SOCIS is an EPSRC-sponsored R&D project between the Universities of Sheffield and Surrey, being run in collaboration with 4 UK Police Forces. The overall aims of the project are:
The project is set within a real application of considerable social importance, and which integrates a number of relatively mature research technologies to ask new questions. The two major strands of research in the SOCIS project that will establish the link between language and vision relate to the specialist language of subject domains and to the ways in which information extraction systems can be adapted to specific domains. Knowledge acquisition and information extraction approaches are being combined with a visual information system to store digital photographs taken at the scene-of-crime (SOC). 'Off-the-shelf' digital camera and speech recognition technologies are being used to gather images along with verbal descriptions of their contents articulated by scene-of-crime officers and captured by a hands-free microphone at the SOC.
SoCIS (Current prototype system) Link (FOR INTERNAL USERS ONLY)
SoCIS final report (download)
We participated with SoCIS on the ImageCLEF 2003 competition, a cross language retrieval of images via their associated textual captions, held in Sheffield. The results and the paper will be published shortly (early July 2003).
Following the EPSRC 'Technologies for Crime Prevention and Detection' call we submitted an outline proposal for a follow on project to SoCIS - IMPRESS. You can read the outline proposal here.
The EPSRC have invited the consortium to submit a full proposal.
The call generated 150 outline proposals, from which 30 have been selected to proceed to full proposal. We will be preparing our full proposal over the next few weeks and will submit it on Friday 25th April 2003