By Freya Purnell
An innovative application using SAP HANA to identify perpetrators of crime saw Peter Chapman, CTO, enterprise application services, Capgemini, take out second place in the SAP HANA InnoJam Challenge in Palo Alto earlier this year.
Chapman presented his solution at the SAUG Summit 2012 + SAP Forum Australia in Melbourne today.
Inspired by the London riots and the challenges police face in identifying perpetrators of crime, Chapman’s initial concept used SAP HANA to filter and mobile phone data together with mobile tower locations against crime statistics to identify potential suspects.
Due to the large data volumes, HANA was ideal for the task. Chapman was able to load 18 million crime records (sourced from the NSW Government) in under five minutes.
Chapman created an eight-minute video demonstrating his proof of concept, and was subsequently invited to Palo Alto to present it in person for the final competition.
Since the competition, Chapman has been working on developing the concept further.
“We realised that one of the big challenges for the police is the relationship with telcommunications companies,” he said, with expense and time delays creating barriers to using this data as an effective investigative tool.
Instead taking a cue from Google Maps street mapping, Chapman has looked to the huge amount of “public machine information being transmitted” constantly by mobile phones and cars. This information, which is publicly available and reliable in terms of its ability to identify people and vehicles, can then be picked up and broadcast directly to HANA – to potentially be matched to crime statistics.
Describing it as “Big Brother on steroids”, Chapman concedes there may be some civil liberties concerns about information being used in the way, but also points to it being a great example of the potential for in-memory processing to fundamentally change processes within business and government.
“What else can we apply that change thinking to in order to solve problems?,” Chapman said.
