Patent Application
20130305171
This disclosure relates to an investigative tool and more specifically to a system and method for visualizing and navigating dynamic relationships relating to individuals subject to detention environments (e.g., residing or secured in, or on parole, work release or probation from jails, prisons, detention facilities, secured hospitals or addiction treatment facilities).
With respect to detention environments, such as a jail, prison, detention facility, secured hospital or addiction treatment facility, investigators often have to collect information regarding individuals subject to the detention environment from various sources and compile lists by hand. To extrapolate relationships from that data, investigators have to manipulate this data manually. Due to the increasing implementation of computerized systems, relevant information is growing at a rate where gathering information by hand is becoming unwieldy. As the volume of data increases, important relationships are often obscured. Therefore, there is an ever increasing demand for automated tools for efficiently browsing and retrieving relevant information regarding relationships of individuals who are subject to the detention environment.
Most of the data being gathered at detention environments is dynamic because the individuals in the detention environments are constantly interacting with one another and with individuals outside of the detention environment. It is difficult to determine relationships using dynamic information because the information comes from an ongoing process and must therefore somehow be updated and displayed without causing past information to be indistinguishably clustered together. An improved investigative system and method enabling the visualization and navigation of dynamic relationships is therefore needed.
As described more fully below, the embodiments of the present disclosure relate to an investigative tool and more specifically to a system and method for visualizing and navigating dynamic relationships relating to individuals in secure environments.
To this end, a disclosed system and method for implementing an investigative tool is provided. The system comprises a plurality of data gathering systems that gather information relating to individuals subject to a detention environment; a database that processes dynamic information from the data gathering systems and stores the information into a non-transitory machine-readable medium; and a controller that queries the database and dynamically constructs relationships of an individual of interest from the database in order to construct a graphical user interface (GUI) displayable on a display device.
In some embodiments, the system may have the plurality of data gathering systems also gather information relating to individuals who are not within the detention environment.
These, as well as other components, steps, features, objects, benefits, and advantages will now become clear from a review of the following detailed description of illustrative embodiments, the accompanying drawings and the claims. It is to be expressly understood, however, that the drawings, background, summary and descriptions are for the purpose of illustration only and are not intended as a definition of the limits of the claimed embodiments.
Illustrative embodiments are now discussed. Other embodiments may be used in addition or as alternatives. Details that may be apparent or unnecessary may be omitted to save space or for a more effective presentation. Conversely, it should be appreciated that some embodiments may be practiced without all of the details that are disclosed.
As used herein, an individual is a person, representation of an anonymous or unknown person, or other evidence supporting identity, such as e.g., a phone number, credit card, fingerprint, photographs, social security number, government identification, visitations, financial transactions, gang affiliation, tattoos, traits and utility bills.
As used herein, information may include communications, transactions, and associations between or mutually involving individuals. Communications may include e.g., phone calls, voicemail, electronic messages, video visits, and traditional mail. Transactions may include any financial ties or events, such as e.g., monetary deposits, buying commissary goods, creating or modifying inmate trust fund accounts, bail payments, bond payments, restitution payments, and any other payments, or interactive events, such as e.g., conducting a phone call, conducting a visit, sending or receiving communication. Associations may include direct or indirect affiliations, or commonalities, such as e.g., shared arresting officer, shared gang affiliation, shared jail cell or pod, visitations, a linkage to a common crime or crime scene, a modus operandi, having or conducting shared or similar activity in an external network, site or group, or a family connection.
As used herein, relationships may be connections between and among individuals formed by communications, transactions, and associations.
As used herein, a detention environment is defined as an environment in which individuals are confined with supervision, such as a detention facility, jail, prison, secure hospital, or secure addiction treatment facility.
The system 100 is preferably compatible with a data gathering system such as e.g., the interactive audio/video system and device for use in a detention environment disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/088,883, which is incorporated by reference herein. The system 100 is also preferably compatible with a data gathering system such as the consolidated voicemail platform disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/826,168, which is incorporated by reference herein. The system 100 is also preferably compatible with an information exchange facilitating system such as e.g., the secure social network disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/438,940, which is incorporated by reference herein. It should be appreciated that where a definition or use of a term in an incorporated application or reference is inconsistent with or contrary to the definition of that term provided herein, the definition of that term provided herein applies.
