In 2017, detectives at the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department working a cold case got an idea, one that might help them finally get a lead on the murder of Maria Jane Weidhofer. Officers had found Weidhofer, dead and sexually assaulted, at Berkeley, California's Tilden Regional Park in 1990. Nearly 30 years later, the department sent genetic information collected at the crime scene to Parabon NanoLabs--a company that says it can turn DNA into a face. Parabon NanoLabs ran the suspect's DNA through its proprietary machine learning model. Soon, it provided the police department with something the detectives had never seen before: the face of a potential suspect, generated using only crime scene evidence. The image Parabon NanoLabs produced, called a Snapshot Phenotype Report, wasn't a photograph.

There has been a lot of hype around AI to the point where some people are simply tuning it out. I think this is a mistake. While there are limits to what AI can do, there also are sophisticated attacks that we'd miss without it. The need for AI is driven by three fundamental yet significant changes in the enterprise computing environment. Taking all of these factors together leads me to believe that AI is not only a viable solution, but it may be the only solution.

Yesterday several police departments in California announced the arrest of the "Golden State Killer," who killed a dozen people between 1978 and 1986 and has been accused of over 50 rapes. At the time, investigators said DNA played a role in identifying former Auburn, CA police officer Joseph James DeAngelo, and today went a step further with the explanation. The LA Times and New York Times report that investigators took DNA samples from the old crime scenes and plugged them into online databases, looking for familiar matches that would help narrow down the suspect. The Olympian reports that by combing through family trees of partial matches they focused on DeAngelo, who was the right age and had lived in some of the areas. Before arresting the subject they got a DNA sample from something DeAngelo had discarded and checked for a match.

In July 2009, deadly riots broke out in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, China. Nearly 200 people died, the majority ethnic Han Chinese, and thousands of Chinese troops were brought in to quell the riots. An information battle soon followed, as mobile phone and internet service was cut off in the entire province. For the next 10 months, web access would be almost non-existent in Xinjiang, a vast region larger than Texas with a population of over 20 million. It was one of the most widespread, longest internet shutdowns ever.