Reasoning in criminal intelligence analysis through an argumentation theory-based framework

This thesis provides an in-depth analysis of criminal intelligence analysts’ analytical reasoning process and offers an argumentation theory-based framework as a means to support that reasoning process in software applications. Researchers have extensively researched specific areas of criminal intelligence analysts’ sensemaking and reasoning processes over the decades. However, the research is fractured across different research studies and those research studies often have high-level descriptions of how criminal intelligence analysts formulate their rationale (argument). This thesis addresses this gap by offering low level descriptions on how the reasoning-formulation process takes place. It is presented as a single framework, with supporting templates, to inform the software implementation process. Knowledge from nine experienced criminal intelligence analysts from West Midlands Police and Belgium’s Local and Federal Police forces were elicited through a semi-structured interview for study 1 and the Critical Decision Method (CDM), as part of the Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) approach, was used for study 2 and study 3. The data analysis for study 1 made use of the Qualitative Conventional Content Analysis approach. The data analysis for study 2 made use of a mixed method approach, consisting out of Qualitative Directed Content Analysis and the Emerging Theme Approach. The data analysis for study 3 made use of the Qualitative Directed Content Analysis approach. The results from the three studies along with the concepts from the existing literature informed the construction of the argumentation theory-based framework. The evaluation study for the framework’s components made use of Paper Prototype Testing as a participatory design method over an electronic medium. The low-fidelity prototype was constructed by turning the frameworks’ components into software widgets that resembled widgets on a software application’s toolbar. Eight experienced criminal intelligence analysts from West Midlands Police and Belgium’s Local and Federal Police forces took part in the evaluation study. Participants had to construct their rationale using the available components as part of a simulated robbery crime scenario, which used real anonymised crime data from West Midlands Police force. The evaluation study made use of a Likert scale questionnaire to capture the participant’s views on how the frameworks’ components aided participants with; understanding what was going on in the analysis, lines-of-enquiry and; the changes in their level of confidence pertaining to their rationale. A non-parametric, one sample z-test was used for reporting the statistical results. The significance is at 5% (α=0.05) against a median of 3 for the z-test, where μ =3 represents neutral. The participants reported a positive experience with the framework’s components and results show that the framework’s components aided them with formulating their rationale and understanding how confident they were during different phases of constructing their rationale

The synthetic perfect from Indo-Iranian to Late Vedic

This paper outlines the origin and development of the synthetic Perfect from Indo-Iranian, the reconstructed common ancestral stage of the Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages, to Vedic, the oldest attested stage of Old Indo-Aryan. Comparative evidence from Old Iranian, Homeric Greek and a number of other Indo-European languages shows that this morphological category ultimately stems from Proto-Indo-European. In the course of its history, the synthetic Perfect develops from a P-oriented stative construction in IndoEuropean, via an anterior construction in Indo-Iranian to a general past tense with an emerging indirect evidential sense in Old Indo-Aryan. The present contribution highlights the various stages of development reflected in Vedic, but it also includes reference to the Indo-Iranian prehistory of the Vedic Perfect, as well as to its demise in later stages of IndoAryan. The development of the Indo-Iranian Perfect indicates that anterior categories tend to be rather unstable diachronically

Generational research: between historical and sociological imaginations

This paper reflects on Julia Brannen’s contribution to the development of theory and methods for intergenerational research. The discussion is contextualised within a contemporary ‘turn to time’ within sociology, involving tensions and synergies between sociological and historical imagination. These questions are informed by a juxtaposition of Brannen’s four-generation study of family change and social historian Angela Davis’s exploration women and the family in England between 1945 and 2000. These two studies give rise to complementary findings, yet have distinctive orientations towards the status and treatment of sources, the role of geography in research design and limits of generalisatio

