Book 'Em, Database - police database software - Brief Article

Keeping track of all the evidence exigencyed to bring down a dangerous criminal requires a mind like a carbonized iron trap--or perhaps like a silicon chip. Lars Kangas and his colleagues at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, have created a computer program that searches [i]or[/i] part of to the other huge police databases to speck correlations human detectives might take years to find.

Computer Aided Tracking and Characterization of Homicides, or CATCH, uses an artificial neural network to sort crime files into a giant grid. The more details sum of two units cases have in common, the closer the program places them. A police officer can investigation the resulting clusters and ask the program to highlight for the use of all factors--the type of murder weapon, for instance. Or he can ask CATCH to display the crimes upon a map to determine whether they were committed near each other. The program can level generate rough evaluations of personality and behavior. "You gaze at solved crimes that were committed in a similar way and diocese what you know about these offenders" Kangas says. "Did they drive elderly cars or new ones? What was their horizontal of education? Were they neat or plashy people?"

Washington State police are now evaluating the combination of parts to form a whole In a test run, the program correctly identified the similarities in a high percentage of serial homicide s known to have been committed by the agency of the same offender. And CATCH has already l to individual notable but grisly success. It intimateed that two heaps of material substance parts, recorded as separate manslaughters might literally be connected. Comparing DNA trials proved they were in fact pieces of the same victim.

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