Named after Thomas Bayes, a statistician, philosopher and minister who came to Edinburgh to study logic in 1719, the Bayes Centre was established in 2018, as a gateway to the University’s data expertise for businesses, entrepreneurs and the public sector. As a result, students and academics within the Centre have been using their data talent, skills and experience to help support collaborative projects with Police Scotland.
Using expertise
A recent project that illustrates this focus has been using data science to measure police officers’ physiological responses when receiving data, to determine the most effective way of delivering live information to them during an emergency call out.
Harry Schone is the Data Science Coordinator for Police Scotland. Through the Bayes Centre he was able to access the University’s Neuropolitics Reseach Lab, which focuses on the relationship between cognitive and neurobiological processes. Staff and students within the Lab look at reactions in the brain to decision-making.
“We were interested in this thing called ‘the priming effect’,” says Harry. “This is when you receive a lot of information and have levels of adrenaline on board that could diminish your ability to make rational decisions. There can be very serious consequences in such scenarios.”
Presently, when police officers are on the way to a scene, a call operator is relaying information to them as it is received in real time. Therefore it can be fragmented and non-sequential. The hope is that police officers attending scenes can be provided with much more data that is held about the scenario. This would also be relayed in a more digestible format.
Helping the police response
Harry explains what this change in provision could look like: “We might be taking calls and instantly on screen is a summary of everything that phone number or address has ever called the police about. That information will be coming through very quickly, so what is the most responsible way to transfer that information to the officer? How do we ensure proportionality? ”
Studying this type of data can only bring better understanding of how to minimise risk in highly stressful situations.
“There is some evidence in this area of cognition, but it tends to be firearms based in and from America,” explains Harry. “So we are really pleased to contribute a piece of UK evidence, to wider understanding.”
A data partnership
In the same vein, the Bayes Centre’s Business Development Manager, Charlotta Cederqvist, comments: “We have seen great enthusiasm for the Police Scotland projects from academics and students across disciplines such as maths, computer science and social sciences. The outcomes demonstrate that an interdisciplinary approach to data can help address policing challenges and drive innovation.”
The growth in partnership working like this is clearly mutually beneficial. It provides students and staff with live research opportunities and has a positive impact on the police service. This in turn brings benefits to the general public.
“The Bayes Centre is a really good place to meet a wide range of interesting people and learn,” says Harry. “I’ve met academics and students who have been keen to work with us and our data. And we have an eye on the future and building a talent pipeline. When we need expertise, particularly niche expertise, we’ll be able to access that. We also have jobs for students. We have really interesting data and really interesting problems which we welcome collaborative thoughts on.”
Using data helps
Another illustrative piece of work which formed part of Police Scotland’s collaboration with Bayes has been a School of Informatics masters project analysing data related to knife crime.
The project focused on cross-referencing police crime data relating to stabbings, with Scottish Ambulance Service data related to knife wounds, to help highlight under-reporting and data gaps. As a result, Harry concludes:
“We found helpful information around stop and search and areas where there were stabbings, but where we had no weapons recovery or weapons stop and searches. We’re investigating further. Moreover, this project gave us a more reliable data set than we’ve had before.”
Attracting investment
Police Scotland also received funding in 2024 from Research Data Scotland, an organisation based at the Bayes Centre that connects researchers with data, to create a synthetic data set, in collaboration with the School of Mathematics.
Synthetic data is artificial data that doesn’t contain information about real people but follows some of the same patterns as real-world data.
“It’s not the anonymisation or redaction of data,” explains Harry. “It’s creating entirely new entities that retain the robust relationships of the original data set. We want a fake data set that provides us with incidents that mirror the real-life distribution of those types of things.”
Such data can help the police service manage future demand for resources, such as allocating the right level of officer numbers in rural and urban areas, to meet different community needs.
Collaborative ambition
For Charlotta, the projects with Police Scotland exemplify the collaborative nature and ambitions of the University’s data-driven innovation (DDI) hubs. These six hubs include the University’s Bayes Centre, Edinburgh Futures Institute, the Usher Institute, Edinburgh International Data Facility and Easter Bush Agritech Hub, as well as Heriot-Watt University’s National Robotarium. The collective aim is to bring together expertise and industry partners to benefit society through the innovative use of data.
“Bayes – and all of the DDI’s hubs – are interdisciplinary, so can support organisations with a range of skill sets, from data science to linguistics,” she says.
In short, the benefits of this partnership are clear to see. On the one hand Police Scotland has received valuable insights while being able to advertise itself as a data-driven employer to students. On the other, University academics and students have had the opportunity to work on projects that make societal impact. It’s a successful data-sharing relationship in which Thomas Bayes himself would see the logic.
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Image credits: main image – GettyImages/Thomas Faull; policeman on his radio – GettyImages/Alphotographic; students outside the Bayes Centre – Whitedog Photography.
