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

An application of a domain-specific language facilitating abstraction and secure access to a crime and ballistic data sharing platform

Abstract—Crime investigation requires controlled sharing, secure access and formalised reporting on heterogeneous datasets. This paper will focus on encapsulating data structures and services, whilst exposing abstraction, relevant only to the End-User through the application of a domain-specific language. The language is used for all interactions with the platform, enabling non-technical users to build complex queries. The language also increases the platform’s security, by hiding the internal architecture of services and data structures. This solution has been demonstrated to law enforcement communities across Europe as a prototype crime and ballistic data sharing platform.between law enforcement agencies, this will allow information to be used more innovatively

Sharing ballistics data across the European Union

Across Europe police organisations are using numerous systems, both computerised and manual, to capture information about firearm crimes. The Odyssey platform intends to address this issue by providing police organisations with the ability to access ballistics data from other European law enforcement agencies. The Odyssey platform is a prototype system that has been developed to identify standards for the development of a European wide ballistics information system. In this paper, we outline the investigation tools found within the platform and discuss how these were developed. The prototype has been demonstrated to law enforcement communities across Europe and is in its final stages of development

The Odyssey platform: a unified European response to a global threat.

Odyssey is a European funded research project that tackles the problem of analysing crime and ballistics data, taken from disparate heterogeneous ballistic systems, across Europe. The partnership consortium involves 12 members including police representatives from Servizio Polizia Scientifica (DAC) – Italy, West Midlands Police ( representing National Ballistic Programme) – UK, An Garda Siochana – Eire, North Yorkshire Police-UK and Europol. The variety of systems in operation across Europe has been brought about through each individual country having the autonomy to choose its own ballistics system. At present there is no interoperable way to analyse ballistics data taken from these systems used in each European country. At present it is not possible to collectively analyse ballistics data extracted from the heterogeneous systems currently in use. The Odyssey platform attempts to resolve these issues by the development of (a) interoperable data and (b) interoperable systems. In addition, the project is also exploiting ontologies semantic reasoning and data mining. This paper intends to provide a brief overview of the Odyssey approach. It begins by providing a overview of the technology and goes on to highlight the shortcomings of the current state of the art in ballistics technologies. The paper concludes with a potential use case scenario that illustrates some of the benefits of the Odyssey platform

ZFP91: A Noncanonical NF-κB Signaling Pathway Regulator with Oncogenic Properties Is Overexpressed in Prostate Cancer

Novel molecular targets are being searched to aid in prostate cancer diagnosis and therapy. Recently, ZFP91 zinc finger protein has been found to be upregulated in prostate cancer cell lines. It is a potentially important oncogenic protein; however only limited data regarding its biological function and expression patterns are available. To date, ZFP91 has been shown to be a key factor in activation of noncanonical NF-κB signaling pathway as well as to be involved in HIF-1α signaling in cancer cells. The present study aimed to characterize ZFP91 expression in prostate cancer specimens. Furthermore, since our earlier reports showed discrepancies between ZFP91 mRNA and protein levels, we studied this interrelationship in LNCaP and PC-3 prostate cancer cell lines using siRNA mediated knockdown. QPCR analysis revealed marked upregulation of ZFP91 mRNA in the majority of prostate cancer specimens. Transfection of prostate cancer cells with ZFP91 siRNA resulted in a 10-fold decrease in mRNA levels. On a protein level, however, no inhibitory effect was observed over the time of the cell culture. We conclude that ZFP91 is overexpressed in prostate cancer and that potential accumulation of the ZFP91 protein in studied cells may be of importance in prostate cancer biology

The EU in 2007 – development without drama, progress without passion

The development of advanced techniques for fast 3D reconstruction and recognition of human faces in unconstrained scenarios can significantly help the fight against crime and terrorism. We describe a 3D solution de- veloped within Sheffield Hallam University that satisfies a number of im- portant requirements such as operating close to real-time, high accuracy in recognition rates, and robust to local illumination. Experimental results in 3D face recognition are reported and two scenarios are provided that can be used to exploit the outcomes of this research for forensic analysis and for flagging potential threats in counter-terrorism

Leveraging StoLPaN host environment for portable diagnostic health-care platform.

This paper reports on leveraging our recent achievement in StoLPaN project that combines mobile phones/PDAs with the Near Field Communication (NFC) wireless technology to further support a portable diagnostic health care platform (namely POCEMON)