Each year, Hong Kong citizens and visitors submit several million application forms to the Immigration Department to apply for a wide variety of documents ranging from right of adobe, travel documents, identity cards, work permits, to the registration of birth, death and marriage. Providing high quality service in a timely manner is a very important mission objective for the Immigration Department. By using a suite of AI technologies, we are able to streamline approval processes and enable one-stop service for many types of applications.
The Hong Kong Immigration Department (ImmD), plays a very important role in maintaining the security and prosperity of Hong Kong. It is responsible for controlling the entry and departure of all people at its borders and safeguarding it against threats. It is also responsible for enforcing immigration control within the city. The Department has a Registration of Persons Division where citizens register births, deaths and marriages and obtain identity cards. It also issues passports and other international travel documents.
The Department processes over a hundred different type of application forms for travel documents, identity cards, visas, or other permits and certificates. In 2004, roughly 4 million application forms were submitted to the Department. The speedy and accurate processing for all application forms is essential in supporting the economy and growth of Hong Kong.
Our AI technology is part of the Immigration Department's eBrain project. Our software provides a full range of intelligent AI-services to support the Immigration Department's next generation form and document processing systems. AI-services provided by our software included rule-based assessment, workflow processing, schema-based suggestions, data mining, case-based reasoning, and machine learning.
The main objective of the project is to provide an adequate set of advanced AI technologies to help streamline processes and workflows for all the application form processing needs for the Immigration Department, thus greatly shortening the turnaround time for millions of Hong Kong citizens and visitors, which in turn helps facilitate Hong Kong's economic growth. This project is probably the first time any immigration department in the world is using AI for automatic application assessment in such a large scale.
Intelligent Text-Mining/Information Retrieval