This was my first semester teaching undergrads at UT Dallas. I taught the Communities and Crime undergrad course. I thought it went very well, and I was impressed with the undergrads here. For the course I had students do a bunch of different prediction assignments based on open data in Dallas, such as predicting what neighborhood has the most crime, or which specific bar has the most assaults. The idea being they would use the theories I discussed in the prior lecture to make the best predictions.

For their final assignment, I had students predict an arbitrary area to capture the most robberies in 2016 (up to that point they had only been predicting crimes in 2015). I used the same metric that NIJ is using in their crime forecasting challenge – the predictive accuracy index. This is simply % crime/% area, so students who give larger areas are more penalized. This ended up producing a pretty neat capstone to the end of the semester.

Below is a screen shot of the map, and here is a link to an interactive version. (WordPress.com sites only allow specific types of iframe sources, so my dropbox src link to the interactive Leaflet map gets stripped.)

Look forward to teaching this class again (as of now it seems I will regularly offer it every spring).

More news on classes to come soon. I am teaching GIS applications in Criminology online over the summer. For a quick idea about the content, it will be almost the same as the GIS course in criminal justice I previously taught at SUNY.

In short, if you think maps rock then you should take my classes 😉