Real time Analytics to Enable Law Enforcement

###Business Problem and Example Use Case

Law enforcement agencies across the country and world strive to leverage timely information to proactively to address issues and act in time. Given the increasing importance of social media in communication and collaboration among individuals, social media can provide key and timely insights to help law enforcement agencies act quickly as well as provide insights previously not possible. For example, one large US city established a command and control center where they could monitor, for a given geography, social media activity around specific key words. For a major event, city security officials, police, fire and event management officials were able to monitor social media activity around specific words of interest. Real-time analytics were used to capture and process specific key words and event data, and then visualize them for each group based on their area of interest. The activity was monitored for a given geographic area based on geographic tags in tweets where available. Sample data and application to be provided.

###Suggested Hacks Possible use case extensions/ideas/challenges for hackers to consider

A pre-built list of key words was being monitored in this use case. New words are created all the time in social media. How can we proactively identify new words of interest to suggest words that law enforcement officials should be monitoring based on trends, patterns, etc. Automatic detection of emerging trends and constructing a self building key word list to monitor could extend this use case. How can we correlate the information from the social media sources with other data sources to provide new insights? For example, how could weather patterns influence the situation? The InfoSphere Streams Commodity Purchasing Sample application could be hacked to ingest weather temperatures and/or weather alerts.
Documentation at: http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/streams/v3r2/topic/com.ibm.swg.im.infosphere.streams.commodity-sample.doc/tasks/sample-container.html

1. How can we monitor multiple locations to determine issues/threats?
2. Possible visualization extension: Decrease or increase keywords across a given time interval (1 min or 5 min intervals.)
3. What other ways can real-time analytics of big data help law enforcement?
4. How do we handle spam?