Miles Wernick, ACE Motorola Chair Professor, and his team help CPD predict crime.

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After years of high crime the Chicago Police Department (CPD) is hoping to prevent crime before it ever happens. They have developed a way to predict crime using the CPD’s crime database and an algorithm developed by Armour College of Engineering (ACE) Motorola Chair Professor, Miles Wernick.

Dr. Wernick has been doing predictive analysis work since the 1980s, when he worked with the US military to recognize potential targets in the battlefield. A lot of his current work focuses on analyzing data and brain scans to make automated diagnoses of dementia in elderly patients.

Wernick and his team at ACE are working on technology to generate crime maps that highlight neighborhoods that might be at risk of an increase in crime. Wernick compares his team’s work to a weather forecast or a computer-aided diagnosis in medicine. Wernick compared these predictive maps to identifying potentially worrying anomalies in a mammogram. “By looking at the whole picture,” he says, “you can begin to learn what it means for a certain area to be abnormal.”

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