Page 44 - FCW, November, December 2018

Public Sector Innovations
PROJECT: Violent Criminal Apprehension Program FBI
A proven program, rebuilt
from the ground up
The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) isn’t new, but the cloud has given it a makeover worthy of a witness protection program.
Rather than replacing a tool built on
a now-unsupported solution, Program Manager Nathan Graham and his team decided to revamp it, move it to the cloud and switch to open-source Elasticsearch technology.
ViCAP helps 2,500 users identify and
stop violent serial criminals by linking seemingly unconnected crimes. Graham said the program is gaining a new graphical user interface, improved search capabilities, integrated geospatial search and analysis, interactive timelines and anomaly detection.
“Let’s say the crime analyst searches a set of cases for unidentified remains in a state, and that some significant portion of the cases have a unique weapon as evidence,” he said. “That anomaly would be made visible as an unasked theme. The analyst did not ask. The crime analyst could pin the query, and when additional cases involving evidence of that type occur, the system alerts.”
The bureau applied an extract, transform, load process to update ViCAP and hired part-time subject-matter experts to produce a prototype in six weeks. It was built using an Elasticsearch instance created in Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud that pulls data from ViCAP’s Oracle database and transforms it for compatibility with Elasticsearch so that it can be formatted for querying, reporting and visualization.
For now, a 32-bit Microsoft FAST Search Server is still in play, but the Oracle database is scheduled to be updated by AWS while Graham makes more tweaks before moving a minimally upgraded version of the tool into production.
PROJECT: Virtual Situation Room
City of Independence, Ore.
When smart cities meet
event management
Unsurprisingly, the city of Independence, Ore., goes all out on the nation’s birthday, hosting a four-day event that doubles its population of about 10,000. Management of the celebration has largely been left to volunteers, but this year, they got some digital help.
“Our problem was how do we most effectively deploy staff during this very large event where it’s just madness and craziness, and how do we keep track of all the information?” said Jason Kistler, the city’s IT manager.
The answer was the WiseTown Situation Room, an event management tool created by the city and software development company TeamDev. Kistler likened it to a computer- aided dispatch system. During the event, the tool automatically ingested real-time traffic information, surveillance video and geo- referenced social media posts and shared them on a central dashboard.
“We had an app that ran on all volunteers’ smartphones [and] all city staff smartphones, and that enabled us to track their locations within the event,” Kistler said. “When an issue would come up, we could assign the nearest person...who was available.”
The city also used internet-of-things technology to monitor the crowds and collect demographic information. Using sensors at the entrance gates, officials could track the number of people entering and leaving, along with their age groups and genders.
It was a vast improvement over operations in the past. “Usually, volunteers are just running around putting out fires that they see,” Kistler said.
PROJECT: Wake County Tax Assessment Model
Wake County, N.C., Revenue Department
More science, less art in
property assessments
By using analytics and machine learning to assess real property values, Wake County, N.C., is removing much of the human subjectivity from the process, resulting in more accurate numbers and cost savings.
Machine learning software from SAS crunches data on the county’s 400,000 properties. That data includes more than 140 variables such as square footage, exterior finish, neighborhood and number of bathrooms. The software uses a sophisticated algorithm to turn around estimations in minutes.
“It’s important to note that the method we are utilizing to assess properties hasn’t changed,” said Marcus Kinrade, the county’s revenue director. All counties must still comply with the state’s General Statutes and use a uniform schedule of values, standards and rules.
“That being said,” he added, “there is a
lot of subjective analysis performed by our appraisers when applying the schedule
of values, particularly in a market where property values are increasing rapidly. The SAS machine learning models only consider the data, and there is no emotion or human judgment involved. So as a tool providing a check and balance to the work our appraisers are doing, it’s invaluable.”
The department has also used the software to review the boundaries of valuation control areas, or groups of similar properties. “The real benefit is we have a completely objective tool to either validate or possibly invalidate the historical appraisal techniques our office performs,” Kinrade said.
The software is saving the county money because appraisers can work from the office rather than in the field, and the department has had to hire fewer contractors because its employees are more productive.
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“As we go forward, we hope to save