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.

Objectives

• To provide a more in-depth and fine-grained analysis and understanding of the factors of fear of crime in urban environments, investigating and correlating both dimensions of objective aspects, related to the actual surroundings and crime incidents, and subjective aspects, related to societal and psychological factors covering the citizens' perspective.
• To foster and facilitate the engagement of citizens in better addressing security challenges, by encouraging and enabling their bidirectional interaction with the relevant authorities as well as among themselves in trusted networks and broader communities.
• To provide a platform and technologies for collecting, integrating, managing and visualizing contextualized, crime-related information -both historical and real-time- and using it for more effective and timely prevention and response to security threats.
• To design and develop an ecosystem of mobile services that will transform the citizens' smart phones and tablets into primary tools for sharing safety-critical information with the appropriate authorities and among them.
• To design and build new lightweight and user friendly small sensor devices for enabling the detection of specific cases of criminality, such as identifying and locating stolen object utilizing the citizens as sensors.
• To validate and evaluate the developed solutions and technologies in real-life scenarios and settings, via extensive pilot trials that will be setup and operated at several selected cities.
• To produce flexible and sustainable business models, best practices and replication plans for further deployment and exploitation of City.Risks results in other urban environments, maximizing the project impact and opening up new market opportunities for urban security technologies.

Technical Approach

The main concept of City.Risks is to place information sharing at the center of addressing security challenges in large urban environments:

• what – diverse types and sources of information need to be analysed, integrated and exploited, including historical crime data and statistics, victimization reports, demographic data, maps of transportation networks and other city infrastructures, available physical sensors, news feeds and the Web.
• whom – citizens are in the centre of the approach, actively being engaged as both targets and sources of information, in a bidirectional communication channel between either citizens and the authorities or among citizens themselves within trusted networks or broader communities.
• when – the ultimate goal is to ensure timely sharing of appropriate information both for preventing security threats as well as mitigating their impact when they actually occur.
• how – by primarily utilising citizens' smart phones and mobile devices for appropriately visualising the needed information as well as feeding information back to the platform.