AI-based virtual avatar for police interview training
We are developing an AI child avatar for the interview training of the police officers to protect vulnerable children from abuse.
The sexual and physical abuse of children is a significant societal problem in need of attention. Norway’s Child Protective Services received 57,988 allegations of child maltreatment in 2019 alone. An estimated 118 million children in Europe every year are victims of abuse, and 850 children under age 15 die as a result, according to the World Health Organization. The objective in this project is to protect vulnerable children from abuse, facilitate prosecution of offenders, and ensure that innocent adults are not accused of criminal acts. There is therefore a need for systems that help interviewer training to equip police with the skills to conduct high-quality interviews. To support this important task, we propose to research a training program that utilizes different system components and multimodal data from the field of artificial intelligence such as chatbots, generation of visual content, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text. The goal of combining all these different technologies and datatypes is to create an immersive and interactive child avatar that responds in a realistic way, to help to support the training of police interviewers, but can also produce synthetic data of interview situations that can be used to solve different problems in the same domain.
Goal
There are a large number of open challenges like:
- Language models
- AI-based chatbots
- Text-to-speech and speech-to-text
- Realistic AI-based visual avatars
- How to detect online live abuse
We collaborate with social sciences at OsloMet, Child Protection Services (barnevernet), the police and several international partners.
Want to be part of our research group and improve the current systems? Contact us, and let’s see if we can find a thesis topic that matches your interests!
Learning outcome
- Interdisciplinary research
- Machine learning / AI
- Building systems
Qualifications
- Hard working, motivated
- Interested in learning
(the rest can be learned during the thesis work)
Supervisors
- Pål Halvorsen
- Saeed Sabet
- Syed Zohaib Hassan
References
Salehi, P., Hassan, S. Z., Lammerse, M., Sabet, S. S., Riiser, I., Røed, R. K., ... & Riegler, M. A. (2022). Synthesizing a Talking Child Avatar to Train Interviewers Working with Maltreated Children. Big Data and Cognitive Computing, 6(2), 62.
