Developing conversational agents for use in criminal investigations

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in environments that involve high risk and high consequence
decision making is severely hampered by critical design issues. These issues include system transparency
and brittleness, where transparency relates to (i) the explainability of results and (ii) the ability of a user to inspect and verify system goals and constraints, and brittleness (iii) the ability of a system to adapt to new user demands. Transparency is a particular concern for criminal intelligence analysis, where there are significant ethical and trust issues that arise when algorithmic and system processes are not adequately understood by a user. This prevents adoption of potentially useful technologies in policing environments.

In this paper, we present a novel approach to designing a conversational agent (CA) AI system for intelligence analysis that tackles these issues.We discuss the results and implications of three different studies; a Cognitive Task Analysis to understand analyst thinking when retrieving information in an investigation, Emergent Themes Analysis to understand the explanation needs of different system components, and an interactive experiment with a prototype conversational agent. Our prototype conversational agent, named Pan, demonstrates transparency provision and mitigates brittleness by evolving new CA intentions. We encode interactions with the CA with human factors principles for situation recognition and use interactive visual analytics to support analyst reasoning. Our approach enables complex AI systems, such as Pan, to be used in sensitive environments and our research has broader application than the use case discussed.