Neurobiological pathways to childhood psychopathology : Population-based studies of cognition and behavior

In the past few decades, considerable advances have been made in understanding childhood psychopathology. This progress is the result of four primary developments in the field. First, both in the research and in the clinical framework, psychopathology has been conceptualized across a spectrum of severity of symptoms and impairment. Second, psychopathology has been studied in the context of young children’s real life parallel to referral settings. Third, studying child psychopathology in large-scale prospective epidemiological studies offers new insight into the etiology of child psychiatric disorders. And fourth, enormous progress has been made in understanding the nature of psychopathology and its biological underpinnings

A platform for discovering and sharing confidential ballistic crime data.

Criminal investigations generate large volumes of complex data that detectives have to analyse and understand. This data tends to be "siloed" within individual jurisdictions and re-using it in other investigations can be difficult. Investigations into trans-national crimes are hampered by the problem of discovering relevant data held by agencies in other countries and of sharing those data. Gun-crimes are one major type of incident that showcases this: guns are easily moved across borders and used in multiple crimes but finding that a weapon was used elsewhere in Europe is difficult. In this paper we report on the Odyssey Project, an EU-funded initiative to mine, manipulate and share data about weapons and crimes. The project demonstrates the automatic combining of data from disparate repositories for cross-correlation and automated analysis. The data arrive from different cultural/domains with multiple reference models using real-time data feeds and historical databases

Critical success factors for OSINT Driven Situational Awareness

A critical element of successful intelligence-led law enforcement operations is the ability of the police and other security services to obtain timely, reliable and actionable intelligence concerning the problem, incident or investigation under focus. As well as traditional investigative techniques and information sources, open-source intelligence (OSINT) can provide additional capabilities for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) to manage an investigation or address the intelligence requirements of a given incident. This position paper introduces the concept of OSINT, identifies and discusses existing effective practices and critical success factors for the fusion of OSINT with traditional intelligence sources. This paper is written as a position piece based upon CENTRIC operational involvement in 14 UK based LEA open source investigations over the years 2015 to 2017

Towards an enterprise architecture framework for community policing

The activities of policing and community policing may be considered fundamentally different from the processes that occur within business organisations; however, at a high-level both groups still require people, systems and processes in order to effectively carry out their functions and achieve their goals. Therefore, through the identification of community policing (CP) stakeholders, the activities, processes and information flows and the governance,training and management procedures all carried out under CP’s remit we are able to understand the current state of play within CP, how we might wish CP to be in the future and the processes that need to be put in place to get there. Using an Enterprise Architecture approach we provide an initial formal description of CP, its interdependencies, relationships, principles and guidelines in order to lay the groundwork for a fully featured CP model in Europe

Maximising the security and safety of citizens by strengthening the connection between the police and the communities they serve

This paper provides a discussion on the objectives, approach and findings of the EU H2020 funded UNITY project. The project aims to strengthen the connection between the police and the communities they serve by providing a suite of ICT tools to improve collaboration, cooperation and information sharing between LEAs (Law Enforcement Agencies) and the communities they serve. The paper defines the underlying concept of community policing, before moving into a discussion about the developed ICTs and the empirical research underpinning their development and the subsequent approach used to test them. Within, we build upon the theoretical notion that ICTs in isolation do little to break down existing cultural, socio-economic and other embedded factors that contribute to absences in collaboration between citizen groups and the police. Instead, ICTs are an important mechanism at can be used to reinforce existing cultures of collaboration and trust, providing an additional vector through which citizens can make a contribution in their local communities, and through which police can be made contextually aware of local crime issues

Application of a new service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm on the design of a crisis management distributed system

The complexity and the intensity of crisis-related situations require the use of advanced distributed systems infrastructures. In order to develop such infrastructures, specific architectures need to be applied such as Component-based Modelling, Object-Oriented, Aspect-Oriented and Service-Oriented Design. This paper focuses on the use of Service-Oriented Design techniques for the development of the ATHENA Crisis Management Distributed System. The function of the ATHENA Crisis Management Distributed System is based on the use of data generated by social media for the evaluation of the severity of the conditions of a crisis and the coordination of the appropriate measures in response to the crisis. The paper presents a new definition for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and specifies the benefits that are generated by the use of this new definition in the development of the ATHENA system. Useful conclusions are also drawn in relation to how the definition considers the different technical backgrounds of users

The Gradual Process of Nationalizing MRE in Afghanistan

Afghanistan, a country torn apart by decades of conflict, is implementing a successful plan for national mine-risk education. Successes, strategies, and at-risk populations are discussed and analyzed in this article

Using Social Media for Crisis Response : The ATHENA System

Social media is now prevalent in all aspects of society. Any major news event is now accompanied by a stream of real-time social media posts. The ATHENA system turns this stream of information into a vital resource in crisis and disaster response for Law Enforcement agencies (LEAs). The ATHENA system scans the social media environment during a crisis, recognises and collects information relevant to the crisis, and synthesises that information into credible and actionable reports. Via an automated process of classification, these reports are delivered by ATHENA to the stakeholders that most need the information: from the LEA Command and Control Centre managing the crisis, to the first responders on the ground, and to the citizens themselves via a mobile application. The automatic extraction of location data from social media posts allows ATHENA to pin-point crisis activity and resources on a map-based user interface. The citizen, via a mobile device, is provided with fast and reliable alerts of danger, the location of medical help and vital supplies, and direct communication with emergency services. The first responder is given the same intelligence along with additional information pertinent to their search and rescue actions. Command and Control have the ultimate access to all information being processed by the system, where their decision making is supported by computer generated estimates of priority and credibility. Command and Control have the responsibility of validating crisis information before it is disseminated to the public. Social media are also key to the dissemination of crisis information. Dedicated social media entities on the most popular sites are maintained by Command and Control to provide a focal information, advice and instruction broadcasting presence as a trusted source. These social media presences are designed to encourage collaboration between the public and first responders and to provide a channel for communication between all the crisis stakeholders. Thus ATHENA empowers the LEA and the public with a collective intelligence, enabling both to safeguard themselves and others during a crisis