Research project
Turing Fellow - Dr Birks
- Start date: 1 October 2018
- End date: 1 October 2020
- Funder: Alan Turing Institute
- Primary investigator: Professor Daniel Birks
Dr Birks is one of 24 researchers awarded a prestigious Turing Fellowship at the University of Leeds, following the launch of a partnership announced earlier this year between the University and the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. Fellowships are awarded to individuals with proven research excellence in data science, Artificial Intelligence (AI), or a related field. The partnership with The Alan Turing Institute is led by the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA), which will play a major role in the coordination of projects and activity amongst Turing Fellows and their research teams.
Dr Birks’ research focuses on exploring the potential of data science and AI to better understand, predict, and disrupt crime problems. He has over 15 years' experience working in applied criminal justice and public policy settings, and has collaborated extensively with government and policing agencies in the UK and Australia. He is particularly interested in how commonly observed patterns of crime emerge from the individual behaviours of potential victims, offenders and crime preventers and their interactions with the urban environment. To investigate these questions, he applies methods from a variety of disciplines, including data science, agent-based computing, and epidemiology.
Dr Birks is currently part of the N8 Police Research Partnership, a £7million research collaboration between eight research intensive universities and 11 police services across the north of England. In addition, he is investigator on projects evaluating the effectiveness of computational methods in forecasting crime patterns in Australian communities (funded by the Australian Institute of Criminology), and in analysing Automatic Number Plate Recognition data collected by UK police (N8 Police Research Partnership).