Joseph Bell Centre's Kingston on AI in Criminal Justice

John Kingston, Director of the Joseph Bell Centre for Forensic Statistics and Legal Reasoning visited the Berkman Center on October 21. The Centre is named for an Edinburgh physician whose precise diagnostic method inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes. A joint project of the University of Edinburgh and Glasgow Caledonian University, the Centre studies statistics, law, and artificial intelligence, and works on projects that use combinations of the three to assist attorneys and law enforcement in various ways.

Internet Based Decision Support for Divorce Lawyers, one of their projects, is a user-friendly interface which asks questions in order to divide assets in a divorce case. Options include a form-based financial calculator, and a decision-tree type tool which provides past caselaw which reflects the type of decision, including child support, which would be appropriate.

Another project, ADVOKATE, is a tool used to assess the reliability of eye witnesses. They hope to expand the project to include comparative reliability among multiple witnesses, as well as exploring identity and identity fraud on the Internet.

ff POIROT, sponsored by the European Union, is building an ontology for terminology needed for the prevention of financial fraud, particularly unauthorized investment brokerage and sales tax (VAT) fraud, such as "carousel fraud", between the different EU countries.

The Centre is also working on several other AI and statistics projects. They look forward to creating an LL.M. program in IP and tech law in conjunction with other centers, to which they would contribute courses on evidence, knowledge management, and AI. They are working with the University of Mexico to help Mexican judges be clear about how they reach judgments in bankruptcty cases.