Science Fiction
Dictionary
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
 |
PredPol Predicting Crime As It Happens
PredPol, a cloud-based, data-driven crime prediction service, predicts place-based prediction boxes as small as 500' x 500'. Officers are briefed daily on these zones in which crimes are most likely.
(PredPol's place-based prediction boxes)
In an interview, PredPol's Chief Scientist, George Mohler, Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Santa Clara University, provided additional information:
"When I joined the crime modeling group at UCLA, I started to work on similar types of optimization problems, but applied to spatio-temporal crime patterns. We had a large dataset provided by the Los Angeles Police Department and I was interested in understanding the statistics of crime hotspots and how they could be predicted. ""Some of the models we use at PredPol are self-exciting point processes that were originally developed for modeling earthquake aftershock distributions [Marsan and Lenglin, 2008]. The fact that these point process models fit earthquake and crime event data quite well is, by itself, a cool result. However, in the context of policing we can actually send police into the hotspots that we predict in order to prevent crime. So not only does predictive policing present an interesting modeling problem, but the models then have a societal impact that can reduce the risk that one's car is broken into or that they are a victim of gun violence."
"We have run randomized controlled trials to measure accuracy of the PredPol algorithms and impact on crime rates. These are necessary, because without them it is impossible to determine whether a crime rate increase/decrease is due to the technology and its use or because of some exogenous factor. But my favorite examples are at the scale of individual hotspots. For example one agency had a guy stealing cars with a tow truck. So the police put a decoy car with a GPS tracker in one of the PredPol hotspots and sure enough he came and towed it away (and the police were able to catch him)."
In his 1956 short story Minority Report, Philip K. Dick wrote about the Precrime system. It used computers and precognitive human beings to predict murders before they happened:
In the gloomy half-darkness the three idiots sat babbling. Every incoherent utterance, every random syllable, was analyzed, compared and reassembled in the form of visual symbols, transcribed on conventional punchcards, and ejected into various coded slots.
(Read more about the precrime analytical wing)
From PredPol and Self-Exciting Point Process Modeling of Crime (pdf) via Data Science Weekly via Frolix_8.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 4/5/2014)
Follow this kind of news @Technovelgy.| Email | RSS | Blog It | Stumble | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit |
Would
you like to contribute a story tip?
It's easy:
Get the URL of the story, and the related sf author, and add
it here.
Comment/Join discussion ( 0 )
Related News Stories - (" Surveillance ")
Chameleon Personalized Privacy Protection Mask
'...the Virtual Epiphantic Identity Lustre.' - Neal Stephenson, 2019.
Spherical Police Robot Rolls In China
'Rand could effectively be in several places at once...' - Niven and Pournelle, 1981.
Vietnam To Have Full Biometric Transparency
'inscriptions too small to be seen with the naked eye; microscopic data...' - Eric Frank Russell, 1939.
Simple Way To Defeat AI Face Recognition
'... designed to foil facial recognition systems.' - Neal Stephenson, 2019.
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's 1950's
1960's 1970's
1980's 1990's
2000's 2010's
Current News
Robotic Barber Programmed With a Number of Styles
'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'
Humanoid Boxing Robot KO's Opponent - It's A Knockout!
'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'
Caterpillar Electric Mining Loader Not Yet Ready For Moon
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'
Centipede Robots Down On The Farm
'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'
Anthropic's Claude AI Creates Legal Citation From Whole Cloth
'Here is a Clerk that would work incessantly, and neither eat, sleep, want payment, or grumble.'
Students Vie For Lunar Regolith Mining Robot Prize
'About time you got here,' the astronaut said.
'They Erased My Memory' Says Ariana Grande
'...using a neutralizing electronic impulse.'
Solitary Black Hole Wanders In Space
'...the Hole is something like a vortex or a whirlpool?'
Spaceplane From Virgin Atlantic
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'
DARPA Wants 'Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'
Robot Hand Creeps Along, Separate From It's Owner
'The crawling... object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand...'
Taikonauts Exercise In China's Tiangong Space Station
'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...'
Korean Exoskeleton Suit F1 Helps You Put It On
'Better late than never.'
Have AI Researchers Given Up On 'Bio-Babies'?
'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
Bunker Busters and Bore-Pellets
'The first revelation of the new Soviet bore-pellets.'
'Spikeless' Brand Swizzle Stick Detects Spiked Drinks
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