A scientific exploration of scenario planning, thinking, and cognitive biases

Scenario planning, as a recognised practice, is approaching the better part of a century. In this time it has experienced broad application across various industries and, as of late, growing popularity as an academic discipline. In stark contrast to its prolific use in the field and academia, is the lack in scholarly work that brings verifiable and robust knowledge regarding the efficacy of the practice. In order to understand the impact of scenario planning interventions, it is first necessary to understand scenario thinking. The importance of investigating scenario thinking lies in the notion that scenario planning has less to do with forecasting (i.e. aiming for facts) and more to do with futures-thinking (i.e. working with perceptions). The mental models, experiences, and abilities of scenario teams largely dictate the efficacy of a scenario planning intervention. At this time, however, scenario thinking remains a black box. The present investigation, first, provides a discussion on how to understand scenario thinking. A gestalt perspective is offered, where discrete cognitive features are defined, which comprise the structure of scenario thinking. The motivation to this discussion is understanding the level(s) of influence scenario thinking may succumb to, in the face of changes to external information. Next, three higher-order cognitions (creative, causal, and evaluative thinking) are explored, in depth, and tested against the Intuitive Logics model of scenario planning to help determine i) the robustness of scenario planning against ii) the influence of the cognitive experience. A multi-attribute approach is taken, borrowing methods from cognitive psychology, behavioural economics, and management science. A form of the traditional framing manipulation is used to measure for biases in scenario thinking. Results suggest that even the smallest change in information can lead to several biasing effects across the tested cognitive features of scenario thinking. Understanding the nature of influences on scenario thinking helps reveal the efficacy of scenario planning for management and organisations.Scenario planning, as a recognised practice, is approaching the better part of a century. In this time it has experienced broad application across various industries and, as of late, growing popularity as an academic discipline. In stark contrast to its prolific use in the field and academia, is the lack in scholarly work that brings verifiable and robust knowledge regarding the efficacy of the practice. In order to understand the impact of scenario planning interventions, it is first necessary to understand scenario thinking. The importance of investigating scenario thinking lies in the notion that scenario planning has less to do with forecasting (i.e. aiming for facts) and more to do with futures-thinking (i.e. working with perceptions). The mental models, experiences, and abilities of scenario teams largely dictate the efficacy of a scenario planning intervention. At this time, however, scenario thinking remains a black box. The present investigation, first, provides a discussion on how to understand scenario thinking. A gestalt perspective is offered, where discrete cognitive features are defined, which comprise the structure of scenario thinking. The motivation to this discussion is understanding the level(s) of influence scenario thinking may succumb to, in the face of changes to external information. Next, three higher-order cognitions (creative, causal, and evaluative thinking) are explored, in depth, and tested against the Intuitive Logics model of scenario planning to help determine i) the robustness of scenario planning against ii) the influence of the cognitive experience. A multi-attribute approach is taken, borrowing methods from cognitive psychology, behavioural economics, and management science. A form of the traditional framing manipulation is used to measure for biases in scenario thinking. Results suggest that even the smallest change in information can lead to several biasing effects across the tested cognitive features of scenario thinking. Understanding the nature of influences on scenario thinking helps reveal the efficacy of scenario planning for management and organisations

Design Management Capability in Entrepreneurship: A Case Study of Xiaomi

In recent years, entrepreneurship has become a popular topic and attracted many young people to start their own companies. In entrepreneurship, design was generally viewed as essential to innovation, replacing the conventional role of the engineer. Unlike traditional businesses, which generally take a longer time to become established in the more stable economic context of mass-production, current start-ups have to face fierce competition and have the tendency to expand rapidly and accommodate the dynamic business environment. Consequently, design management is considered to be crucial to business growth, since it contributes to both competitive advantages and strategic flexibility. However, start-up companies are well-known for their high failure ratio. This triggered our initial research question: what is the role of design in a start-up to support it in achieving success? Through a case study of Xiaomi, a well-known successful entrepreneurship in China, the new capabilities of entrepreneurial design management were reported. It was further classified into three key topics in line with the three stages of entrepreneurial business development. Difference with design management capabilities reported in previous studies, the new capabilities show the dynamic nature of entrepreneurial design management

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNewsStory 2015)

This volume contains the proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Computing News Storylines (CNewsStory 2015) held in conjunction with the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (ACL-IJCNLP 2015) at the China National Convention Center in Beijing, on July 31st 2015. Narratives are at the heart of information sharing. Ever since people began to share their experiences, they have connected them to form narratives. The study od storytelling and the field of literary theory called narratology have developed complex frameworks and models related to various aspects of narrative such as plots structures, narrative embeddings, characters’ perspectives, reader response, point of view, narrative voice, narrative goals, and many others. These notions from narratology have been applied mainly in Artificial Intelligence and to model formal semantic approaches to narratives (e.g. Plot Units developed by Lehnert (1981)). In recent years, computational narratology has qualified as an autonomous field of study and research. Narrative has been the focus of a number of workshops and conferences (AAAI Symposia, Interactive Storytelling Conference (ICIDS), Computational Models of Narrative). Furthermore, reference annotation schemes for narratives have been proposed (NarrativeML by Mani (2013)). The workshop aimed at bringing together researchers from different communities working on representing and extracting narrative structures in news, a text genre which is highly used in NLP but which has received little attention with respect to narrative structure, representation and analysis. Currently, advances in NLP technology have made it feasible to look beyond scenario-driven, atomic extraction of events from single documents and work towards extracting story structures from multiple documents, while these documents are published over time as news streams. Policy makers, NGOs, information specialists (such as journalists and librarians) and others are increasingly in need of tools that support them in finding salient stories in large amounts of information to more effectively implement policies, monitor actions of “big players” in the society and check facts. Their tasks often revolve around reconstructing cases either with respect to specific entities (e.g. person or organizations) or events (e.g. hurricane Katrina). Storylines represent explanatory schemas that enable us to make better selections of relevant information but also projections to the future. They form a valuable potential for exploiting news data in an innovative way.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Distribution‐free estimation of local growth rates around interval censored anchoring events

