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Minding your language
Terrorists and underworld thugs are not the only security targets that demand the attention of American organisations like police and the FBI. A major security issue they face is gravely familiarity to Australian authorities: childhood protection. The internet has become a battleground to ensure the safety of children and American authorities wanted software that would prove, for instance, that an email purporting to come from a 16-year-old boy was, in reality, from a 45-year-old male predator. And not just that, but who the predator was.
This has led to extraordinary success for Sydney company Appen Pty Ltd, which specialises in speech and language technology.
The US Department of Homeland Security, along with a substantial list of other agencies, originally set out to identify ways to effectively deal with—and identify—the origins of the massive amounts of data that pour endlessly into their systems, all day, every day, with only limited human resources to deal with it. They invited tenders from expert suppliers, including Appen, in a process known as Broad Agency Announcements (BAA). This system is used to discover quantum leaps in product design and this time the agencies wanted to produce a software solution that would deal with the problem of authorship attribution, the real identity behind communications that arrive in various security organisations.
Appen faced competition from some 50 organisations but ultimately won the bid with a software solution that, in addition to keyword search, provided a profile of an unknown writer’s gender, age bracket, education level and even native language, along with psychometric traits including emotion and psychosis. It works in English and Arabic and, potentially, many other languages as well.
Appen’s business development manager Phil Hall, says major sponsors of the work, including the US Department of Homeland Security, later requested a second stage of the project: a Data Stream Profiling tool that would actually identify authors. The solution that Appen produced provides a biometric profile based on keystroke signatures of writers; individual typing styles, such as the way keystrokes were strung together, how long the author’s fingers waited on computer keys and the time lag between strokes.
American agencies like the FBI, the Secret Service, Celebrity Protection Units and a host of police departments, now create biometric profiles of computer users, and identify them regardless of the name and password used to log in. Hall says the tools are now being readied for broader release and Appen is in discussion with a number of American and British agencies that have given “a very enthusiastic response”, although Australia has been slower to pick up on the potential of Appen’s work.
“We’d like to see more interest from Australia but this kind of technology is quite a stretch even for the deeper pockets of US buyers,” Hall says. “There are Australian organisations in the child welfare and similar fields who are really interested in our systems but, in the long run, this kind of work is most often internet-based and, therefore, it’s a global issue, requiring international cooperation.”
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