Twitter can detect crime up to an hour faster than police

Twitter has repeatedly proven itself as an invaluable platform for information sharing during social crises. Now new research has shown its ability to detect serious incidents much faster than police reports -- up to an hour faster, in fact. By analysing data from the London riots in 2011, researchers at Cardiff University showed that computer systems could automatically scan through Twitter and identify potentially dangerous occurrences, such as windows being broken and cars being set on fire, long before they were reported to the Metropolitan Police Service. The system could also identify Twitter rumors about where riots were likely to take place, as well real-time information about areas where people were gathering. The researchers used a series of machine-learning algorithms to analyze each of the tweets from the dataset of 1.6 million tweets, taking into account a number of key features such as the time they were posted, the location where they were posted and the content of the tweet itself.