Recommended patrol routes can be used by organizations such as police agencies, emergency medical responders, and taxi services whose agents patrol roadway segments at proper times to assist or deter their target events. The creation of optimal complementary patrol routes for multiple agents targeting temporal event hotspots and minimizing travel distance is an NP-hard combinatorial problem that belongs to a class of problems known as the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). Traffic safety patrol routing problems share many characteristics of VRPTW problems but differ in ways that prevent the application of existing solutions. In our approach, nondeterministic patrol routing algorithms are used to specify the movements of simulated mobile agents on a roadway system. Nondeterminism is critical in the traffic safety patrol routing domain, as rigidity and predictability can negatively impact the effectiveness of law enforcement agents' efforts.This paper addresses the problem of expressing, executing, evaluating, and engaging patrol routing algorithms that target event hotspots on roadways. The patrol algorithms are first expressed using Turn, which is our extensible domain-specific language (DSL) created for this purpose. Algorithms specified using Turn syntax are then executed in a custom simulation environment. Utilizing predefined metrics, users evaluate the resulting patrol routes to ensure that the criteria of interest in a given patrol context are met. Acceptable patrol routes are then engaged by end users via a web-based geographic information system (GIS) portal. To demonstrate the applicability and efficacy of our approach, we present two illustrative case studies.

Information technologies such as data mining and social network analysis have been widely used in law enforcement to solve crimes. Recent research indicates that geographic profiling also plays an important role in facilitating the investigation of crimes. However, lack of integration makes those systems less helpful in practice. In this paper, we propose an integrated system called PerpSearch that will take a given description of a crime, including its location, type, and the physical description of suspects (personal characteristics or vehicles) as input. To detect suspects, the system will process these inputs through four integrated components: geographic profiling, social network analysis, crime patterns, and physical matching. Essentially, geographic profiling determines ldquowhererdquo the suspects are, while other components determine ldquowhordquo the suspects are. We then process the results using a score engine to give investigators a ranked list of individuals. To date, we have implemented a prototype of the system based on current Alabama law enforcement data.

Automobile license plate recognition (ALPR) is becoming increasingly important to homeland security and law enforcement. There are a number of commercial vendors with tag recognition hardware and software in the ALPR market. Many of these vendors have developed open tag recognition solutions that run on laptop PCs with commodity video-capture devices as peripherals. Such PC-based solutions are quite conducive to an open architecture for data transmission and sharing between applications. In this paper, we present an architecture that supports such a commodity tag recognition solution as its centerpiece. We then discuss a recent pilot project where this architecture was implemented and tested.

Commodity computing hardware continues to increase performance while decreasing price. This combination is driving a renewed interest in parallel and distributed computing. In this study, we examine the performance of an existing application in a ten-node computing cluster using commodity off-the-shelf components. The application is a statistical analysis software package that processes categorical data used by state public safety programs. The study examines various network topologies and focuses on minimizing the software modifications required to distribute the application. We conclude that parallel computing using commodity components is an effective mechanism to increase the performance of real-world applications especially when the underlying application architectures have the flexibility to support efficient reuse of the existing code. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We face a need for undergraduate instruction in networking and telecommunications. The Computing Research Association has identified both web-specialists and network-designers as being among the seven occupations where there is a clearly established shortage of professionals [2]. Even with the recent softening of the economy, individuals in the networking and telecommunications field are highly sought after as attested to by surveys such as RHIConsulting's® recent survey of 1400 CIOs nationwide [4]. It is imperative to ask how these individuals will be educated.Historically, telecommunications has been hardware oriented. Consequently, it has been in the domain of Electrical Engineering. The ongoing convergence of communications and computing, however, has drastically shifted the focus of telecommunications and considerably broadened the field. Many of the new areas of telecommunications will not fit neatly into old categories. Some are much closer to Computer Science than Electrical Engineering.Schools wishing to address this need must begin by deciding what should be taught. For two-year schools, the ACM has issued guidelines for several programs [1]. For four-year institutions, the curriculum remains an open question. The primary guidelines for four-year institutions are the dated 1991 Computing Curricula [5] and the emerging Computing Curricula 2001 Computer Science [3]. As the goal of these documents is to define the core needs of the CS discipline, understandably, neither goes beyond outlining an introductory course in networking. Schools interesting in educating professionals in networking and telecommunications will need to go beyond this first course. A key question would seem, then, in teaching networking, what should be taught beyond the first course?Our panel presents three quite different positions---that the basic need can be met with a single well-designed course, that a few advanced courses will meet the need, and that a collection of courses constituting a minor is called for.

In most software development organizations, there is seldom a one-to-one mapping between software developers and development tasks. It is frequently necessary to concurrently assign individuals to multiple tasks and to assign more than one individual to work cooperatively on a single task. A principal goal in making such assignments should be to minimize the effort required to complete each task. But what impact does the manner in which developers are assigned to tasks have on the effort requirements? This paper identifies four task assignment factors: team size, concurrency, intensity, and fragmentation. These four factors are shown to improve the predictive ability of the well-known intermediate COCOMO cost estimation model. A parsimonious effort estimation model is also derived that utilizes a subset of the task assignment factors and unadjusted function points. For the data examined, this parsimonious model is shown to have goodness of fit and quality of estimation superior to that of the COCOMO model, while utilizing fewer cost factors.