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iSGTW 2 December 2009

Feature - Fighting money-laundering, with the grid

Image courtesystock.exchng

When it comes to money laundering, crime really does pay. An estimated 1 trillion US dollars is laundered annually worldwide by criminals moving dirty money around in an attempt to cover up the origins of their cash.
The AMONG (Anti money laundering in Grid) Business Experiment from BEinGRID is set to stop such crooks in their tracks.
AMONG is helping banks to cooperate in order to improve their Anti-Money Laundering (AML) mechanisms. Currently, banks track suspicious behavior with AML systems set up within their own individual institution, with communication between banks initiated only in the case of an anomaly. But this approach can only detect simple cases of fraud.
“Money laundering cannot be dealt with when you look only within one organization,” says Kostas Tserpes from NTUA (National Technical University of Athens), a partner in the project. “By default, the person doing money l

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Feature - Finding a clue in a data-stack

Data-mining techniques can give law enforcement agencies the edge they need to catch criminals and stop terrorists, but they also raise concerns about respecting personal privacy and civil liberties. New research at Rutgers University has lead to the creation of DI-HOPE-KD, a suite of tools that integrate powerful data mining tactics while guarding civil liberties and due process. Image courtesy Jupiter Images; caption information courtesy of the National Science Foundation

Thanks to a distributed data analysis system under development at Rutgers University, New Jersey, the time it takes police to connect the dots between illicit activities across the globe could go from months to minutes.
Imagine that law enforcement officers in Los Angeles are investigating labs that manufacture the illegal drug methamphetamine. Meanwhile, investigators in Chicago are looking into the illegal sale of large quantities of the drug pseudoephedrine, manufactured i

Amelia Williamson

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Feature - Predicting burglary with the grid

Photo courtesy Andy Fox, stock.exchng

Superheroes like Batman are not the only ones who can make use of sophisticated technology to fight crime. Nick Malleson, a researcher at Leeds University, has designed an intricate computer model to forecast burglary rates, which relies on the UK’s National Grid Service (NGS) to provide the necessary computing power.
Predicting crime is a tricky business, because the likelihood of a burglary can depend upon numerous human and environmental factors, all of which affect one another. In an attempt to forecast general trends, Malleson’s model simplifies the complexities surrounding crime prediction by using an “agent-based” model — one in which largely autonomous individuals, or “agents,” make decisions and perform actions which are influenced by the multiple individual factors within their environment.
In his model, potential burglars make decisions a

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Feature - I see crime scenes

I see crime scenes

IC-CRIME’s laser scanner technology will allow investigators to accurately record room and object dimensions, as well as the placement of every piece of evidence in a crime scene.Image courtesy NCSU

Fighting crime with science isn’t as simple as popular TV shows like CSI would have you believe. But those shows get one thing right: science and technology have a tremendous potential for changing the way crime is investigated.
Today, investigators record crime scenes using sketches and photographs. Bullet trajectories are determined using lasers or even lengths of string. “They take a microsnapshot,” said Mitzi Montoya, a North Carolina State University researcher who specializes in knowledge and virtual team management. “You don’t really know what’s relevant in a crime scene, and you can’t go back and create it, because once it’s cleaned it’s gone forever.”
That could change if the IC-CRIME (Interdiscip

Miriam Boon

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Visual

Image - Facevision

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