Emilio Ferrara, a postdoctoral researcher at Indiana University’s...
Emilio Ferrara, a postdoctoral researcher at Indiana University’s Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, is using cellphone calling data to help police fight crime, said a news release from the university. The technology has already helped police in Italy…
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solve a number of crimes, the release said (http://bit.ly/1hKvwMr). “We're learning new insights about individuals by taking very specific physical events, let’s say like a string of robberies, and identifying huge spikes of activity during that same period of time,” Ferrara said. “We can then create what we call a dynamic spring layout -- a series of nodes that represent possible members of criminal networks -- and analyze how those members interact and shape their interconnections over time.” Even a very short phone call or hang-up can provide useful information in solving crimes like theft, Ferrara said. “You have these spikes of phone activity during the times of these robberies, and those might well be the lower rung of the network, but the system also can identify what would be non-intuitive calls of interest, maybe very short, that are extremely hard to capture,” he said. “But we capture these into the network as well."