mine when I worked at a local council. The purpose was to help solve one
of the problem's of the Victoria Climbe case. There were reports of the
suffering of this child but they went to different agencies and I think
in different boroughs as well. If the information had come into a
central source the she would have been helped. Information systems in
local government are appaulling and the idea of connecting them up is a
decade away.
The software they selected was called Autonomy if I remember right. It's
an exceptionally interesting and powerful piece of software. If people
knew about this commercially available software they'd be pretty
paranoid about privacy. Autonomy had many purposes but it was being
investigated for it's ability to connect with all sorts of data then get
the information out to the people who needed it. It could connect with
all sorts of electronic information systems including email. It could
also understand voice information so could understand conversations and
voicemail messages. It could even translate from 30 different languages.
Any form of data could be understood by this system then anything
relevant could be sent to appropriate groups of people.
The software could have helped in the Victoria Climbe case through this
hypothetical series of events. A neighbour hears a child being beaten so
leaves a message on the phone of the local children's services system.
The kid's teacher notices the child has been withdrawn and emails a
colleague. A doctor makes notes on an electronic system that there are
unusual scars on the child but the cause is unknown. Individually these
three events wouldn't flag up on the children's social care system and
the child wouldn't be put on the Special Protection Register. With
Autonomy in place these events would be picked up and would trigger an
email contain the 3 events to the local SPR administrator, a manager and
a senior social worker or whatever. The software would work within the
constraints of the poor information systems and ensure the child was
safe. It was the hope that it would have saved Victoria Climbe's life
and many others.
Automony could be used for suicide prevention and perhaps even homicide
prevention. This application would be far harder because of the
considerably larger dataset and the need for access to what would
ordinarily be considered confidential data, for example personal email,
phone and other communication. A lot more people experience suicidal
thoughts too - 1 in 6 in a lifetime according to the UK's Adult
Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2009 - but computational power is
relatively cheap now with distributed processing systems like what are
used by Google or cloud computing from Arjuna.
Autonomy is a commerically available bit of software primarily purchased
by media and information organisations with large budgets. I think the
software costs £150,000. I was told it was too expensive for children's
services at the time. It's pretty damn cheap if it can save 1 life a year.
I would guess that there is more advanced software today in the commerical sector. Military technology would also be a generation or two ahead of what's available commercially. The number of people who have died from terrorist attacks is significantly lower than the number of people who have died over the last few years from suicide.
Of course this is totally screwed by people's rights to privacy and human rights and stuff like that. I suspect that, just like terrorism, those would be ignored.
http://www.autonomy.com/
http://www.arjuna.com/
http://www.ic.nhs.uk/pubs/psychiatricmorbidity07
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