Martin Innes is Director of the Crime and Security Research Institute, and Universities’ Police Science Institute at Cardiff University. His research has been highly influential across policy, practitioner and academic communities, both nationally and internationally. He is the author of three books and numerous scholarly articles on aspects of policing, reactions to crime and counter-terrorism. He has acted in an advisory capacity to policing and security agencies, and governments in the USA, Canada, Australia and Holland. He serves on the Professional Committee of the College of Policing.

Colin Roberts is Operations Manager for the Universities’ Police Science Institute, Cardiff University, and leads the Institute’s research programme on counter-terrorism policing. He holds a PhD from the University of Surrey and an MA in social justice from the University of London. With Professor Martin Innes he worked on the National Reassurance Policing Programme and invented a community intelligence technology for the capture and analysis of signal crimes and disorders. In recent years Colin’s main interests have focused on counter-terrorism policing, the time dynamics of conflict, social media analytics and computational methods.

Alun Preece is Co-Director of the Cardiff University Crime & Security Research Institute and Head of the Knowledge and Data Engineering Group in the School of Computer Science and Informatics. His research interests focus on techniques for information provisioning and decision support in complex environments. He was UK Academic Technical Area Lead (2011–2016) for the 10-year joint US/UK International Technology Alliance in Network and Information Sciences, involving a consortium of 26 US and UK academic, industry and government partners, led by IBM and funded by the US Army Research Laboratory and the UK Ministry of Defence.

David Rogers is currently employed as a Research Assistant in the Cardiff University School of Computer Science and Informatics. He is applying his interest in Big Data and the Semantic Web to his current work within the OSCAR team developing real-time web collection and analysis tools to provide situational awareness through social media. He is also studying for his PhD titled ‘Text Mining of Extremist Narratives on the Web’ in which he is looking to evaluate to what degree Web data can be converted into actionable intelligence related to extremism in terms of reliability, usability and timeliness.