Oct 5, 2015

Wtf


Not quite Minority Report, but monitoring everything from weather to Twitter may be able to predict where and when crime will occur.

"No doubt the precogs have already seen this," says Chief John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise), head of Washington, D.C.'s experimental "Precrime" crime-prediction department in Minority Report, the 2002 Steven Spielberg movie based on Philip K. d-ck's 1956 short story (which is also now a new Fox TV series).

Of course, no one has found a trio of psychic mutant "precogs" who can unanimously foresee future crimes, but Hitachi today introduced a system that promises to predict where and when crime is likely to occur by ingesting a panoply of data, from historical crime statistics to public transit maps, from weather reports to social media chatter. Hitachi says that "about half a dozen" U.S. cities will join a proof of concept test of the technology beginning in October, and though Hitachi hasn't yet named them, Washington, D.C. could well be on the list. It's one of several dozen cities in the U.S. and Caribbean countries where the company already provides video surveillance and sensor systems to police departments with its Hitachi Visualization Suite. Hitachi execs provided several examples—even screenshots of the software—featuring D.C. in my conversations with them.

"We don't have any precogs as part of our system," says Darrin Lipscomb, cofounder of companies Avrio and Pantascene, which developed crime-monitoring tech that Hitachi later acquired. "If we determined that the precogs were actually somewhat accurate, we could certainly use their predictions to feed into our model," he says with perfect deadpan. What the new technology, called Hitachi Visualization Predictive Crime Analytics (PCA), does have is the ability to ingest streams of sensor and Internet data from a wide variety of sources.

It then applies what's called machine learning, using the popular statistical software known as "R," that crunches all this information in order to find patterns that humans would miss. "A human just can't handle when you get to the tens or hundreds of variables that could impact crime," says Lipscomb, "like weather, social media, proximity to schools, Metro [subway] stations, gunshot sensors, 911 calls."

LET THE DATA SPEAK FOR ITSELF

Machine learning is the hot new phase of artificial intelligence. Rather than trying to design a beautiful electronic mind, computer scientists are now building huge distributed computing systems that learn by sifting through fire hoses of data and ascertaining patterns or anomalies. This has become practical only recently with the development of big, cheap data storage and processing capabilities, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Hitachi's own HDS cloud system–all of which Hitachi's PCA can run on.

More: http://m.fastcompany.com/3051578/elasticity/hitachi-says-it-can-predict-crimes-before-they-happen