By Nneka Nwogwugwu
Professor Matthew Bennett of the department of environmental and geographic sciences at Bournemouth University, has developed an app as a tool that will not just help in the fight against crime but it could even give a voice to long-gone stone-age communities.
At a crime scene in the near future, a detective takes a smartphone out of her pocket and snaps an image of a bloody footprint, Daily Maverick reports.
An app on the phone would tell the sex and estimated age of the perpetrator who left the print. And it would all be thanks to machine learning.
Bennett has been working on a machine learning algorithm that sexes 2D footprints, and he and his team have achieved an accuracy of up to 90%, on Caucasian feet.It has outperformed expectations.
Machine learning is an area of artificial intelligence where algorithms learn from data, without human input.
“It trains itself to actually recognise the distinction between male and female tracks,” says Bennett.
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