Fighting Future Crime

February 19, 2006 - brakis-altwan Time Machine

The utility of business intelligence (BI) is spreading across all fields; BI software is being deployed for a variety of purposes ranging from preventing theft to deterring crime. The Richmond Police Department (RPD) in Virginia is implementing data mining, predictive analysis, and BI tools from enterprise business intelligence software solutions providers SPSS and Information Builders to prevent future crime from happening. The application, which combines SPSS' predictive analysis and Information Builders' enterprise BI capabilities along with an analytic framework from RTI International, an independent scientific research and technology development corporation, will aid the RPD in deploying police power to the right places at the right time and thus preventing crime. The software and implementation make sense since criminal activity follows predictable patterns, and the police are natural data miners who excel at wading through data to derive solutions to crimes, says Colleen McCue, senior research scientist at RTI International. Eweek reports:
"By better characterizing crime trends and patterns to predict where crime was likely to occur, the police department could anticipate criminal activity and proactively place their resources," McCue added.

Source: Business Intelligence

Data mining - A BI threat to Security?

"Data mining" - is associated with Business Intelligence and it helps gather information. Unknown to many an internet user, it is being used by several companies to learn about who you are and what you do. Initially they were introduced as personalized pages.
Sure it looked good to have a web page with a layout you had set when you last logged in - the same colors, themes and contents. It is also amusing to have a small window pop up which says "Hello James... looking for a house loan". But, how on earth did they know that you were looking for a loan or a house or a car?
Data mining is also a concern with governments eavesdropping on citizens. Computer technology is used to extract knowledge that's buried in enormous volumes of undigested information. With the speed at which computers can crunch data today searching through a few hundreds of thousands of lines of data to filter out a few key words - it is easy.
So if you searched for “Hijack” and related words…its easy to pick you up. Similarly the contents of your chats can be searched in no time to detect possible pedophiles and murderers or even tax evaders. While these are the high points of Data Mining, it can also be used to search and sort through trillions of bits of raw data culled from telephone calls, e-mails, the Internet, airlines, car rentals, stores, credit card records and other sources.
To a common man are these not the very threats he was trying to shield himself from by using a firewall and anti spy software and anti virus software. And here reputed companies and makers of search engines are doing the same thing. What’s more worrying is that these are the very useful sites you just cannot do without. So in a creepy way even the innocent citizen has been given the same"preferential" treatment as Bin Laden. Now is that not a misuse of technology and invasion to one's privacy?

February 22, 2006 in Data Mining
Source: http://www.businessintelligencelowdown.com/