Thai Law Enforcement Agency optimises investigations with Microsoft solutions Thailand’s Department of Special Investigation is improving the efficiency of its criminal investigations and gaining significantly faster search results through using Microsoft comprehensive Big Data solutions. The Department of Special Investigation (DSI), founded in 2002 by Thailand’s Ministry of Justice, handles serious criminal activities and coordinates with private and public-sector agencies inside and outside of Thailand. Based in Bangkok, Thailand, DSI collects and maintains large volumes of data to support its activities. The agency’s large data sets included more than one million records gathered from multiple sources in both structured and unstructured formats, such as images, videos, and documents. To improve investigations and reduce manual procedures, the agency wanted better business intelligence (BI) and data-mining tools. “It was very difficult to mine through the data, and the results were too broad with unclear targets. This often forced us to send personnel to the actual crime scenes, which cost us a lot of time and money,” said Police Colonel Yannaphon Youngyuen, DSI’s deputy director.  “We want a system that could automatically notify us of any suspicious persons or activities, like when there are many foreign criminals pouring into Thailand and all travel to the same location, or when there is a noticeably large sum of money being transferred in the country,” Yannaphon added. “If we had a system that notifies us about this, we could implement proactive measures to prevent crimes from happening.” DSI, thereby, sought a solution it could use to search for data faster and more accurately and automatically screen for suspected persons and transactions. The agency decided to adopt the Microsoft Big Data solution. It also teamed up with HP, which provided servers for testing, and Betimes Solutions which helped with implementation. The solution includes Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise data management software, which DSI relies on for importing and analysing huge volumes of structured and unstructured data from multiple sources. For easier data mining, the solution also includes Apache Hadoop software, an open-source platform that DSI uses to store large volumes of unstructured data. Metadata is stored in the Hives data warehouse system. The new solution runs on the Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise operating system. “We were very lucky to receive cooperation from both Microsoft and Betimes Solutions to test Microsoft Big Data,” said Yannaphon. “We already had Microsoft SQL Server in place, so this project was like an extension of our previous system.” DSI is taking advantage of enhanced BI capabilities such as Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Power View, an interactive data visualisation and exploration tool in SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services that launches in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. DSI uses the feature to present reports to high-ranking officers that include analysis details and an executive summary of each case monitored. In addition to images and tables, the reports can include helpful visual features such as graphs plotted on an axis that show statistics of criminal cases over a period of time. The agency is also taking advantage of the Complex Event Processing (CEP) feature in Microsoft SQL Server 2012 to generate automatic notifications of suspicious incidents according to predefined sets of conditions. The filtered data covers phone records, financial transactions, or other real-time data from diverse sources. In addition to triggering alerts, the filtered data can also be worked with using BI tools such as SQL Server 2012 Power View and SQL Server 2012 PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software (PowerPivot for Excel is a feature in Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services). The solution’s improved speed and efficiency reduces the need for investigation officers to search and read hard-copy documents for information. “By using SQL Server 2012, we solved our earlier problems with investigations and inquiries,” said Yannaphon. “It’s a complete solution that provides full services from databases to reporting tools for management.” In addition, investigating officers can produce and summarise their own reports without IT help, which also speeds results. “SQL Server 2012 optimises the investigation and inquiry processes in terms of speed and accuracy and removes the limitations imposed by working with a large volume of data,” he said. In the initial test phase, DSI imported records from 250 closed cases to simulate a large volume of investigative data. Then the agency created a battery of tests and searches to evaluate performance. The solution quickly narrowed down a list of suspects that accurately matched the offenders arrested in the actual crimes. “With the traditional approach, it took two years to search for tips and gather and analyse data,” said Yannaphon. “’With the Microsoft Big Data solution, it took only 15 days. This reassured us that implementing the system would increase the accuracy of our results while saving officers’ time.” By Mai Thuy, VIR