On the suggestion of our partners at West Midlands Police, VALCRI was invited by the C-LINK Network to present a talk and provide a demonstration of VALCRI at the recent British Academy Conference on ‘Using Behavioural Science to Target Prolific Criminals’, on 17-18 Oct 2016, in London. The Conference was focused around advancing our understanding of issues surrounding the accuracy and reliability of the algorithms for Comparative Case Analysis and Comparative Link Analysis. This has obvious overlaps with how VALCRI computes similarity measures, the use of a self-evolving ontology, and ElasticSearch.
This inter-disciplinary community of computer scientists, forensic psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, and police crime analysts, use Signal Detection Theory as the method for assessing accuracy. Estimating the Area Under the Curve (the Receiver Operating Characteristics or ROC curve), sensitivity thresholds, and the occurrence of false positives, help us understand the usefulness of the algorithms used to predict the likelihood of linkages between crimes, e.g. were two crimes committed by the same person. Many UK police forces attended. A joint scientific workshop with C-LINK and VALCRI is being considered for the new year.
