The Transnational Digital Government Research Project An IT system for transnational collaboration on border control

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The Transnational Digital Government Research
Project An IT system for transnational
collaboration on border control
Presenter Charles McSweeney MSc. Chair,
Information Technology Department, UB Chair,
Belize National Observatory on Drugs On behalf of
TDG Team Belize, Dominican Republic, US
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Belize Gateway to Paradise Yoh betta Belize it
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TDG

• Transnational digital government
• collaborative government processes that use
  Information Technology to help address national ,
  regional or global problems
• This research is aimed at demonstrating IT
  solutions that can be used by countries to find,
  notify and receive allowed transnational
  information about suspicious and/or dangerous
  individuals who cross borders

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Participants and funding
Dominican Republic
Belize
USA
Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra
University of Belize
CMU, NCSU U. Colorado U. Florida U. Mass.
Universities
National Drug Council
Ministry of Health
Organization of American States
Agencies

• Funded by US National Science Foundation (5/02)
• NSF funds basic research, not development
• agencies responsible for infrastructure staff
  time

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Broad Context

• OAS Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism (MEM)
• Specifically the MEM indicator that deals with
  Displacement
• The movement of persons and the effect of drug
  trafficking and drug related activities across
  borders
• Project comes as a direct result of the MEM
  requirement

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The TDG team

• University researchers and staff members from OAS
  and agencies in the US, Belize and Dominican
  Republic
• Carnegie Mellon University (J. Carbonell, V.
  Cavalli-Sforza)
• North Carolina State University (A. Anton, Q. He)
• University of Belize (C. McSweeney)
• U. of Florida (J. Fortes, S. Su, A. Matsunaga, M.
  Patil, M. Tsugawa)
• University of Colorado (R. Cole, W. Ward)
• University of Massachusetts (D. Towsley, W. Chen)
• U. Pontificia Católica Madre y Maestra (L. de
  Brens, J. Ventura, P. Taveras)
• OAS CICAD (B. Piñeres)
• National Drug Abuse Control Council (Belize) (O.
  Brooks, Immigration - G. Murillo)
• Consejo National de Drogas (Dom. Rep.) (M.
  Herrera, A. Bautista)
• Agencies in Belize and Dominican Republic

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Why remote border control?

• The participating countries considered this
  critically important
• Border control addresses the influx of
  immigrants, assists in identifying suspicious
  travelers, assists in the protection of the
  sovereignty of countries, provides valuable
  information for the inter-national collaboration
• Tracking movements of traffickers and terrorists
  requires sharing information across countries
• Presents research and execution challenges

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Why Dominican Republic and Belize

• Wonderful similarities
• Caribbean
• Land-locked borders with a country with which
  differences exist
• Air, water,land drug trafficking possibilities
• Challenging differences great for research
• Language
• Culture
• Protocols

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Research goals of the project

• To advance the state-of-the-art of spoken
  dialogue systems, machine translation,
  collaborative information management,network
  performance optimization, and software
  requirements in the context of a specific TDG
  process the MEM.

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A first system design
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Conceptual view
Belize
Dominican Republic
Database Service
Database Service
Translation Services
Translation Services
Query Processor Service
Internet
(Belize/Dominican Republic/OAS/USA)
Query Processor Service
Dialogue Service
Dialogue Service
superdr
superbe
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Distributed Query Scenario
Belize
Dominican Republic
Database Service
Database Service
Translation Services
Translation Services
Query Processor Service
Internet
(Belize/Dominican Republic/OAS/USA)
Query Processor Service
Dialogue Service
Dialogue Service
superdr
superbe
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Event-Trigger Scenario
director
police
superdr
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Watch-List Scenario
director
Dominican Republic
Database Service
superdr
superbe
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Watch list alert

• Upon border crossing by individual on a watch
  list, interested parties (who subscribed to the
  event) are automatically notified
• Person who posted the event is also notified

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Translation at work

• Multilingual processing uses in the background
  a translation service
• A real-time view of translation at work

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Dialogues instead of forms

• Examples of the dialogues that are possible when
  forms are replaced by conversational interfaces
• A real-time view of the system at work

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Dialogue Examples

• What is the date of entry for rosa
  perez?dateofentry 2002-11-08
• What is her passport number and date of birth?
• passportno 44871849
• dateofbirth 1963-06-21
• What about mingo garcia?
• passportno 2676356
• dateofbirth 1962-10-02
• What are his nationality, passport number and
  occupation?
• nationality USA
• passportno 2676356
• occupation IMMIGRATION OFF

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Ongoing work

• Further development and integration of the
  different software components of the system
• Collection of language data for Belize and
  Dominican Republic
• Field-testing and evaluation of system

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The big vision

• System extended to the entire hemisphere
• Good quality of service
• Sharing of resources of all kind

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Thank you so much for not leaving,yawning and
throwing objects.
Questions??
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What???
I said thats it!
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Examples of queries

• Get the passport number, last name, first name,
  nationality and date of entry of all those people
  who entered the country after 01-Jan-2003 and
  whose nationality is USA.
• Get the passport number, name, date of entry,
  port of embarkation and purpose of trip for the
  people who came from Chicago or from Boston for
  business after 01-Nov-2003.
• Get the passport number and name of the lady who
  had a tattoo on her arm and who departed after
  15-Jan-2003.
• Get the passport number, name and comments for
  all the people who appeared nervous when they
  entered the country.
• Get the name, arrival information, departure
  information and purpose of trip for all the
  people who entered the country after
  01-Jan-2003.

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Translation Examples

• El viajero se veía nervioso y tenso.Traveler
  appeared nervous and tense.
• El viajero se presentó en la frontera sin
  documentos.Passenger, presented himself at the
  border without documents.
• Hablaba francés.Spoke French.
• El viajero no entendía español.The traveler not
  understood Spanish.
• No quería contestar a nuestras preguntas.Not
  wanted answer to our men questions.

• Woman appears nervous.
• La mujer parece nerviosa.
• Claim to be students studying archeology.
• Afirman ser estudiantes, que estudian
  arqueología.