In this project, we will investigate whether deception can be identified and proved from 'scent trails', that is, coherent accounts of suspects' activities over time compiled from tracking their movements, communications and behaviours.
The project will investigate scent trails in the context of people undertaking deceptive activities to gain advantage in adversarial 'treasure hunt'-type games. Players will be monitored during games via positional and communication data obtained from mobile devices enabled with geospatial positioning devices. Novel software for integrating these data sources will be developed to build up scent trails of players' activities during game play. Methods of artificial intelligence will be combined to derive inferences from the scent trails about what kinds of activity are possible and impossible given a player's location, trajectory, activities and links with others.
We will interview players at key points during games as a simulation of interviews with suspects, eliciting from players accounts of their activities before presenting them with challenges based on their own scent trails that are either consistent or inconsistent with legal game playing. This will allow interview and analysis techniques to be improved and will provide clues as to how people subsequently change their behaviour after they have been confronted with their deception. The results will also allow us to test between hypotheses deriving from forensic psychology as to how best to detect deception.
The research also allows us to explore public awareness of, and response to, monitoring and surveillance in counter-terrorism. With an advisory panel of stakeholders and subject specialists representing key public and academic bodies, we will identify ethical and legal issues associated with collecting and using data on peoples' movements through public spaces. We will also conduct questionnaire studies with game players and others not involved in the games, to measure attitudes to monitoring and surveillance in game-playing and other contexts.