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BGU Research Could Help Prevent School Shootings

BGU Research Could Help Prevent School Shootings

October 7, 2015

Homeland & Cyber Security

Cleveland Jewish News via JNS — In the fourth shooting at a U.S. college campus since August, 10 people were killed October 1, 2015 when a 26-year-old gunman opened fire in a classroom at Umpqua Community College in southern Oregon. Many would be surprised to learn that part of the solution to the American school shooting epidemic might be found in Israel.

Prof. Yair Neuman

Prof. Yair Neuman

School shooters present a challenge to both forensic psychiatry and law enforcement agencies. But new research by Prof. Yair Neuman, a member of BGU’s Homeland Security Institute, is showing promise.

Together with James L. Knoll, a forensic psychologist at State University of New York, Prof. Neuman says he has developed a personality profiling technique that automates the identification of potential school shooters by analyzing personality traits that appear in their writings.

The tool, which as been written up in the Frontiers in Psychiatry journal, uses “vector semantics.” This involves constructing a number of vectors representing personality dimensions and disorders. The vectors are then analyzed by a computer to measure their similarity with texts written by the human subject.

Prof. Neuman explains that the tool helps identify key diagnoses that can lead to violence, such as depressive personality disorder or narcissism. He says it can identify youths who suffer from exclusion, bullying or other challenges and get them help before something tragic happens.

He selected writings from six shooters involved in high-profile scenarios, including the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. He analyzed and compared those shooters’ writings to 6,000 bloggers’ writings and tasked the computer to identify the shooter. He was able to narrow the pool of suspects to three percent of the original list; the short list included all six shooters.

Read more on the Cleveland Jewish News website >>