City.Risks progresses beyond the state-of-the-art in several technological fields in the wider domain of smart cities, mobile services and online communities. In specific, the project innovates:
• in the field of threats analysis, by focusing on comprehensive research of security threats and challenges at the neighbourhood level. Employing both models and surveys, it develops methods for analysing the environment to identify locations or areas susceptible to security threats;
• in the field of studying the sense of security, by analysing and understanding perceptions and fear of crime from citizens' perspectives, as well as developing more effective means for soliciting their engagement;
• in the field of crowdsourcing/crowdsensing, by developing novel approaches for enabling personalised, interactive, unobtrusive, user-friendly, bidirectional communication between the authorities and citizens (alerting/reporting) as well as among citizen communities;
• in the field of web data mining, by treating social media as a data source and leverage users as a real-time knowledge base for all sorts of urban activities;
• in the field of route planning, by introducing the safety dimension i.e. going beyond finding the shortest or fastest route between locations but also the safest route;
• in the field of emergency management, by designing and developing novel approaches and tools for citizen alerting and risk management and response.
• in the field of mobile augmented reality (mAR) by developing bidirectional mAR applications, allowing the users to add information to virtual objects and also visualizing threats and security-related information.
The project is expected to achieve significant impact in improving the sense of security among citizens and also in transforming the way citizens respond to security-related information and incidents. In particular, City.Risks will:
• contribute to reducing the fear of crime in urban areas, by at least 20%, as will be measured via surveys;
• demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the solution in real-life trials in large urban environments;
• empower citizens, fostering their sense of belonging to a greater community and facilitate their engagement;
• provide new market opportunities, especially for SMEs to develop novel technologies and applications, by building upon open technologies and standards;