We can know when and where the next school shooting will occur...

It is easy to recommend music or movies or food to your taste or predict where you will spend your money on almost anything.

Deciding whether one is going to be incarcerated or not is also decided with predictive analysis.

Risk-assessment software like COMPAS — short for Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions — just do that. Humans are equally as successful as algorithms for predicting defendants’ risk of committing future crimes. The algorithm is used in various courts throughout the nation to predict if a defendant will commit a crime in the future, specifically within two years.

The point is that algorithms can be written and tested with COMPAS and predictions can be made using data combination from, social media, health record, school records, and more. So, predicting future mishap is not impossible task. What is missing and need to happen is government ownership of the situation and commitment to resolving it.

In the upcoming age of digital transformation, we tend to think that machine predictions are the most precise and so are best. This would be the same mistake as general industrywide perception about a couple decade back that ERP takes care of ALL the technology need.

The technology predictions are important but so are human judgments. As much as we need algorithms, we need training and civic engagement programs to not only identify but also prevent and cure the possible disruptive situations.

How can we achieve this task together? What do you think?

A recent thesis work from Dartmouth, by Julia Dressel '17's for crime-prediction research is timely. https://goo.gl/niRzp9.