We are excited to announce that our proposal on “Secure Information Sharing for Proactive Detection of Criminal Activities” has got accepted to be funded by Board Of Regents of Louisiana under Industry Ties Research (ITRS) program by $322,023 until 2020. The project will enable us to recruit two PhD students for three years. Dr. Amini is PI of the project and Dr. Raju Gottumukalla serves as a Co-PI in this research project.
Our industry side on this project is LENSS software company. Law Enforcement Network Sharing Solution (LENSS) is cloud-based software system developed by the Perceptive Intelligence. The system enables law enforcement officers to collect and share their daily observations of criminal activities in a digital form. The observations and the obtained background information of a particular subject are shared with other officers upon their requests. The information sharing helps other law enforcement officers to obtain background information about subjects before approaching them and be prepared for appropriate reaction.
To extend LENSS for proactive investigations, it needs to connect and search datasets from multiple organizations other than the LENSS internal dataset. In particular, LENSS users need to perform semantic search queries over the datasets and retrieve results ranked based on their relevance to the search query.
The increasing volume and diversity of the datasets from multiple organizationsmakes the semantic search a big data scale problem. In addition, organizations generally cannot share their whole datasets due to privacy constraints of their data specifically when the search operation is performed in potentially untrusted cloud environments. To address these challenges, in this project, we will develop an architecture to enable efficient (i.e., real-time) and secure semantic search that operates on encrypted datasets in cloud.
Extending LENSS with the new features through this funding will improve the security of the state of Louisiana and the law enforcement officers. It will directly impact the Louisiana economy in short and long terms by making LENSS a nationally competitive software tool in the law enforcement industry.
More information about the funded project can be found here:
https://web.laregents.org/documents/consultant_reports/fy_2016_17/RD_ITRS_FINAL_17.pdf