Isis Solutions

Drawing upon expertise in monitoring, natural language analysis, child protection and ethics — Isis will develop a toolkit that will help law enforcement agencies identify paedophiles that are active in online social networks.

Specifically, the Isis toolkit will:

· Assist in indentifying paedophiles active on chat sites. Novel natural language techniques will be developed and used to analyse online conversations. Principally, these will allow suspicious behaviour to be flagged up but, in addition, they will also assist in identifying already known paedophiles that may be re-offending, as well as identifying those who are masquerading as children.

· Assist in indentifying the distributors of child abuse media. The combination of monitoring and natural language technologies will be used to pro-actively identify paedophiles who are distributing child abuse media over file sharing networks.

· Assist in the development of ethical monitoring solutions. The development of participatory design tools, the carrying out of field-visits and evaluation sessions with a stakeholder reference group will be used to develop guidelines for building ethical monitoring solutions — not only for use in Isis but also for the monitoring community as a whole.

 

Isis Forensics Ltd, a spin-out company, has licensed the Language Analysis Software that has been developed by Lancaster University staff within the Isis project. Other work at Lancaster University or performed by Swansea University or Middlesex University in the Isis project is not included in this licensing arrangement.

Protecting Children in Online Social Networks