The server 105 includes a controller 103 and a database 102 and parses the information before storing it in the database 102. The controller 103 queries the database 102 to retrieve the information and build relationships about an individual of interest from the information. The controller 103 uses the relationships to construct a graphical user interface (GUI) that is output to a display device 104 (e.g., a computer monitor or other display screen or rendering device) so that an investigator, administrator, a user or other personnel can view and/or manipulate the information.
In one embodiment, the data gathering systems 101 may send information to the database 102 whenever new information is gathered. In another embodiment, the database 102 may pull data from the data gathering system 101 periodically and/or upon command.
In one embodiment, the database 102 may notify the controller 103 whenever it receives new information so that the controller 103 can query the information and update a previously created GUI with new relationships. In another embodiment, the controller 103 may pull data from the database 102 periodically and/or upon command.
Alternatively, the controller may implement a process that issues a warning about an individual based on predefined criteria, such as e.g., suspiciously large or frequent monetary deposits, or an unusually large number of relationships to any individual.
For GUIs 300 that are complex, a filtering feature may be used to reduce results to reveal only relationships that are relevant to a particular inquiry. A user who only wishes to investigate a particular type of relationship such as e.g., financial transactions between individuals within a specific time period may choose to only display relationships involving financial transactions. Filtering may also include limiting results to connection type, frequency, time frame, and or geographic location. A relationship type might be a general type such as a communication, or more specific type such as a voicemail, connected phone call, attempted but not completed phone call, or in-person visitation. Filtering by frequency may include e.g., filtering for a certain number of relationships that may only display individuals connected by two or more financial transactions. Filtering by time frame may include e.g., limiting results to display relationships that occurred within one or more specified time frames such as relationships occurring or ongoing only in the month of October. Filtering by geographic location may involve e.g., limiting results to a specific area, calls to a destination number within a particular state, or visits from persons who reside in the same county.
When viewing a relationship, an individual may appear to warrant additional attention. In this case, selecting an individual who is not the primary individual of interest 301, recreates the GUI with this new individual as the new individual of interest 301; this allows an investigator to quickly change the focus of an investigation and view individuals who are related to the new individual of interest.
Relationships between people subject to a detention environment and others subject to a detention environment could span different secured facilities. For example, if an inmate in one detention environment were to write a letter to an inmate in another detention environment, and the data was tracked within one of the data gathering system 101, those two inmates would share a relationship.
The system 100 may receive requests from the user to manipulate the GUI for a variety of results. For example, the system 100 may receive a request to change the point of focus by expanding, contracting, or changing the GUI, or transform the GUI to alternate between the different GUI as illustrated in
To find relationships shared by multiple members of a group, it is possible to provide a list of individuals and receive a visual display of relationships to other individuals that the provided group may have in common. For example, if five suspected gang members are provided as a starting point, the system might display a common relationship between all members of the group and a single outside individual who has deposited funds for some in the group and received phone calls from others in the group.
In accordance with the practices of persons skilled in the art of computer programming, embodiments of the method 200 are described with reference to operations that are performed by a computer system or a like electronic system. Such operations are sometimes referred to as being computer-executed. It will be appreciated that operations that are symbolically represented include the manipulation by a processor, such as a central processing unit, of electrical signals representing data bits and the maintenance of data bits at memory locations, such as in system memory, as well as other processing of signals. The memory locations where data bits are maintained are physical locations that have particular electrical, magnetic, optical, or organic properties corresponding to the data bits. Embodiments may also encompass integrated circuitry including circuit elements capable of performing specific system operations.
When implemented in software, the elements of the embodiments are essentially the code segments to perform the necessary tasks. The non-transitory code segments may be stored in a processor readable medium or computer readable medium, which may include any medium that may store or transfer information. Examples of such media include an electronic circuit, a semiconductor memory device, a read-only memory (ROM), a flash memory or other non-volatile memory, a floppy diskette, a CD-ROM, an optical disk, a hard disk, a fiber optic medium, etc. User input may include any combination of a keyboard, mouse, touch screen, voice command input, etc. User input may similarly be used to direct a browser application executing on a user's computing device to one or more network resources, such as web pages, from which computing resources may be accessed.
While the invention has been described in connection with specific examples and various embodiments, it should be readily understood by those skilled in the art that many modifications and adaptations of the invention described herein are possible without departure from the spirit and scope of the invention as claimed hereinafter. Thus, it is to be clearly understood that this application is made only by way of example and not as a limitation on the scope of the invention claimed below. The description is intended to cover any variations, uses or adaptation of the invention following, in general, the principles of the invention, and including such departures from the present disclosure as come within the known and customary practice within the art to which the invention pertains.
