low matching similarity value). In addition, the face recognition tools do not automatically draw any conclusion based on the results. Each step (data selection, face matching selection, face matching) is designed with a human in the loop who needs to make the final assumptions.

Early Adopters

What does this mean. The 2nd year prototype is now with our Policing partners and is currently being evaluated with a view to eliciting comments and suggestions for further improvement. At this stage we are inviting Police and related agencies to be a part of our Early Adopter community; to receive the SPIRITplatform, utilise its functionality and provide suitable feedback for our Research and Developers. We already welcome two Early Adopter partners: the Belgium Police Zone Rupel and the Ministry of the Interior of Croatia. Once all administration issues have been finalised, they should be receiving an enhanced version of the year 2 prototype early February 2021.

Some events in which SPIRIT was present:

- SPIRIT attended the CoU - Workshop on Research Data in FCT-Workshop on legal and ethical clarifications- VC, on June 2020. Webinar.

- SPIRIT attended the CoU - FCT Workshop on Organised Crime and Cybercrime: Synergies, Complementarities, Platforms, on June 2020. Webinar

- SPIRIT presented the second Year prototype platform at the UIA ‘Be Feel Secure’ Workshop Organised by The City of Piraeus and the Hellenic Police on July 15th, 2020. Conventional Workshop.

- Michael Phillips, Hassan B. Kazemian from London Metropolitan University, partners of SPIRIT project and Mohammad Hossein Amirhosseini from University of East London, presented the paper "A Rule and Graph-Based Approach for Targeted Identity Resolution on Policing Data", at the 2020 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI), that took place in Canberra, Australia.