Purdue University Builds Analytics Tool for Public Safety Personnel

Purdue University has built an analytics tool for law enforcement officials and first responders, intending to help reduce the crime rate and deploy aid during emergencies.

A team of researchers from Purdue’s Homeland Security Center of Excellence developed the Visual Analytics Law Enforcement Toolkit, which works to gather data about crime, traffic and civil incidents for officers to analyze the information and schedule community resources, Purdue said Sept. 24.

The tool also uses temporal prediction algorithms to predict criminal, traffic and emergency levels, the university says.

“Predictive and proactive analytics that creates a picture of what is happening at any given time and what could happen in an hour or a day or a week is a tremendous help for law enforcement and disaster relief officials,” said David Ebert, director of Purdue’s Visual Analytics for Command, Control and Interoperability Environments.

VALET works with computers, as well as iPhone and iPad devices equipped with the iVALET software.

Abish Malik, a graduate research assistant in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said the researchers have also engineered a portal for viewing calendar dates, zoning tracts and weather reports.