Cyber detective links up crimes

December 6, 2004 | Source: New Scientist

Computer scientists at DePaul University have developed an artificial intelligence system for crime solving that compares records for cases with all the files on past crimes, looking for telltale similarities in crime records and alerting detectives when it finds them.

The system uses pattern-recognition software to link related crimes that may have taken place in widely separated areas whose police forces may rarely be in close contact. The neural network, called a Kohonen network, is particularly good at finding patterns in a set of input data without any human intervention.