Risk Meter
Jae-woo Chung,

Abstract: Will You Help Me tackles an issue related to a pedestrian's current location. We collected a year's worth of crime logs around the MIT campus to measure personal safety risk? These logs were saved on a geographic information system (GIS) database server to render crime statistics and maps in real-time at a user's request. Using the system, users are able to request a crime-risk analysis by providing the server with their current location and information about their commonly transported valuables. Based on the GPS coordinates, the time of a request, and a user's information about his/her valuables, the system calculates the current risk of theft/damage for each valuable and provides this information to the user.

Increasing people's awareness of potential crime in various neighborhoods is the first step towards enhancing the security and safety of each individual. Walking down an unfamiliar street for the first time, or trying to park a car or bicycle in a strange neighborhood can make one particularly vulnerable to crimes.? Risk-Meter offers users the ability to learn about the safety of their surroundings in an attempt to more deeply inform their daily decisions.

Our approach to enhancing the awareness of crime was to build a system that measures a potential risk and provides this information to the concerned user.? This system was built on top of an already existing system that enables simple GPS detection of position. We attempted to measure the risks to personal safety based on a year's worth of crime logs around the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA. This information was collected and saved on a Geographic Information System (GIS) database.? Our system renders crime statistics from the database in real-time at the user's request. Users can request a real-time risk analysis by providing the server with their location and information about their commonly transported valuables. Based on GPS coordinates, the time of a request, and users' information about their valuables, the system can calculate and communicate any potential risk to its users.The goal of the system is to provide a simple mobile phone interface to retrieve just-in-time risk metrics at the click of a button.? The following scenario describes how the system could be used.