At this week’s Police Digital Summit, Rt Hon Chris Philp MP, Minister of State (Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire), met with Trilateral Research’s Mr Kush Wadhwa (CEO), Dr Hayley Watson (Director, Sociotech Innovation) and Dr Stephen Anning (CESIUM Product Manager) and Lincolnshire Police’s Chief Digital Information Officer, Nicola Haywood-Cleverly and Detective Chief Superintendent & Head of Crime Directorate, Jon McAdam to discuss CESIUM – Trilateral’s state of the art AI solution for transforming child safeguarding.
Dr Hayley Watson, Director of Sociotech Innovation at Trilateral Research, emphasised the importance of our research-driven sociotechnical approach to ethical AI in developing solutions in this space that build trust and confidence in their use, and the importance of ethical considerations in all emerging technologies in policing.
Jon McAdam, Detective Chief Superintendent & Head of Crime Directorate at Lincolnshire Police, provided the Minister with an example of a child who was identified proactively through the support of CESIUM and the opportunities for intervention.
In his keynote speech at the Police Digital Summit, Rt Hon Chris Philp MP, Minister of State drew out the importance of the threats and opportunities of emerging technologies for policing, highlighting the “leg up” that AI could bring to policing and crucially, safeguarding – “I was hearing about some work being done in Lincolnshire just a few minutes ago, where vulnerable individuals, children, are being identified for safeguarding…So huge opportunities in the prevention space”.
CESIUM revolutionises the current approach to child safeguarding. A validation exercise was conducted by Lincolnshire Police in 2022, with live data demonstrating its potential to identify vulnerable children much earlier. CESIUM enabled 16 vulnerable children to be identified up to 6 months before the existing process. Further analysis proactively identified three vulnerable children for pre-screening risk assessment who had previously been concealed in the data.
The validation exercise also indicated an increase in operational capacity of 400% within a Safeguarding Partnership setting, and a decrease in time spent on administration – a reduction from 5 people researching, gathering, and analysing data over 5 days, to 1 person analysing all near-real-time data within 20 minutes.
Reflecting on the Summit, Kush Wadhwa, CEO at Trilateral Research said: “The Police Digital Summit was an excellent forum for us to get a clear view of the important role CESIUM can play in achieving broader safeguarding priorities. We were honoured to have been asked to brief the Minister of State on the impacts CESIUM can have on child safeguarding and pleased as well to see the interest in providing even more valuable insights through multi-agency engagement. We designed our breakthrough ethical AI software in part to support a broader public sector digital transformation, but our main focus is aligned with these core safeguarding priorities and to drive opportunities for early intervention to better support vulnerable children.”
Over the coming months, the team at Trilateral Research hope to share the knowledge they have gained on ethical AI best practice across policing and with wider Safeguarding Partnerships, driving forward their vision of multi-agency data sharing and identification of vulnerability to continue supporting the proactive safeguarding of children.
Click here to find out more about how Trilateral is leading the way in responsible, ethical AI.
