Meet Staqu, a startup helping Indian law enforcement agencies with advanced AI
3 min read 26 Jun 2018, 08:58 PM ISTStaqu has also signed up an MoU with Dubai police for integrating Artificial Intelligence into its programmes
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fast evolving into a catalyst for bringing the best of technology to humans. Even as we have just hit the tip of an iceberg, AI is already expanding into multiple facets of our lives, ranging from as basic as mobile computing to complicated finance management.
While there are a great many applications of AI in the real world, the cutting edge technology is also now making way to the law enforcement. And India is one of the first countries in the world to leverage AI for this purpose. This is being facilitated by a Gurugram-based startup Staqu.
Staqu has developed a proprietary AI technology stack which is comprised of advanced image analysis, language and text independent proprietary speaker identification engine, facial recognition and text processing, including name entity recognition, sentiment analysis and summarisation APIs which can be used by various other firms as well.
Late last year, Staqu launched ABHED (Artificial Intelligence Based Human Efface Detection), an application for police officers. The company worked with Rajasthan Police to introduce an AI-enabled app that helps law enforcement agencies by offering tools like criminal identity registration, and tracking and missing persons’ search . The programme was also used by Punjab police, in the form of Punjab Artificial Intelligence System (PAIS).
The application provides matching details from criminal database. Police can also use the app to search through FIR, available face images or even fingerprints.
How does Staqu’s AI, ML platform work?
“In India, our services have been successful in digitising the criminal records which were reduced to the old and dusted files in the police department, previously. We currently have over 90,000 criminal records and have helped police forces solve over 100 high-risk and complicated police cases," said Atul Rai, CEO and co-founder of Staqu.
Apart from the law enforcement, Staqu has various consumer-end products as well that use AI.
“We have commissioned an AI-powered recommendation engine. Our Recommendation Engine is first-of-its-own-kind contextual recommendation engine which provides both in-platform and cross platform recommendation capability along with giving complete control to the platform owners thereby eliminating the current spamming in the digital world, which provides options that don’t connect with a user’s taste or preferences," Atul explains.
“Staqu’s recommendation engine is built on proprietary content adapter technology based on advanced light weighted deep neural networks which do not send any user’s information to remote servers and process the data locally."
Staqu says that its “In Platform Recommendation SDK" is being used by various firms to enhance content discovery on their platforms. For instance, Jaypore, an e-commerce platform, uses Staqu’s recommendation engine for product discovery.
Going international
Staqu is now working with Dubai police to implement an Artificial Intelligence-based predictive policy technology.
Dubai police aims to integrate Artificial Intelligence into its existing policing programmes and database which will subsequently help in decision making process, and give quicker response in emergency situations. Staqu will be implementing an advanced model of its AI model for Dubai Police.
“Activities of police forces on ground zero have been fraught with several challenges like identifying criminals or predicting criminal activities based on heuristic data. The activities further suffer due to a lack of adequate technology that can extract and connect, in real-time, an extensive range of unstructured, disparate and heterogeneous data attributes from criminal records," Atul said.
“These data attributes could be grouped under three categories: image, speech, and previously recorded non-uniform text-data. It is not feasible to utilize currently available simple software algorithms in computing such complex data structures. Staqu solved this problem with its proprietary, advance hybrid AI technology which amalgamates different neural network models to process image speech and text to extract meaningful information that aid in decision making," he said.
