Pre-Cog Is Real – New Software Stops Crime Before It Happens

[Dok]

Pre-Cog Is Real – New Software Stops Crime Before It Happens

The police officers arrived at the parking garage in downtown Santa Cruz and spotted two women behaving suspiciously. No crime had been committed, but peering through the windows of the parked cars was sketchy enough. The officers questioned the women: one had outstanding warrants; the other was in possession of illegal drugs.

What’s strange about this scenario is that no one had called the cops. In fact, the cops didn’t even know that the women would be there, just that the probability of a crime being committed at that location, at that time of day, was especially high. In one of the first cases of ‘predictive policing,’ law enforcement were able to calculate where the criminals would be and arrest them before the crime could be committed.

Oh yeah, totally “Minority Report,” absolutely “Numb3rs.”

Except it’s not Hollywood, it’s real. In July the Santa Cruz Police Department began experimenting with an interesting bit of software developed by scientists at Santa Clara University. The researchers behind the software are like an intellectual “Oceans Eleven” team of specialists: two mathematicians, an anthropologist and a criminologist. They’ve combined their cerebral forces to come up with a mathematical model that takes crime data from the past to forecast crimes in the future. The basic math is similar to that used by seismologists to predict aftershocks following an earthquake (also a handy bit of software in southern California).



rest: http://singularityhub.com/2011/08/29/pre-cog-is-real-%E2%80%93-new-software-stops-crime-before-it-happens/

[kermitthefrayer]

WOW!   Just wow!!!!!

[MonkeyPuppet]

It's not really pre-cog, it's common sense.  I doubt the veteran cops in a particular city need a piece of software to tell them where most of the criminal activity occurs, what time of day/night or the nature of the criminal activity.

I'm going to guess that a every Friday and Saturday night, within a particular "ghetto" neighborhood, 2+ houses will be burglarized, at least one person will be shot to death, 2 stabbed, 4 women will be raped, and several cars will be jacked for their stereos and wheels.

Does that make me a genius?

[Freeski]

It's not really pre-cog, it's common sense.  I doubt the veteran cops in a particular city need a piece of software to tell them where most of the criminal activity occurs, what time of day/night or the nature of the criminal activity.

I'm going to guess that a every Friday and Saturday night, within a particular "ghetto" neighborhood, 2+ houses will be burglarized, at least one person will be shot to death, 2 stabbed, 4 women will be raped, and several cars will be jacked for their stereos and wheels.

Does that make me a genius?

Yeah, but wait until they start aggregating and processing millions/billions bits of data, in real-time, 24/7, combined with a well-trained, obedient and predictable people, then what you'll have is a whole new brand of "common sense".

[MonkeyPuppet]

Yeah, but wait until they start aggregating and processing millions/billions bits of data, in real-time, 24/7, combined with a well-trained, obedient and predictable people, then what you'll have is a whole new brand of "common sense".

True.  The scary part will be when they start taking that statistical data and acting against it by arresting people based solely upon the computer's guestimate of the likelihood of them committing a crime.  I can see it happening, but what's described in the article is not even close to that.

[Dok]

Supercomputer Predicts Civil Unrest

In Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series, the future of masses of people can be predicted with "psychohistory," a method of predicting future political and social trends, using a device called the "Prime Radiant." In the 1950s, there wasn't the math or the computational power available to make such a thing reality. Now there might be.

Supercomputers, such as the Nautilus at the University of Tennessee's Center for Remote Data Analysis and Visualization, may have brought the world closer to Asimov's vision, though it is still early days. The key is seeking patterns in massive amounts of data and being able to visualize them. Kalev Leetaru, assistant director for text and digital media analytics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, did just that.

REST: http://news.discovery.com/tech/supercomputer-predicts-civil-unrest-110908.html