Wipro to help govt track crime

BANGALORE: The government has selected Wipro Infotech to develop software for digitising its crime and criminal tracking network system under the national e-governance plan, the IT bellwether said.

As the Home Ministry's software development agency, the company will link 14,000 police stations and 6,000 police offices across the country for tracking crime records on real-time basis in digital format.

"The system aims to create a nationwide networked infrastructure for IT-enabled criminal tracking system. Spanning across 35 states and union territories, it will link about 14,000 police stations and 6,000 higher police offices across the country," Wipro vice-president Anand Sankaran said in a statement.

The company, however, did not specify the project cost, maintaining non-disclosure agreement with the ministry.

Last year, Wipro had developed a 'Police Information System' to cover important activities related to day-to-day functioning of police departments, including back-end administrative process of general administration, finance, stores etc.

The ambitious criminal tracking network project includes vertical connectivity of police units at various levels within the state and between states and union territories as well as horizontal connectivity, linking police functions at state and central levels to external entities.

As one of the largest e-governance projects in the country, the network system will also present a citizen-interface to provide basic services to citizens.

"As part of the scope, we will develop the core application software for states and another core application for the central government to digitize crime and criminal records," Sankaran pointed out.

The solution will be developed on multiple platforms to address functionality required at central and state levels.

"When implemented, the application will link the state crime records bureau with the national crime record bureau, thereby creating a database that can be accessed in real-time from any police station across the country," Sankaran noted.

The company will leverage its domain expertise and best practices to build the core application software for effective and efficient policing through adoption of e-governance principals.

"Given the current national security scenario, our solution is expected to enhance police efficiency in the detection and prevention of crimes," Sankaran added.

Government vertical head Ranbir Singh said the network system project was one more step towards enabling the government accelerate efforts in detecting and preventing crimes in the country.

"Wipro is already working with several state governments for e-enabling security and surveillance," Singh said.

US says it's committed to cutting greenhouse gases

AMSTERDAM: The United States has assured international negotiators it remains committed to reducing carbon emissions over the next 10 years, despite the collapse of efforts to legislate a climate bill.

US delegate Jonathan Pershing told a climate conference in Bonn, Germany, that Washington is not backing away from President Barack Obama's pledge to cut emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels.

Pershing said legislation is the preferred way to control greenhouse gases, but the administration "will use all the tools available" to reach its target.

Obama made the pledge at a climate summit in Copenhagen last December, and affirmed it in a formal note to the UN climate secretariat. At the time, the US House of Representatives had passed a climate bill and the Senate had been broadly expected to follow suit.

But the withdrawal of a scaled down climate bill last week in the U.S. Senate raised concern about America's commitment to fight global warming and disappointed developing countries that had hoped Obama would seize international leadership on the issue.

The European Union said the failure of the bill encumbered its talks among its own 27 member states on whether the EU should increase its pledge to rein in the gases blamed for global warming.

"It hasn't made the discussion and the debate any easier in Europe," said Artur Runge-Metzger, the European Commissioner for climate change.

The EU has promised to cut emissions by 20 percent below 1990 over the next decade, but said it would raise its target to 30 percent if the U.S. and other major polluters adopt similarly tough goals.

Delegations from 178 countries began five days of work Monday, resuming painstaking discussions on an agreement to limit global emissions and prepare poor countries for the effects of a warming world.

Delegates pointed to the lethal floods in Pakistan as an example of the extreme weather events that scientists say will become more common as average temperatures rise.

As if to underscore the global warming threat, U.N. officials lifted the coat-and-tie rules for the week, citing soaring temperatures in Bonn and a desire to lower the air conditioning to reduce the conference's emissions.

One more round of talks is scheduled in Tianjin, China, in October before the next major climate conference from Nov. 29-Dec. 10 in Cancun, Mexico.

Acknowledging widespread concern over the U.S. position, Pershing said many delegates had asked him about the status of its pledge and the chances of a deal in Cancun.

"Success in Cancun does not hinge on U.S. legislation," he told some 3,000 delegates, businessmen and activists attending the talks.

Environmental groups warned that the setback in Washington should not deter other countries, and called on the EU to take the lead.

"Parties should not allow U.S. domestic politics to lower the overall level of ambition of an international agreement," said Manuel Oliva, of Conservation International.

A study by World Resources Institute said the Obama administration could reach the 17 percent goal without passing a sweeping climate bill by using existing powers, including those of the Environmental Protection Agency; by issuing new regulations and executive orders; and through piecemeal energy legislation, Oliva said.

The talks in Bonn and Tianjin aim to prepare a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which calls on industrial countries to reduce emissions but makes no demands of developing countries like China and India, which are now among the largest polluters.

The United States rejected Kyoto as imbalanced and unfair, but said it will join a new climate regime as long as it is "symmetrical," encompassing all major emitters.

The emissions-controlling terms of the Kyoto accord expire in 2012, a deadline that has delegates worried about leaving a vacuum unless a new agreement is in place - the so-called Kyoto gap.

Negotiations have stumbled along for 2{ years. The original intention was to seal an agreement in Copenhagen, but that summit of 120 world leaders in the Danish capital only managed to agree on a brief political statement of intentions.

The top UN climate official, Christiana Figueres, said it may be unnecessary to complete a full agreement in Cancun. It was up to the countries to decide whether they want to make it legally binding or a series of less enforceable decisions.

But she said by the time the Cancun conference begins wealthy countries should have made the first payment of a $30 billion three-year promise of emergency climate funds to poor countries.

"Developing nations see the allocation of this money as a critical signal that industrialized nations are committed to progress in the broader negotiations," said Figueres.

A device that can read terrorist's mind, predict attacks

WASHINGTON: Imagine technology that will allow law enforcement officials to get inside the mind of a terrorist to know how, when and where the next attack will occur. Well, it could soon be a reality, say scientists.

A team at Northwestern University has developed a new test which they claim if employed for a real-world scenario - like an imminent terrorist attack - could enable the police to confirm details about an attack, like date, location, and even weapons.

In their study, when the scientists knew in advance the specifics of the planned attacks by the "terrorists", they were able to correlate P300 brain waves to guilty knowledge with 100% accuracy in the laboratory, according to Peter Rosenfeld, who led the team.

For the first time, the scientists used the P300 testing in a mock terrorism scenario in which the subjects are planning, rather than perpetrating, a crime. The P300 brain waves were measured by electrodes attached to the scalp of the make-believe "persons of interest" in the laboratory.

The most intriguing part of the study in terms of real-word implications, Rosenfeld said, is that even when the researchers had no advance details about mock terrorism plans, the technology was still accurate in identifying critical concealed information. "Without any prior knowledge of the planned crime in our mock terrorism scenarios, we were able to identify 10 out of 12 terrorists and, among them, 20 out of 30 crime-related details," Rosenfeld said.

He added, "The test was 83% accurate in predicting concealed knowledge, suggesting that our complex protocol could identify future terrorist activity."

For the study, participants - 29 students - planned a mock attack based on information they were given about bombs and other weapons. They then had to write a letter detailing the rationale of their plan to encode information in memory.

Then, with electrodes attached to their scalps, they looked at a computer display monitor that presented names of stimuli. The names of Boston, Houston, New York, Chicago and Phoenix, for example, were shuffled and presented at random. The city that study participants chose for the major terrorist attack evoked the largest P300 brainwave responses.