Ferrara et al.: Visualizing criminal networks reconstructed from mobile phone records

Dr. Emilio Ferrara , Dr. Pasquale De Meo , Salvatore Catanese , and Professor Dr. Giacomo Fiumara have posted a paper entitled Visualizing criminal networks reconstructed from mobile phone records , to be presented at Data Wiz 2014: Data Visualization Workshop of Hypertext, to be held 1-4 September 2014 in Santiago, Chile, in conjunction with ACM Hypertext 2014 Conference.

Here is the abstract:

In the fight against the racketeering and terrorism, knowledge about the structure and the organization of criminal networks is of fundamental importance for both the investigations and the development of efficient strategies to prevent and restrain crimes. Intelligence agencies exploit information obtained from the analysis of large amounts of heterogeneous data deriving from various informative sources including the records of phone traffic, the social networks, surveillance data, interview data, experiential police data, and police intelligence files, to acquire knowledge about criminal networks and initiate accurate and destabilizing actions. In this context, visual representation techniques coordinate the exploration of the structure of the network together with the metrics of social network analysis. Nevertheless, the utility of visualization tools may become limited when the dimension and the complexity of the system under analysis grow beyond certain terms. In this paper we show how we employ some interactive visualization techniques to represent criminal and terrorist networks reconstructed from phone traffic data, namely foci, fisheye and geo-mapping network layouts. These methods allow the exploration of the network through animated transitions among visualization models and local enlargement techniques in order to improve the comprehension of interesting areas. By combining the features of the various visualization models it is possible to gain substantial enhancements with respect to classic visualization models, often unreadable in those cases of great complexity of the network.

Click here for a post about the authors’ earlier paper, entitled Detecting criminal organizations in mobile phone networks .

HT @net_science

Filed under: Applications, Articles and papers, Conference papers, Research findings Tagged: Cluster analysis and legal data, Community detection analysis and legal data, Criminal investigation software, Criminal justice information systems, Criminal networks, Data Visualization Workshop of Hypertext, Data Wiz, Data Wiz 2014, Emilio Ferrara, Giacomo Fiumara, Interactive visualization of legal data, Legal expert systems, Legal knowledge based systems, Legal social network analysis, LogAnalysis, LogAnalysis social network analysis algorithm, LogAnalysis social network analysis software, Newman community detection algorithm, Pasquale De Meo, Salvatore Catanese, Social network analysis, Social network analysis and legal data, Social network analysis of criminal networks, Social network analysis of criminal organizations, Visualization of legal information, Visualization of legal social networks



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