From the Daily Intelligence, by Angel Oliveri Gandarillas

The mandate that Dr. Zurkowski refers to is ECO’s stated mission to coordinate and manage investigation of all “extraordinary mortuary activity” in the EU. This is, of course, a massive task, although one which has obvious benefits in solving crimes.

“It’s essential that we have the best tools at our disposal at all times,” states Dr. Slovan Milesz, ECO’s current Coroner General. “Too many crucial homicide investigations hinge upon the evidence that our coroners are able to gather and collect into our organization’s database. In the past, this has meant relying on solutions like Sentinel Software’s patented Cyber-Coroner software to link our main office to the offices of local coroners across the continent.”

Dr. Milesz continues: “As good as the Cyber-Coroner software is, it’s really just a data-collection tool. Up until now, we’ve relied on human beings to poke around in that data and make the necessary connections between the disparate entries. This is, of course, a terribly inefficient means of handling an amount of data this massive. It’s literally impossible for a single person to keep track of everything that’s going on in her head. Making the connections between various cases is often like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.”

Because the demands of monitoring the data array are so vast, many cases that could be solved have been known to fall between the cracks. The case of the William Backster, A.K.A. the Nottingham Strangler, is the most notorious that ECO’s managed to contribute to in the past 10 years, but according to critics, that was really only by luck.

“To some extent, I have to agree,” says Dr. Milesz. “That’s where the new ECO office AI comes in,” Dr. Zurkowski states proudly. “The ECO AI has been tailored to not only serve the direct needs of the office’s investigators but also to facilitate mining of ECO’s database of ongoing investigations.”

In layman’s terms, the ECO AI is able to spend all of its downtime-time when it’s not catering to its charges’ direct demands-to poke around in the database, looking for connections between investigations that a human coroner might miss. Does this mean an end to the careers of the coroners around the continent?

“Hardly,” says Dr. Zurkowski with a wry grin. “In fact, the ECO AI makes the work of our nation’s coroners more important than ever. Instead of shooting in the dark when trying to connect different deaths together, these good doctors can spend their time collecting the vital data the AI needs instead of wasting their time poking around and hoping to stumble upon a link on their own.”

Dr. Milesz agrees. “This tool is nothing short of amazing. The ECO AI can not only find patterns that might take a human coroner years to pick out, it can even prompt our coroners to collect evidence that might otherwise be ignored.”

In short, the ECO AI can help to eliminate human error in mortuary investigations and evidence gathering. “For instance,” Dr. Zurkowski explains, “a coroner in Marseille might have a serial killer on his hands whose MO (modus operandi) involves planting a clue deep into the victim’s right ear canal. This is the kind of thing that might go unchecked by a coroner that hasn’t seen this kind of pattern before.

“The ECO AI, though, can complete a profile of the killer’s complete MO and then cross-check that against every murder in its database. In cases with a close match, it can then prompt the local coroner to go back and poke around in a victim’s right ear canal. If that killer’s trademark shows up again, then we know that much more about the killer and are that much closer to putting an end to his reign of terror.”

Of course, like most AIs, the one that Dr. Zurkowski has installed in the ECO offices is just getting its feet wet. “While the ECO AI has a tremendous amount of potential,” the doctor cautions, “it’s still in its infancy. Like most AIs, the ECO version has been designed to learn from its own experiences as it goes along. As it interacts with Dr. Milesz and his team, it will educate itself more and more about how a coroner’s job works and how the coroners under ECO’s command work together. By the end of this year, the ECO AI should have accumulated the knowledge base and work habits of the top physicians in its field, and by the end of the decade, Sherlock Holmes himself would be hard-pressed to match it.”