How do you envisage the ways your algorithm could be used?

People have concerns that this will be used as a tool to put people in jail before they commit crimes. That’s not going to happen, as it doesn’t have any capability to do that. It just predicts an event at a particular location. It doesn’t tell you who is going to commit the event or the exact dynamics or mechanics of the events. It cannot be used in the same way as in the film Minority Report.

In Chicago, most of the people losing their lives in violent crimes is largely due to gang violence. It is not like a Sherlock Holmes movie where some convoluted murder is happening. It is actually very actionable if you know about it a week in advance – you can intervene. This does not just involve stepping up enforcement and sending police officers there, there are other ways of intervening socially so that the odds of the crime occurring actually goes down and, ideally, it never happens.

What we would like to do is enable a kind of policy optimisation. My cohorts and I have been very vocal that we don’t want this to be used as a purely predictive policy tool. We want policy optimisation to be the main use of it. We have to enable that, as just putting out a paper and having the algorithm there isn’t enough. We want the mayor or administrators to use the model generated to do simulations and inform policy.