AI DETECTIVES

There has been a spate of armed robberies in the city. And detective VALCRI has been tasked with scanning thousands of records of previous crimes to find patterns and connections that could help track down who is responsible. The thing is, VALCRI isn’t human.

VALCRI, or Visual Analytics for Sense-making in Criminal Intelligence Analysis, is an AI system that can scan police crime reports, interviews, videos and pictures, interpreting words and recognising faces. Its aim is to identify links between crimes that might provide detectives with an all-important breakthrough. These links may be similarities in the modus operandi of the thief, a reoccurring weapon, or similar descriptions by witnesses. Funded by the EU and led by Prof William Wong at Middlesex University London, VALCRI can learn, too. When a crime analyst decides whether a piece of evidence identified by the system is relevant or not, it will use that information to improve future searches. It is currently being tested by police in the West Midlands and in Antwerp, Belgium.

VALCRI isn’t alone – other AI systems for crime detection have been developed to do everything from sifting large volumes of documents for clues in fraud cases to helping forensic teams determine how many people have contributed to a large, multi-person DNA sample – something that’s tricky to fathom at present.