Erika's Innovation Blog

  My name is Erika.  I have two little girls (9 and 11) and am very excited to be a part of the Computer Science – Big Data Analytics Doctorate program.  I started the program in Nov2019 and am currently working in data analytics.  I love programming!  I know VBA for Excel, Python, SQL, R, SAS, and a little bit of XLST, HTML, and CSS.  I also love riddles, forensics, abnormal psychology, and anything related to solving crime.  I have also been known to interpret dreams.  It seems I like anything that requires solving. :) I expect this blog to be about my research interests such as anything related to crime analysis, crime prevention, and recidivism.  If there is a way that I can marry data science with crime data, I am all about it!  I would like a way to utilize my mathematical knowledge in forecasting and new techniques to better predict crime.  Making an impact like that would be a dream come true.   The impact I can have on the criminal justice community and the knowledge I can gai

I would love to see better technology for identifying predatory users in social media.  Specifically, child abusers.  It is easy to set up a user account with bogus information such as your age and sex.  A predator could claim to be an 8-yr old girl and any other child in their chat circle (along with their parents) would not be able to tell if they are someone parents need to worry about their child talking to.  It can be very stressful for us parents to ensure our children’s safety when they are online.  If there was an addition to social media and online gaming software that could tell by the chats an older user types, that they are an adult and not a child.  The things predators ask such as grooming questions could be set as triggers to flag users.   I do appreciate that some online games do not allow links or images to be posted in chats.  In a YouTube video, the speed at which predators reach out, engage, and send inappropriate photos is shocking (Bark, 2020).  It made me sick.