How Altia’s Innovative Software Enhances Investigations for Locate International

Locate International works with a number of organisations as part of its investigations.

One of these is Altia, a security software company with offices in Nottingham, Glasgow and Reading as well as in Canada and Australia. It operates in 25 countries.

The company has been around in various guises for about 30 years, acquiring a number of other companies along the way until a management buyout three years ago produced the company that it is today.

Altia counts all the UK police forces on its client list as well as other organisations involved in some form of investigation, like the RSPCA.

Chief Technology Officer Dr Huw Bristow l explained that Altia’s work is largely focussed on providing software for criminal investigations - particularly financial investigations.

“If you think about the end-to-end of an investigation,” he said. “There's capturing evidence out in the field - which might be photographs of things, could be recordings of conversations with sources, could be witness statements or interviews with family members, for example.

“And then bringing that through into an investigation and managing that investigation with all the law that comes with it, particularly with the police who need the right approval and the right processes to make sure that they can legally carry out that investigation.

“Our software analyses all that data and looks for links, like people who have appeared in other investigations, maybe locations that are recurrent, bank transactions which are frequent between random people.

“We turn all that into a bundle that can be provided to the Crown Prosecution Service and used in court.”

Collating all the relevant data and making it available to different investigators is important in avoiding the mistakes made in the past. Reports into high profile murder cases like the Soham killer Ian Huntley have encouraged more collaboration between forces and the avoidance of keeping data in silos.

“If you look at our mission, it’s about trying to use software to make the world safer,” said Dr Bristow. “That's something that we believe in and have a lot of heritage in.”

That mission and the functionality of Altia’s software is what brought the company together with Locate International.

The Altia team spent months working with people from Locate International, including CEO Dave Grimstead.

“We worked with Locate users to understand the process that they wanted to go through to carry out the investigation,” said Dr Bristow.

“We recognised how important it is to get information from the family of someone who's missing very quickly and how accurately the family can actually predict what's happened to their loved ones.

“If you can listen to that family, get the information from them in a structured, accessible way, then that can be really, really effective.

“So what we built for Locate was a process that used a series of questions - Where was the person last seen? What was their mental state? Are there any family issues? Financial issues that might have an effect on why this person's gone missing.

“And then using the rest of the case management and functionality it allows Locate to bring all that information together and look for links.

“I think as the amount of data that comes in grows, then you can start to do some more things with it and that will be interesting.

“The fact that we've got police customers using the same software is likely to open up some further sharing opportunities between Locate and other agencies.

“One of the things we've been looking at is where people have already got a data sharing agreement in place, can we notify each party if there's a common link found?

“We might not tell them what the link is, we might just say, there's something here worth investigating. But that’s going to start a conversation.

“The important thing is making sure we can find those links in a secure and controlled way. That’s something that would be helpful to many users.

“We have worked in this space for a long time and we have got a good reputation. The confidence that people have in it is really important and that helps sharing between different groups.”

Altia is constantly looking to improve its software with cloud sharing and they are already using AI but with some caution.

“I think it can be very, very helpful but it needs human guidance and human control around it,” said Dr Bristow.

“Where we are using it in our application, we're trying very hard to make sure that it’s got that human governance around it. It needs to be transparent about how it got to the decision.

“One of the really interesting things is the summarisation in AI. In its answer, it provides you the links to the original footage or the original page. That's actually better than a human. When we summarise we don’t put the footnotes of where we got the information. I think there's actually some kind of benefit there.

“What it is pretty effective at is what's called entity matching. That’s where you've got a large amount of text and it will pull out all of the names, locations, mobile phone numbers, bank sort codes and account numbers very quickly.

“But every time it extracts one of those, it gives you a confidence rating.”

This is to avoid any confusion over, for example, a person’s name which could also be a place name. AI will look at the context and suggest which is most likely.

Dr Bristow is very pleased with the relationship with Locate International and can see areas where the company could help more with investigations.

“It fits with our ethos and mission as a company,” he said. “I think it’s been really beneficial to both parties.”