The ability to predict the future has long been the stuff of science fiction or, more often, pure fantasy, with hard science usually finding it difficult to rationalise there ever being a way to use technology to foretell what is to come.
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But IBM is tackling the problem in a measured way via big data analytics, offering a range of products that, in a limited but surprisingly encouraging way, is allowing the police department of Richmond, Virginia to begin actually stopping crimes before they happen.
Captain of services, Tim Heroff, described how Richmond Police Department has been "swimming in information" for quite some years now, but finding a way to make sense of it all has always been "a great challenge".
But using the technology available now, which includes IBM's Identity Insight product and law enforcement and fraud prevention software i2, which IBM acquired in 2011, "has been a real game-changer in law enforcement," said Heroff.
"About three years ago we introduced a new paradigm called Intelligence-Led Policing, and one of the tenets of ILP is that a very small percentage of offenders are actually responsible for the majority of crime," explained Henoff.
Identify those individuals and focus your departments resources on these "most serious and prolific offenders," said Henoff, "and you're going to have a significant impact on the crime rate in your area."
Not only that, but connect enough information together, and it actually becomes possible to use logical data connections to quite literally stop crimes before they happen.
Using IBM's InfoSphere Identity Insight product, Henoff explained how Rochester PD is first of all able to process "who is who" in its existing data management systems. This is a tougher challenge than it looks because, as Henoff explained, "identity resolution can be problematic when people don't always tell us the truth. They sometimes switch out their name, or date of birth, or other identifying information."
As many as six different people in the police computer can turn out to be the same person, but InfoSphere teases this out by focusing on connections between these named individuals.
"It helps us to understand who knows him, who he has relationships with – non-obvious relationships," explained Henoff.
But even then, trying to express these connections in a way police personnel untrained in hardcore data analysis can understand is a challenge in itself. This is where i2 comes in.
"Using i2, we can present this information in a visual manner, and it's incredible," enthused Henoff. "It allows us to display the relationships like a spider's web, and it becomes quite apparent why this particular individual was at the scene of a crime; it's because the vehicle that was there was owned by a person he's associated with. We have all this information in the management systems already, but it would take a great deal of time and effort to find it all manually. With this tool we can visually see the environment we are dealing with."
The visual system is so simple and easy to use that if an investigating officer "finds something interesting, they can click on an icon, whether it's a person or a vehicle or a location," said Henoff.
