Czech Software LikPik Helps Police Investigators Detect Criminals

Software developers from Tomas Rebok's research team at the Institute of Computer Science at Masaryk University have developed a new software tool. The new tool is called LikPik and facilitates the work of the Police of the Czech Republic and helps to maintain public order and security. The new tool speeds up the daily work of police officers in detecting and proving criminal acts. The tool can process and search large amounts of digital data effectively. The tool helps search for specific information in large datasets, saving officers hours or days of analytical work.

The Czech Police uses a wide range of data sets to detect and prove crime sources related to the criminal act under investigation. Investigators often search for necessary information in large datasets, which are often disorganised and inappropriately structured. Now, police officers can take advantage of this new software for example while analysing network traffic records. Their work is now faster thanks to the LikPik software developed by a team of developers led by Tomas Rebok from Masaryk University.

The LikPik tool was created within the applied research project Automated Forensic Digital Data Laboratory for complex crime detection with the support of the Czech Ministry of Interior. The most unique feature of the software lies in its precision, speed and effective processing, cleaning and searching of large data sets. "LikPik processes large data sets of unsorted information and allows to search and analyse tens of billions of information within seconds. This helps the police officers to speed up their investigative work and decision-making, “explains the principal investigator of the AfoLab project, Tomas Rebok.

The main advantage of the developed solution is a unique approach to organising the obtained unsorted information. LikPik automatically corrects and cleans the data and actively helps investigators create data descriptions independently of the input data formats. Despite the inconsistency of input formats, this tool can successfully process and comprehensively search large data sets while tracking their original source. "A significant benefit of our solution is that it can the unsorted input data sorting occurs only once. Subsequently, the data can then be searched and processed in various data-analytic systems," says student Denis Stranak from the Faculty of Informatics of Masaryk University, who worked on the tool as part of his bachelor thesis.

"LikPik is an invaluable tool that helps us sort and analyse large data sets in a reasonable amount of time. It provides clean and classified data to feed into other analytical tools and is flexible for further development according to the future needs of the Czech Police," evaluates the benefits of the developed solution Jaroslav Kaplan from the Department for Science, Research and Innovation of the Police Presidium of the Czech Republic. In addition to the previously mentioned advantages, investigators also appreciate the modularity and openness of the developed tool published under a free license. This allows its further development and extension with new functions not only by the original developers but also by IT professionals of the Police of the Czech Republic.

Due to the positive results of the testing so far, the Masaryk University researchers are currently cooperating on the integration of the developed solution into the IT infrastructure of the Czech Police. From autumn 2023, LikPik will thus serve police investigators as a centralised support in detecting and convicting of criminal offences.

Expert contact: Tomáš Rebok