Who done it? Or who will do it? Can we predict crime?
Statistical researcher Richard Berk in Norway is using the data collected by the government about Norwegian citizens. Berk hopes to use the data from the files of children and their parents and process it with machine learning to see if he can predict from the circumstances of their birth whether a child will commit a crime before their 18th birthday. Berk’s work is based on machine learning. This involves data scientists designing algorithms that teach computers to identify patterns in large data sets. We were joined by Paul McGorrery a criminal lawyer and PhD candidate at Deakin University and Dawn Gilmore a PhD candidate in Learning and Sociology at Swinburne University, discussing the implications of such research and specifically how it could impact the Australian justice system.
Produced by Annie Lewis
