Centre of Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence and Organised Crime Research

Our vision is to consistently deliver excellent applied research across the security and policing domain. The diverse expertise of the CENTRIC team allows us to carry out qualitative and quantitative research that positively impacts operational policy, practice and procedures and contributes to public safety and societal resilience. Concurrently, our data science and technical team can process, model and analyse large datasets whilst developing deployable, operational solutions that address the information requirements and needs of security practitioners and experts.

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Artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics have real and beneficial applications across all major sectors. The security domain has already proved a fruitful environment for applying such techniques. CENTRIC takes a pragmatic approach to AI and machine learning, focusing on applications supporting human decision-making, such as incident and activity detection, classification and alerting, natural language processing for threat identification and risk analysis. 

In tandem, we heavily emphasise developing big data and AI solutions that embed ethical, privacy-conscious, and accountable principles that uphold the fundamental rights of citizens and society.

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The acceptance of new technologies into the security domain relies on a consensus of support from the public and transparency and accountability from law enforcement, governments and those who deploy such technologies. Consequently, citizens' perception of and their behaviour in response to security and surveillance technologies has a significant impact on their acceptance into society and the legitimacy of the organisations that deploy them. 

At CENTRIC, we understand the impact that security and surveillance technologies can have on society and the need to engage early and deeply with societal actors on the use of such technologies to maximise their benefit whilst protecting the fundamental rights and privacy of citizens. We undertake qualitative and quantitative research with citizens to understand their perceptions and acceptance of a range of security practices and use this to inform and shape the development of new approaches and tools to safeguard society.

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Serious games simulate real-world events and processes, providing unique challenges that improve a user's domain knowledge and problem-solving capabilities. They build on gamification principles to increase engagement and interest, leveraging gaming platforms, including mobile, tablet, desktop, virtual, and augmented reality experiences. As a result, serious games can provide an immersive, cost-effective and safer route to training for specialised or dangerous scenarios such as emergency response, surgery, firefighting, or counter-terrorism operations.

CENTRIC develops 2D and immersive reality games that support training and knowledge-building for various security stakeholders in areas such as community policing, cryptocurrency investigation, radicalisation awareness and firearms training.

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Systems and applications supporting situational awareness are and continue to be a key element of CENTRIC's research and development portfolio. Good situational awareness can apply to an individual, team or organisation and means understanding the current situation, interpreting what that situation means in the context of the environment and then using this information to predict what may happen in the near future. Applying situational awareness to security has a clear rationale and directly supports most command-and-control operations in various scenarios. At CENTRIC, we develop situational awareness solutions that enhance staff safety and security, provide monitoring for major incident management, and enable horizon scanning and proactive threat assessment.

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