DARPA Work on Intelligent Crime Prediction System

In the science fiction film "Minority Report", the hero of Tom Cruise was involved in the prevention of crimes that had not yet been committed, but which were predicted by a trio of seer mediums. If we discard the last component — the predictors of the future — from this scheme, we get something similar to the actual development of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - an agency of advanced defense research projects), which is sponsored by the US Army and designed to identify “possible” crimes.

The Cognitive Engine project is the development of a special unit of DARPA Innovation House, which is an artificial intelligence system designed to analyze a large volume video stream and identify people with potentially dangerous behaviors in it. In fact, we are talking about pattern recognition, identifying objects and comparing their behavior with certain behavioral patterns that the system recognizes as trustworthy and which do not require the attention of the police or similar services.


Did the man leave the bag in a public place? Does a man hold his hand in his pocket, in which obviously something is lying? Is someone in black camouflage and a large backpack coming out of the toilet? Similar signs of a potential crime will be recognized by the system, which will respond accordingly, and special services will be able to take "preventive measures."

The Cognitive Engine solution will be based on the volume visualization technique and another DARPA development called the Extended Activity Reasoning system (EAR), which can be trained both on personal experience and based on human-specified rules and characteristics.

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