I-CAPCHA 2018 - First IEEE International Workshop on IoT and Cloud based Collaborative Analytics for Prevention of Crimes and Heinous Activities

Crime prevention and timely aid to victims of criminal acts have been challenging tasks for administrators and citizens, since Adam's days. The task has consistently been becoming increasingly complex with the advances in technology, which is leveraged by the criminal mind to devise newer and stranger ways to perpetrate heinous crimes on unsuspecting individuals or groups of individuals. Using the same technological innovations to proactively predict and prevent crime, and to provide timely aid to victims, is a real challenge for law enforcers and law abiding citizens.
Recently, social networking and cloud computing have been a witness to the execution of many criminal activities, providing powerful and easy mechanisms for the criminals to confer, plan and execute with absolute timely precision. IoTs are highly vulnerable to becoming the criminal's playground as well, due to the absence of heavy access control and standardized security mechanisms.
On the other hand, with proper policies and mechanisms, and cloud based fast analytics, IoT devices can be not only made secure, they could also be tailored to play a prominent role in crime prevention.
The scope for successful use of IoT in crime prevention arises from three aspects of their inherent nature
(i) Geographic Coverage and Universality
(ii) Connectivity
(iii) Control over associated entities appliances/vehicles
IoT devices would typically generate huge volumes of data. Massive data generated by the IoTdevices needs to be stored, accessed fast, and an analyzed to get meaningful activities done. Cloud based storage, cloud computing and big data analytics are crucial technologies for making IoT technology useful, especially for objectives like crime prevention.
Much research in this area and the underlying specializations is required for such an application to become a reality. The First IEEE International Workshop on IoT and Cloud based Collaborative Analytics for Prevention of Crimes and Heinous Activities (I-CAPCHA 2018) is an exciting step forward towards fostering research in this relevant and interesting area, and aims to earnestly encourage talented computer scientists to put their minds to this worthy task.