Bio
Dr Daniel Birks is the University Academic Fellow in Quantitative Policing and Crime Data Analytics at the School of Law, University of Leeds. He holds degrees in criminology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence and computer science; and has previously held research and teaching positions at UCL, Griffith University, Brisbane, and the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security. His research interests lie at the intersection of criminology, complexity science and AI.
Research interests
Dan's 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.
Dan 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).