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SYNTHESYS CASE STUDY

Connotate and Digital Reasoning Deliver Law Enforcement Solution with Advanced Analytics

Connotate integrated with Synthesys to deliver a unique and powerful solution that leverages precise Web data collection and advanced analytics to uncover indicators of illegal activity on Web sites and social media discussion forums. This also enables a new generation of tools to combat crimes against children.
The explosive growth of Web sites, message boards and other online media has made it more difficult to monitor and identify illicit activities. Law enforcement has few if any tools to make it easier to spot indicators of illegal activity on the Web to combat this problem. Recognizing this need, the DNA Foundation has committed substantial funding toward innovative use of technology for combatting this growing problem. This case study describes a pilot project conducted jointly by Connotate and Digital Reasoning.

SOLUTION

KEY HIGHLIGHTS
Challenge: Identify consistent patterns indicative of illegal activity in ads and message board discussions, and then build a predictive model that reduces the time law enforcement spends manually reviewing online data to catch criminals. Solution: Connotates hosted Web data monitoring and collection solution gathered precise data from targeted sites, transforming it into usable format for Digital Reasonings Synthesys analysis tool. Business benefits: Unstructured Data Analytics saves law enforcement time and increases their targeting accuracy by identifying online sites that have a higher than normal probability of

OBJECTIVE
Develop predictive models to automate the process of identifying sites supporting illegal activity. Solve the messy data problem online data is unstructured and is often false or encoded Automate the process of collecting the data and transforming into useful format Create a reliable document classification model to rank data according to the probability that it indicates illegal activity Create profiles for unique individuals suspected of engaging in illegal activity

Connotate collected an initial data set consisting of 11,687 online files obtained from Web sources, transforming this unstructured data into usable format for Digital Reasonings Synthesys. Connotate was able to derive location data from the target websites referencing metadata. Digital Reasoning implemented algorithms for extracting specific details. These details were then crossreferenced with location data and resolved hone numbers to produce profiles of suspected individuals. The output was a .CSV file with 6,424 unique profiles, which were imported into a spreadsheet to perform a variety of data pivots to create custom views of the data. The predictions from all of the files belonging to a specific profile were then factored together to come up with a composite score indicating the likelihood of criminal activity. Using this classification process, 572 profiles were identified as being most likely to be engaging in criminal activity.

NEED

Ability to handle a wide variety of Web data sources Ability to perform data aggregation and cleansing on high volumes of input, transforming input into a usable format with sophisticated analytics, resolution and pattern matching system

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SYNTHESYS CASE STUDY

Connotate and Digital Reasoning proved the viability of applying advanced analytics to Web data to identify sources with the highest probability of supporting criminal activity giving law enforcement new tools to combat crime. DNA Foundation

ANALYSIS INTEGRATION WORKFLOW

Business Benefits

Using data collected by Connotate, Digital Reasoning created a model for predicting the likelihood of criminal activity, saving time and effort for law enforcement by reducing the number of profiles investigated by a factor of 20. The solution effectively triaged very large numbers of online files and identified those with a higher than normal risk of illegal activity Based on conversations with law enforcement, this technology would provide them with the tools and functionality to significantly improve their current efforts to identify and eliminate criminal activity The availability of more training data will increase the accuracy of the model and its ability to accurately predict across a wider data domain.

About the DNA Foundation

The DNA Foundation works to disrupt and deflate the predatory behavior of those who abuse and traffic children, solicit sex with children or create and share child pornography. As these crimes are increasingly facilitated by technology, DNA invests in and deploys the latest technology as part of its ongoing fight to end child sexual exploitation.

Solution architecture
Connotate was deployed as a hosted solution, delivering the following benefits: No need for capital outlay for hardware or IT resources The solution can scale up quickly as needed to accommodate further research Synthesys can be deployed as public or private cloud. As a private cloud, Synthesys resembles a typical enterprise software deployment except that scalability is achieved through the deployment of additional commodity server nodes deployed in a hadoop deployment. Through this integration, Synthesys and Connotate make it possible to easily and intelligently collect web content and provide a scalable analytics solution.

For more information visit our website at www.digitalreasoning.com

730 Cool Springs Blvd., Suite 110, Franklin, Tennessee 37067 +1 615 370 1860
Copyright 2012. All Rights Reserved. Digital Reasoning is a registered trademark of Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc. (DRSI). Synthesys is a trademark of DRSI.