Patricia L. Brantingham

Patricia Brantingham is the RCMP University Professor of Computational Criminology and the founder and Director of the Institute of Canadian Urban Research Studies (ICURS). Dr. Brantingham is also a professor in the School of Criminology and an associate member of the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. ICURS has memoranda of understanding for joint research with 13 university research centers that range internationally from Australia to the United Kingdom and to Chile. There are special research arrangements with the RCMP, government ministries and other institutes and research centers at Simon Fraser University. Her goal is to continue interdisciplinary research between computing science, applied mathematics and criminology to address the complex dynamics of urban living and associated crime and safety. ICURS is the archive for police and urban data for British Columbia, providing a research base for collective efforts to model better crime occurrences, offender activity patterns as well as develop effective tools for policy and planning in the justice system. The archive provides the basis for new approaches to understanding crime patterns. ICURS has 28 university members. Research topics at ICURS include: computational criminology, crime analysis and criminal justice system policy analysis. Specific research use mathematical and computing science techniques such as: Policy Simulation Models; Crime Pattern Theory (perception, cognition, similarity and classification algorithms); Computational Topology (crime analysis, latent links, hot spots); Data Quality (fuzzy logic, dynamic acceptable ranges of values; software agents; statistical techniques); Data Mining (algorithms relevant to Public Safety, the Justice System and Emergency Preparedness (decision trees, neural networks, SNA); Urban Morphology (directionality, navigation, road networks, connectivity; primitive rule models) Professor Brantingham developed, with her husband Paul Brantingham, Crime Pattern Theory and Environmental Criminology as well as major research on patterns of individual and aggregate crime patterns. She has over 10 books and monographs and 100 articles.