Roslin V. Hauck

COPLINK Connect: information and knowledge management for law enforcement

As part of nationwide, ongoing digital government initiatives, COPLINK [Chen et al. 2002, Chen et al. 2003, Hauck et al. 2002] is an integrated information and knowledge management environment aimed at meeting some of the challenges faced by the law enforcement community. Funded by the National Institute of Justice and the National Science Foundation, a prototype for COPLINK was initially developed at the University of Arizonas Artificial Intelligence Lab in collaboration with the Tucson Police Department (TPD) and Phoenix Police Department (PPD). COPLINK was developed into a product by Knowledge Computing Corporation (KCC) and deployed in approximately one hundred law enforcement agencies nationwide [see for example The Los Angeles Daily News Dec. 6, 2003 and Anchorage Daily News Nov. 23, 2003].

Using Coplink to analyze criminal-justice data

The paper discusses the Coplink system. The system applies a concept space-a statistics-based, algorithmic technique that identifies relationships between suspects, victims, and other pertinent data-to accelerate criminal investigations and enhance law enforcement efforts. The Coplink concept space application, which began as a research project, has evolved into a real-time system being used in everyday police work. Coplink CS has been successfully deployed at the Tucson Police Department, where crime analysts, officers, detectives, and sergeants from 16 departmental units use the technology voluntarily as part of their daily investigative routine.

Tools for distributed facilitation

We have extensive experience with distributed facilitation of synchronous virtual meetings since 1992. More recently, we have gained experience in asynchronous virtual meetings and have learned lessons from which best practices have been distilled. Best practices for synchronous and asynchronous distributed facilitation give insight into requirements for toolsets. Our experience with toolsets, including (1) widely available unstructured toolsets, (2) virtual reality offices, and (3) persistent visualization, provide direction for further tool development.

Concept-based searching and browsing: a geoscience experiment

In the recent literature, we have seen the expansion of information retrieval techniques to include a variety of different collections of information. Collections can have certain characteristics that can lead to different results for the various classification techniques. In addition, the ways and reasons that users explore each collection can affect the success of the information retrieval technique. The focus of this research was to extend the application of our statistical and neural network techniques to the domain of geological science information retrieval. For this study, a test bed of 22,636 geoscience abstracts was obtained through the NSF/DARPA/NASA funded Alexandria Digital Library Initiative project at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This collection was analyzed using algorithms previously developed by our research group: concept space algorithm for searching and a Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm for browsing. Included in this paper are discussions of our techniques, user evaluations and lessons learned.

COPLINK: Information and knowledge management for law enforcement

The problem of information and knowledge management in the knowledge intensive and time critical environment of law enforcement has posed an interesting problem for information technology professionals in the field. Coupled with this challenging environment are issues relating to the integration of multiple systems, each having different functionalities resulting in difficulty for the end user. COPLINK offers a cost-efficient way of web enabling stovepipe law enforcement information sharing systems by employing a model for allowing different police departments to more easily share data amongst themselves through an easy-to-use interface that integrates different data sources. The COPLINK project has two major components: COPLINK Database Application and COPLINK Concept Space Application.

Temporal Aspects of Information Technology Use: Increasing Shift Work Effectiveness

The dynamic nature of organizations and technologies require a comprehensive understanding of how organizational forms and information technology interact. While previous research and theories of information technology have investigated aspects such as organizational structure, individual and group behavior, and inter-organizational relationships, shift work, an important temporal aspect often found in service organizations, is surprisingly absent in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect that shift work has on employee use and satisfaction with information technology. The results of a field study of a police organization indicate that information technology systems are valued differently by workers on different shifts. The authors discuss how this research helps advance theories of technology use and effectiveness (such as task-technology fit and technology acceptance model) and present important practical implications of this study for strategic alignment of technology in the areas of systems design, implementation, addressing the needs of peripheral workers, and resource management.