How AI tools can help assess verbal eyewitness statements
Quattrone Center Academic Director Paul Heaton’s new paper explores how he and his co-authors trained a large language model to parse eyewitness confidence statements.
“Of the over 3,000 exonerations recorded to date by the National Registry of Exonerations, more than 900 are due to eyewitness misidentifications,” says Paul Heaton, academic director of the Quattrone Center, professor of law, and co-author of the paper. “To help address this problem, we developed a new tool to enable attorneys and police investigators to better distinguish accurate identifications from faulty ones.”
After an eyewitness selects a suspect from a lineup, best practices instruct police officers to ask how confident they are in their identification. Prior research demonstrates that witnesses who are highly confident at the time of the identification from an unbiased lineup tend to be correct much more frequently than those who express uncertainty. But in the field, police typically make a subjective judgement as to whether any particular witness was confident, which can introduce error into the process. The AI developed by the researchers offers a neutral method for assessing such statements free of contextual bias, leveraging information from thousands of prior eyewitness decisions.
In Senegal, the ambitious Dakar Greenbelt project seeks to create an extensive network of ecological infrastructure in and around the city to sustainably address environmental concerns and enhance urban life. With support from David Gouverneur and Ellen Neises, Ph.D. candidate Rob Levinthal in the Weitzman School of Design led two courses that included a field trip to Dakar, that culminated in students presenting their visions for parts of the Greenbelt.
From a desert to an oasis: Penn engages in ambitious greening effort in the Sahel
Students from the Weitzman School of Design journeyed to Senegal to help with a massive ecological and infrastructural greening effort as part of their coursework. The Dakar Greenbelt aims to combat desertification and promote sustainable urban growth.
As part of an undergraduate course, Penn faculty and students curated an Arthur Ross Gallery exhibition of works from the Neumann family’s extensive collection of modern and contemporary art.
The University’s nexus for technology transfer supports researchers in their innovative efforts, from CAR T to mRNA advancements that have dramatically reshaped the world.
