Avencia has been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) for its HunchLab™ software system designed to identify and warn relevant authorities about changes and aberrations in the patterns of geographic events. The initial version of the system is targeted at the law enforcement market and will enable police officers to develop, analyze, and evaluate hunches about patterns in criminal activity in the communities they patrol. This Phase II award is for $467,805 over two years. In 2006, the NSF awarded Avencia an SBIR Phase I grant totaling $100,000 for testing technical merit and feasibility of the HunchLab concept. SBIR Phase II grants enable SBIR Phase I grantees to further develop their technology and prepare it for commercialization. Avencia will use the Phase II grant to develop and test additional functionality for the system, enhance the algorithms, and develop a new user interface. The result will be a commercial version of the software.
HunchLab was inspired by a prototype Crime Spike Detector that Avencia developed to help the Philadelphia Police Department identify when and where unusual increases in crime are occurring. The Crime Spike Detector, which has been in operation since June 2005, uses a spatial statistics algorithm developed in conjunction with Dr. Tony Smith (University of Pennsylvania) to compare current crime to historical crime across the city. Each night this “data mining” service checks for spikes in different types of crime. Unusual increases result in an email being sent to the relevant district captain. The email details the severity of the spike and links to an online report with maps, charts and tables, supporting analysis of the result.
As part of their daily activities, police officers often formulate hunches based on observations and other sources of information. Unfortunately, police officers spend much of their day responding to new incidents so there is very little time left over for collecting the data needed to develop hunches. Large amounts of data about crime events are already available in electronic form, but the data usually exists in disparate systems that are difficult to integrate. HunchLab applies the techniques and statistics developed for the Crime Spike Detector to enable the generation of ‘hunches’ about the relationship between different data sets.
“The Crime Spike Detector software has already proven its value in Philadelphia, where it is used to rapidly identify geographic clusters that might otherwise not be apparent. With HunchLab, we hope to build on this success to create a powerful pattern detection and alerting system for a broad range of markets,” says Robert Cheetham, President and founder of Avencia.
Although HunchLab is being developed to assist with detection of geographic changes in crime pattern, its technology is relevant for any application in which events display geographic changes in distribution, such as disease occurrence, consumer buying patterns, and real estate sales.
“Since 2004, Avencia has completed several highly successful software projects and is currently working on a property conveyance fraud application for the Philadelphia Department of Records. We look forward with anticipation to using the HunchLab software Avencia is creating to more effectively detect patterns in property and mortgage fraud.” – Joan Decker, Commissioner, Philadelphia Department of Records
HunchLab is supported by the Small Business Innovation Research program of the National Science Foundation, Directorate for Engineering, Division of Industrial Innovations and Partnerships, Award Number (IIP-0750507).
This is the fourth time in two years that Avencia has been awarded an SBIR grant. Previous awards were SBIR Phase I awards from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.