What do the Unabomber and Marc Dutroux have in common? Your first thought might be that they both killed multiple people. That is true, of course! The other similarity is the fact that in both cases the police took a very long time to identify and arrest the right person. New technological developments could help the police to solve future cases faster.
In case your first thought was: Unabomber? Marc who? here is a short description of them. Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, conducted a bombing campaign in which he targeted people who were involved with implementing modern technology. Killing three, and severely injuring 23 others. Marc Dutroux abducted, molested, and murdered several young children in Belgium in the 90’s.
Solving crimes is a very complex task, and requires a lot of work and experience. well, maybe not always if you look at the following headlines “Florida man uses wanted poster as Facebook profile picture”, and “Woman arrested after trying to test her drugs for Ebola”. In most cases it is a time-consuming and costly process. Therefore, new ways of solving crimes are desirable.
Data mining could help the police to solve crimes faster, as it can be used to model crime detection problems. Data mining will capture years of human experience in solving crimes into computer models. Their algorithms will then help in the identification of crime patterns. Researchers are now trying to integrate machine learning to further accelerate the potency of data mining.
Maybe Ted Kaczynski knew that this was coming, and therefore tried to save himself, along with his fellow murderers, by bombing people that were involved with modern technology. We should all be thankful that the bombings did not stop the world from implementing new technologies, because they can assist us in multiple fields, like solving crimes.
source: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-6264-3_70
