Psychology, Technology, Lies and Videotape

The skill of cognitive and forensic psychologists, communications monitoring experts and information analysts, is being combined in an extensive research project into the forms of deception potentially associated with terrorism in public places.

BEHAVIOUR AS EVIDENCE
The D-Scent Project, led by Professor Tom Ormerod of Lancaster University, has received funding from the UK Research Councils to investigate whether deception can be identified reliably from suspects' movements, communications and behaviours. "The extreme risks and rapid time frames associated with terrorist activities add to the difficulty of gathering evidence that might prevent an attack or lead to successful prosecution," said Professor Ormerod. "It is vital that the police and security services are provided with tools that help them make reliable decisions about who to treat as a suspect and whether there is sufficient evidence to secure a prosecution, since immense damage can be caused by wrongful arrests based on misinterpretations of weak evidence."

D-Scent will provide a proof of concept and system capability that shows how deceptions can be identified and investigated in public settings, using 'scent trails' gathered from diverse data sources. By using a location-based gaming environment, it will suggest new ways of integrating geospatial, communications and behavioural data to assemble scent trails of individual and group activities over time in physical space. The data will also be used to develop novel algorithms for deriving inferences that provide 'true positive' and 'false positive' instances to test deceptions, which can be used to confront individuals during games and to challenge accounts of their behaviour during post-game interviews.

HCI MEETS FORENSICS
One branch of the research will use methods from AI, systems theory and linguistics to strengthen the assertion that if someone has done action X, then they are likely to do action Y. A user-friendly interface to this schema will be developed in conjunction with Lancaster, which offers specialist expertise in human-computer interaction and will enable the resulting analysis to be presented in a meaningful way to those who are not familiar with the underlying guava.

The technological challenges of this project focus on how to make a transition from data to prediction, by establishing to what degree data gathering technologies can be made interoperable. Researchers will identify which information sets offer opportunities to share the burden of interpretation between automated and human resources; and begin to clarify the relationship between data quality and reliable and useful tracking of deceptive behaviours, when using inference systems.

Led by Lancaster, the other Universities involved in the research are Nottingham (location-based monitoring and data analysis – Professor Mike Jackson, Dr Bai Li); Leicester (Forensic Psychology – Prof. Ray Bull); St Andrews (Communications monitoring and analysis – Prof. Saleem Bhatti); and Leeds Metropolitan (data mining – Dr Elizabeth Guest). The project is one of three funded as part of a research initiative on Countering Terrorism in Public places, a collaboration between the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Centre for Protection of National Infrastructure.

Associated Link: Countering Terrorism in Public Places

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