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The
Transnational Digital Government Project seeks to combine five
advanced information technologies into one integrated system to
help the immigration services of various countries cooperate
with each other to control their boundaries against illegal
immigration, drug smuggling and terrorism. The project is based
on technologies that facilitate the collection, processing,
exchange and integration of information. While the current pilot
project being executed in Belize and the Dominican Republic
focuses on connecting remote border posts within and between
these two countries (nationally and transnationally), as well as
producing instantaneous access to centralized databases in both
countries, the technology can be used in a variety of other ways
and applied to other government functions (i.e.: health and
education) to enhance international cooperation and more
effective government in general. Specific research is being done
in five information technologies:
§
Spoken dialogue
systems for data
collection, training and learning;
§
Active data
management and security techniques
for rule-based data sharing and filtering;
§
Information
retrieval and machine translation technology for sharing documents and searching information across different
languages and countries;
§
Middleware for
transnational (heterogeneous) information grids
that enable private, secure and dependable automation of
collaboration processes and policies, and the delivery of
computing services through Internet portals; and
§
Network
behavior modeling and optimization
for delivery of acceptable quality of service.
Initially
two pilot countries volunteered to serve as pilots for this
project – Belize and the Dominican
Republic – and the government process they have chosen
to apply the research being conducted is immigration
control at remote border stations. However, the long run
goal is to be able to replicate this system in other Western
Hemisphere countries, and to other government processes.
At the end of the project, the application being developed will:
§
Permit automatic querying of databases in any of
the participating countries to obtain information on suspicious
travelers;
§
Automatically alert authorities and relevant
agencies when the profile of a traveler (history of travel,
behavior, illegal documentation, appearance) is suspicious;
§
Enable access to information
in databases either within the country or in other participating
countries, including information automatically translated from
databases in other languages;
§
Manage security and privacy
of the information internally in the control agencies of
each participating country, nevertheless permitting regional
access to selected information to share with the authorities of
the other countries allowing for transnational collaboration.
The
context of this research is the ongoing process of transnational
cooperation among governments of the Western hemisphere to deal
with the negative impact on society of illicit drug production,
trafficking, and consumption. The process, coordinated by CICAD
– the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission, which is
the counter-drug body of the member states of the OAS, is called
the Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism (MEM). The MEM is a
peer-based multilateral process to facilitate evaluation of the
progress made by the nations of the hemisphere in dealing with
the diverse manifestations of the drug problem.
The MEM requires that countries collect, share and
analyze extensive amounts of information in accordance with
agreed-upon standard indicators presented in the form of a
questionnaire. A
complete response to this questionnaire on the part of OAS
countries and the success of the analysis of this data at the
regional level requires data that is obtainable, compatible, and
exchangeable. This project provides countries with a tool to be
able to gather accurate data to be used in the MEM process.
The
research is being conducted by a team of researchers from seven
universities: University of Florida, Carnegie Mellon University,
University of Colorado, University of Massachusetts, North
Carolina State University, University of Belize and the
Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM) from
the Dominican Republic; and experts from agencies in three
different countries (United States, Belize and the Dominican
Republic). Under the umbrella of the OAS, several ministries and
agencies in the three countries will be involved. These include
two OAS departments in Washington, D.C. (the Office of Science
and Technology and the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control
Commission – CICAD); the National Drug Abuse Control Council
of Belize’s Ministry of Health; and the National Drug Council
of the Dominican Republic. The university researchers include
experts on speech-based interfaces, machine translation,
databases, information retrieval, Internet computing and
networking.
This is a three year project financed by the National
Science Foundation through a US$1,500,000 grant to the
University of Florida. We are currently in the project’s
second year of execution. The first phase of the research has
been completed, and an initial system prototype has been built
and demonstrated in Belize. Further research is being done to
extend the capabilities of the system and adapt it to the
immigration agencies of the participating countries. A second
demonstration of a more advanced prototype is programmed to take
place in the Dominican Republic during the second quarter of
2004. The short term objective (year 2005) is to be able to
implement the built system in one border post in each country.
Upon success in this one border post, the system then would be
scaled up to include multiple border posts in each country.
Taking
into account the results of the project and the success of the
system in the pilot countries, the long term objective of the
project is to expand the built model to other countries in the
hemisphere, and adapt the system to serve other government
functions.
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