Presenter: Charles McSweeney MSc. Chair, Information Technology Department, UB

1. The Transnational Digital Government Research Project An IT system for transnational collaboration on border control Presenter: Charles McSweeney MSc. Chair, Information Technology Department, UB Chair, Belize National Observatory on Drugs On behalf of TDG Team: Belize, Dominican Republic, US

2. Belize Gateway to Paradise – YohbettaBelizeit

3. TDG • Transnational digital government • collaborative government processes that use Information Technology to help address national , regional or global problems • This research is aimed at demonstrating IT solutions that can be used by countries to find, notify and receiveallowed transnational information about suspicious and/or dangerous individuals who cross borders

4. Participants and funding Dominican Republic Belize USA Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra University of Belize CMU, NCSU U. Colorado U. Florida U. Mass. • Funded by US National Science Foundation (5/02) • NSF funds basic research, not development • agencies responsible for infrastructure & staff time Universities National Drug Council Ministry of Health Organization of American States Agencies

5. Broad Context • OAS Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism (MEM) • Specifically the MEM indicator that deals with Displacement • The movement of persons and the effect of drug trafficking and drug related activities across borders • Project comes as a direct result of the MEM requirement

6. The TDG team • University researchers and staff members from OAS and agencies in the US, Belize and Dominican Republic • Carnegie Mellon University (J. Carbonell, V. Cavalli-Sforza) • North Carolina State University (A. Anton, Q. He) • University of Belize (C. McSweeney) • U. of Florida (J. Fortes, S. Su, A. Matsunaga, M. Patil, M. Tsugawa) • University of Colorado (R. Cole, W. Ward) • University of Massachusetts (D. Towsley, W. Chen) • U. Pontificia Católica Madre y Maestra (L. de Brens, J. Ventura, P. Taveras) • OAS CICAD (B. Piñeres) • National Drug Abuse Control Council (Belize) (O. Brooks, Immigration - G. Murillo) • Consejo National de Drogas (Dom. Rep.) (M. Herrera, A. Bautista) • Agencies in Belize and Dominican Republic

7. Why remote border control? • The participating countries considered this critically important • Border control addresses the influx of immigrants, assists in identifying suspicious travelers, assists in the protection of the sovereignty of countries, provides valuable information for the inter-national collaboration • Tracking movements of traffickers and terrorists requires sharing information across countries • Presents research and execution challenges

8. Why Dominican Republic and Belize • Wonderful similarities • Caribbean • Land-locked borders with a country with which “differences” exist • Air, water,land drug trafficking possibilities • Challenging differences – great for research • Language • Culture • Protocols

9. Research goals of the project To advance the state-of-the-art of: spoken dialogue systems, machine translation, collaborative information management,network performance optimization, and software requirements in the context of a specific TDG process – the MEM.

10. A first system design

11. Dominican Republic Belize English Español Conceptual view Belize Dominican Republic Database Service Database Service Translation Services Translation Services Query Processor Service Internet (Belize/Dominican Republic/OAS/USA) Query Processor Service Dialogue Service Dialogue Service superdr superbe

12. Dominican Republic Belize Query Query English Español Result Result Distributed Query Scenario Belize Dominican Republic Database Service Database Service Translation Services Translation Services Query Processor Service Internet (Belize/Dominican Republic/OAS/USA) Query Processor Service Dialogue Service Dialogue Service superdr superbe

13. Register Events Event Description Country Template Event Register Event Publication and Subscription Registry Subscription + Event Filter Specification Event Filter Installation Dominican Republic Event Server Event Server Belize Post Arrest Translation Service Translation Service Internet Suscripción Arrest Record (OAS/Belize/US/ Dominican Republic) Arrest PEntry Language Defendant Witness Victim Enter Arrest Record Subscribe Notification Event-Trigger Scenario director police superdr

14. Register Events Event Description Country Template Dominican Republic Belize Check Watch-List Internet Forma de llegada Response (OAS/Belize/US/ Dominican Republic) Fill Port of Entry Form Alert Watch-List Scenario director Dominican Republic Database Service superdr superbe

15. Watch list alert • Upon border crossing by individual on a watch list, interested parties (who subscribed to the event) are automatically notified • Person who posted the event is also notified

16. Translation at work • Multilingual processing uses “in the background” a translation service • A real-time view of translation at work

17. Dialogues instead of forms • Examples of the dialogues that are possible when forms are replaced by conversational interfaces • A real-time view of the system at work

18. Dialogue Examples • What is the date of entry for rosa perez?dateofentry: 2002-11-08 • What is her passport number and date of birth? passportno: 44871849 dateofbirth: 1963-06-21 • What about mingo garcia? passportno: 2676356 dateofbirth: 1962-10-02 • What are his nationality, passport number and occupation? nationality: USA passportno: 2676356 occupation: IMMIGRATION OFF

19. Ongoing work • Further development and integration of the different software components of the system • Collection of language data for Belize and Dominican Republic • Field-testing and evaluation of system

20. The big vision • System extended to the entire hemisphere • Good quality of service • Sharing of resources of all kind

21. Thank you so much for not leaving,yawning and throwing objects. Questions??

22. What??? I said that’s it!

27. Examples of queries • Get the passport number, last name, first name, nationality and date of entry of all those people who entered the country after ‘01-Jan-2003’ and whose nationality is ‘USA’. • Get the passport number, name, date of entry, port of embarkation and purpose of trip for the people who came from Chicago or from Boston for business after ‘01-Nov-2003’. • Get the passport number and name of the lady who had a tattoo on her arm and who departed after 15-Jan-2003. • Get the passport number, name and comments for all the people who appeared nervous when they entered the country. • Get the name, arrival information, departure information and purpose of trip for all the people who entered the country after ‘01-Jan-2003’.

28. Translation Examples • El viajero se veía nervioso y tenso.Traveler appeared nervous and tense. • El viajero se presentó en la frontera sin documentos.Passenger, presented himself at the border without documents. • Hablaba francés.Spoke French. • El viajero no entendía español.The traveler not understood Spanish. • No quería contestar a nuestras preguntas.Not wanted answer to our men questions. • Woman appears nervous. La mujer parece nerviosa. • Claim to be students studying archeology. Afirman ser estudiantes, que estudian arqueología.