Artificial intelligence could help warn us of another Dallas

As the country reels from the spasm of gun violence that killed two black men and five officers this week, a prominent digital vigilante is using an online tool he hacked together to keep an eye on hot spots that seem at risk of boiling over into bloodshed. The Web app, which is powered partly by artificial intelligence, analyzes posts on social media as well as police radio chatter and feeds of the local airspace in virtually any region. To detect rumblings of unrest and alert the public. On a recent night, the tool had its gaze trained on Baton Rouge, La., where protesters backed by the New Black Panther Party gathered for a rally. "I'm looking for any indication they are coordinating skirmishes. Using IBM's Watson AI, the tool not only examines large collections of tweets but -- somewhat eerily -- also can go through a single user's timeline and, with Watson's machine learning technology, offer an analysis of that user's "trustworthiness, propensity toward violence [and] openness," the Jester said. That information, he said, could hold clues to a criminal's intentions. If the Jester's name sounds familiar, that's because the hacker has appeared elsewhere -- on Time's list of most influential internet personalities, on CNN and, according to a recent blog post, on an upcoming episode of USA's "Mr.