Grant: Alliance Grants

This project will apply computer science and data science in novel and effective ways to address public safety problems managed by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Corrections, Policing, and Public Safety ("the Ministry"). The core activity of the Ministry is to oversee Saskatchewan's correctional system and facilities, and to provide guidance and support to Saskatchewan's municipal police services. Specifically, the goals of this project are to (A) improve monitoring of the inmate telephone system ("Telmate") by increasing the speed and decreasing the cost of transcribing inmate calls, (B) improve the monitoring of the same system by detecting anomalous patterns of usage, and (C) estimating the trustworthiness of computerized agents. The potential outcomes, besides the research results themselves, are new policies and procedures for the Ministry. As examples: (A) more convenient transcription of telephone calls may allow security intelligence officers to change their procedures for analyzing security threats by allocating more time to analysis and less to listening, (B) detailed analysis of telephone call log data may lead to policies affecting the permissible frequency, duration, and times of inmate calls, and (C) improved understanding of trust in automated systems may contribute to the future formulation of new policies for automated vehicles. The primary benefit will be to aid the Ministry in several initiatives related to public safety in Saskatchewan. The project is intended to increase public and inmate safety by detecting illegal behaviours, facilitating the analysis of confidential data, and reducing the errors made by automated systems. It will also provide training for highly qualified personnel in computer science, data science, software design, data mining, database access, speech recognition, trust-based protocols, machine learning, deep learning, time series, and handling private information.