NYPD's Big Artificial-Intelligence Reveal

Governing: The details of the crime were uniquely specific: Wielding a hypodermic syringe as a weapon, a man in New York City attempted to steal a power drill from a Home Depot in the Bronx. After police arrested him, they quickly ascertained that he'd done the same thing before, a few weeks earlier at another Home Depot, seven miles away in Manhattan.

It wasn't a detective who linked the two crimes. It was a new technology called Patternizr, an algorithmic machine-learning software that sifts through police data to find patterns and connect similar crimes.

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