Biological processes are usually defined on timelines that are anchored by specific events. For example, cancer growth is typically measured by the change in tumor size from the time of oncogenesis. In the absence of such anchoring events, longitudinal assessments of the outcome lose their temporal reference. In this paper, we considered the estimation of local change rates in the outcomes when the anchoring events are interval‐censored. Viewing the subject‐specific anchoring event times as random variables from an unspecified distribution, we proposed a distribution‐free estimation method for the local growth rates around the unobserved anchoring events. We expressed the rate parameters as stochastic functionals of the anchoring time distribution and showed that under mild regularity conditions, consistent and asymptotically normal estimates of the rate parameters could be achieved, with a biom13015-gra-0001 convergence rate. We conducted a carefully designed simulation study to evaluate the finite sample performance of the method. To motivate and illustrate the use of the proposed method, we estimated the skeletal growth rates of male and female adolescents, before and after the unobserved pubertal growth spurt (PGS) times

Backward Planning: Examining Consequences of Planning Direction for Time Prediction

Research examining the “planning fallacy” indicates that people frequently underestimate the time needed to complete tasks, and that this underestimation bias stems from a tendency to base predictions on plans that are idealized and oversimplified. The present research tested a potential debiasing strategy – known as backward planning – that involves beginning with the future target goal in mind, and working backwards toward the present by imagining all the steps needed to attain that goal in a reverse-chronological order. It was hypothesized that by altering the temporal direction of planning, this approach may lead people to have greater planning insights (i.e., clarify planning steps, think of new planning steps, break plans down into important steps), and plan less idealistically (i.e., consider potential problems and obstacles), which would in turn lead them to make more conservative predictions. Results from four experiments supported the prediction hypothesis. Participants assigned to the backward planning condition predicted to finish a variety of hypothetical tasks (Studies 1 & 2) and real, upcoming projects (Studies 3 & 4) later than participants in the other conditions. Further, in a follow-up study that tracked actual completion times (Study 4), backward planners were found to be less biased in their predictions than participants in the other conditions. Lastly, as predicted, backward planners reported more planning insights and potential problems and obstacles (Studies 1, 2, & 4) than those in the other conditions. Hypotheses concerning mediating processes received some support (Studies 2 & 4). These studies are the first to test the effects on prediction of a planning strategy commonly advocated in applied contexts, and provide some evidence that backward planning helps individuals generate more realistic predictions by influencing cognitive processes that normally lead to bias

Lunar Polar Coring Lander

Plans to build a lunar base are presently being studied with a number of considerations. One of the most important considerations is qualifying the presence of water on the Moon. The existence of water on the Moon implies that future lunar settlements may be able to use this resource to produce things such as drinking water and rocket fuel. Due to the very high cost of transporting these materials to the Moon, in situ production could save billions of dollars in operating costs of the lunar base. Scientists have suggested that the polar regions of the Moon may contain some amounts of water ice in the regolith. Six possible mission scenarios are suggested which would allow lunar polar soil samples to be collected for analysis. The options presented are: remote sensing satellite, two unmanned robotic lunar coring missions (one is a sample return and one is a data return only), two combined manned and robotic polar coring missions, and one fully manned core retrieval mission. One of the combined manned and robotic missions has been singled out for detailed analysis. This mission proposes sending at least three unmanned robotic landers to the lunar pole to take core samples as deep as 15 meters. Upon successful completion of the coring operations, a manned mission would be sent to retrieve the samples and perform extensive experiments of the polar region. Man's first step in returning to the Moon is recommended to investigate the issue of lunar polar water. The potential benefits of lunar water more than warrant sending either astronauts, robots or both to the Moon before any permanent facility is constructed

Processing Structured Hypermedia : A Matter of Style

With the introduction of the World Wide Web in the early nineties, hypermedia has become the uniform interface to the wide variety of information sources available over the Internet. The full potential of the Web, however, can only be realized by building on the strengths of its underlying research fields. This book describes the areas of hypertext, multimedia, electronic publishing and the World Wide Web and points out fundamental similarities and differences in approaches towards the processing of information. It gives an overview of the dominant models and tools developed in these fields and describes the key interrelationships and mutual incompatibilities. In addition to a formal specification of a selection of these models, the book discusses the impact of the models described on the software architectures that have been developed for processing hypermedia documents. Two example hypermedia architectures are described in more detail: the DejaVu object-oriented hypermedia framework, developed at the VU, and CWI's Berlage environment for time-based hypermedia document transformations