City.Risks

City.Risks will leverage a set of innovative technologies, city infrastructures as well as Web and social media technologies aiming to increase the security level of citizens in large cities. Through City.Risks solution the citizens in modern smart cities will be actively contributing to the fight against crime and the increase of security level in their daily activities. The project’s focus is to put information sharing at the center of addressing security challenges in large urban environments.

How will City.Risks approach the mitigation of urban threats?

The City.Risks project aims at increasing the perception of security of citizens in urban environments. This will be achieved by placing information sharing at the center of addressing security challenges in large urban environments. Citizens will serve both as targets and sources of information. Information flow will be bidirectional between citizens and authorities or among citizens themselves, forming trusted networks and communities. Smart phones and mobile devices will be utilized as the enabling technologies for the visualization and acquisition of information. The City.Risks platform will analyze and integrate diverse information including historical crime data, statistics, victimization reports, demographic data, maps of transportation networks, physical sensory data, news feeds and information mined from the Web. The products of this project consists into a City.Risks platform and SDK, City.Risks mobile and web applications and a City.Risks theft prevention and identification sensor.

Research areas on security threats in urban environments

The first relevant area of research the project reviewed is Emergency Response and Risk Management. More, specifically, the research was focused on the recent advances in emergency alerting and response, augmented reality, and risks management for decision support within the operation center. Then, further on is outlined the most important work related to Data Management that is of relevance to City.Risks. The report is focusing on data acquisition and mining, query processing, privacy and anonymization, data analytics and route planning. The analysis continues with the areas of Mobile Sensors and Sensor Communication. The recent advances on sensor technologies and communications are presenting with special attention on current work in ground of monitoring and theft detection, and relevant approaches for theft detection are been discussed. Finally, it is outlined the state-of-the-art in software development methodologies, platform architectures, design process models and theories, and while giving an overview about platform architectures for emergency management systems. For more information find the published report online at the project website.

Gaps and challenges found after the initial research

When considering the results of this initial research, some gaps in the development could be identified, which are closely related to the challenges to be faced during future development of the City.Risks environment. Collection of social and end user generated data should on one hand side be available to others generating leverage effects. On the other hand side, collection of personal data has to respect data security laws and privacy rights, with respect to the legal situation in the country of application.

Furthermore, a strong dedication to standards, especially communication and encryption should be considered in further research and development, preventing potential abuse and misuse of data collected and processed by the City.Risks solutions. This might contradict with the requirements for availability and desirable platform independency of the software to be developed.

Thus, one of the challenges of further research and development will be to find a balance between the aforementioned interest conflicts. Establishing the desired harmony between them will be part of further steps throughout the City.Risks project.