Border security

When Border Control Meets Big Data Technology

Border control has always been a critical issue, but the urgency is far more widely apparent since the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. Zettafox, a privately owned consultancy, is working on a system that will employ big data analytics to help border security agents assess the risk factor of travellers and hopefully prevent disaster.

Zettafox’s work focuses on extending the predictive to the prescriptive. That is, they’re working algorithms that will move beyond saying what might happen, to suggesting what should be done.

Patrick Zerbib and Marc Atallah, founders of Zettafox, have been working in late 2013 and early 2014 on simulations to, according to Atallah, decisively demonstrate to an unnamed European border agency a “smarter approach to raising the red flag.”

Their approach allows potential risk profiles to be calculated from “overwhelming big data,” said Zerbib, drawn from the vast amounts of available personal information, such as financial transactions (think credit card records), social media presence, mobile communication history, and more. Mining this data allows the system to spot high-risk profiles.