Current Members
Dr. Ernest Fokoué
Principal Investigator, RIT
As the Principal Investigator, Dr. Fokoué provides the strategic vision and academic leadership for the OpenBWC project. With a Ph.D. in Statistics and extensive experience in machine learning and data science, he guides the research methodology, ensuring ethical considerations and statistical rigor are at the core of our work. His passion lies in applying advanced computational techniques to solve pressing societal problems.
Angela Srbinovska
Graduate Research Assistant, RIT
Angela is a graduate student in Computer Science at Rochester Institute of Technology with a passion for machine learning and its potential to create positive societal impact. Her research focuses on AI-driven analysis of police body-worn camera footage through the OpenBWC project, where she developed a visual timeline pipeline that automatically analyzes video footage to identify scene context and activity patterns over time. By combining computer vision and machine learning, her work helps transform large volumes of body-worn camera data into structured insights that can support transparency, accountability, and improved police-community relations.
Adrian Martin
Data Analyst, RPD
Mr. Martin is a Data Analyst for the Rochester (NY) Police Department. He works in the Office of Business Intelligence (OBI) focusing on executive-level performance reporting, research design, and program evaluation. Mr. Martin’s projects include data visualizations to assist command-level decisions on resource allocation; designing, implementing and monitoring a randomized controlled trial of a proactive policing intervention; and supporting and conducting grant-funded Body-Worn Camera analysis in partnership with local research universities. Prior to joining the OBI, he worked as a crime analyst for 8 years, primarily focusing gangs, violent crime, and organized crime. Mr. Martin holds a B.A. in Modern European History from Brown University and a Masters degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University.
Anita Srbinovska
Information Services Developer, RPD
Anita is the Information Services Developer for the Rochester (NY) Police Department. She currently works in the Office of Business Intelligence (OBI). Anita leads the natural language processing (NLP) and multimodal understanding efforts for the OpenBWC initiative. She develops pipelines that transform raw police body-worn camera (BWC) audio and transcripts into structured data, including Whisper-based speech-to-text, diarization, transcript correction workflows, and semantic parsing. She also works on ontology-driven reasoning, mapping police narratives into OWL knowledge graphs to support analysis, transparency, and research in policing. Anita holds a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Nishka Desai
ML Researcher, RPD
Nishka is passionate about advancing our understanding of the world through the lens of mathematics and statistics. She is currently a machine learning (ML) researcher at the RPD, having recently completed her undergraduate studies in Applied Mathematics and Applied Statistics with a minor in Physics from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her research interests include deep learning, statistical machine learning, abstract algebra, and theoretical physics. In the OpenBWC team, she aims to further the efforts for successful speaker separation and diarization using audio data.
Dr. John McCluskey
Senior Executive Director and Professor, University at Albany
Dr. McCluskey is Senior Executive Director of the School of Criminal Justice. His research focuses on two areas: the impact of body-worn cameras and artificial intelligence in policing, and teacher victimization and maltreatment in schools. Supported by the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the National Institute of Justice, his work examines how procedural justice shapes police performance, criminal justice outcomes, and school responses to victimization. He earned his BA, MA, and PhD from the School of Criminal Justice at University at Albany.
Wyatt Auten
Criminal Justice PhD Student, University at Albany
Wyatt is a PhD Student at the University at Albany. He manages the human evaluation of AI generated transcription analysis for OpenBWC. He also researches the limitations of using BWC footage in social scientific research.
Isabella Zicari
Undergraduate Criminal Justice Researcher, RPD
Isabella is an undergraduate student at the New York State University at Albany, majoring in Criminal Justice and Psychology. At OpenBWC, she supports the research team by manually coding body-worn camera footage, including SRR, context, activity, weapons, tactics, escalation, and video summaries. Her work helps create reliable labeled data that can be used to evaluate and improve future AI models for BWC analysis.
Mamadou K. KEITA
PhD Student, RIT
Mamadou K. is working on creating the information retrieval infrastructure, including the models and pipelines for OpenBWC. This work will enable multimodal evidence retrieval through natural language queries and accelerate the annotation and analysis of complex evidence.
Sanjay Charitesh Makam
Undergraduate Researcher, RIT
Sanjay is an undergraduate student in Computing and Information Technologies at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is interested in artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and multimodal AI. Through the OpenBWC project, Sanjay works on applying AI techniques to analyze police body-worn camera footage, helping support research focused on transparency, accountability, and evidence-based policing.
Kwaku Sanaah-Faried
Graduate Researcher, RIT
Kwaku completed a B.S. in Applied Statistics at Rochester Institute of Technology and he is currently pursuing a masters in Applied & Computational Mathematics. His research interests include causal inference, statistical machine learning, deep learning, and quantitative social science. In OpenBWC helps refine data-driven tools that advance procedural justice in everyday policing practice.
Past Members
Jonathan Bateman
ML & Criminology Researcher, RIT
Jonathan bridges the critical gap between criminology and machine learning. His research focuses on developing fair and interpretable models to identify behavioral patterns in law enforcement interactions. With a background in both criminal justice and data analytics, he is instrumental in defining the features and metrics that matter for creating meaningful, evidence-based policy recommendations.
Vivek Senthil
ML & Data Engineering Researcher, RIT
Vivek architects the robust data pipelines and machine learning infrastructure that power the OpenBWC platform. He focuses on creating scalable, efficient systems for processing vast amounts of video data. His expertise ensures that our models are not only accurate but also deployable and maintainable, making our research accessible and practical for real-world application.