Report: Impact of Smart Cities, Startups and Co-Working on Gender Equality 2/4
Antonia Terriuolo, with Margherita Girotto, Anastasiia Chaikovska wrote an excellent report on how smart cities, startups and co-working contribute to gender equality at Ca’Foscari University of Venice. To read the first part, click here .
Continue to read below, for the second part of the report.
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5. Case Study: Smart Cities and Safe & The City Ltd.
The following chapter aims to present the Safe & The City Ltd. company as a business case, including its core features and objectives, going into detail regarding the innovation’s application and exploitation. Moreover, it provides a brief understanding of the innovation’s performance effects by discussing its strategic and campaign organization.
5.1. The Quest to Provide Safe Navigation
Safe & The City is a personal safety navigation app, designed as a map that points out places that might not be safe or have higher crime rates than other areas (Flockett, nd). It is designed not to take you on the quickest route but the safest one. Moreover, it has been named as one of thr five top start-ups developing gender equality solutions by the StartUs Insights research blog, to not forget multiple Forbes citations and acknowledgments (StartUs Insights, nd). The start-up’s mobile app provides real-time notifications from official sources and suggests the safest walking and public transit routes based on public ratings (Safe & the City, nd b). It allows women to notify their close ones if an unexpected incident occurs. Additionally,it enables authorities to discover and mitigate risks based on crowdsourced incident reports (StartUs Insights, nd). It all started when Jillian Kowalchuk, the founder, was using maps to get to a location in the evening and it took her down a dark alleyway where she had a bad encounter. From that experience, she started looking into developing an app that uses Google Maps and information from the police to provide you with information that you need. Reliving this experience, she stated: “It’s not about being scared, but having something there to make better decisions and also, to leave an accountability marker outside businesses, so they know there is this sort of behavior being shown by their staff which is unacceptable ” (Flockett, nd, np).was using maps to get to a location in the evening and it took her down a dark alleyway where she had a bad encounter. From that experience, she started looking into developing an app that uses Google Maps and information from the police to provide you with information that you need. Reliving this experience, she stated: “It’s not about being scared, but having something there to make better decisions and also, to leave an accountability marker outside businesses, so they know there is this sort of behavior being shown by their staff which is unacceptable ” (Flockett, nd, np).was using maps to get to a location in the evening and it took her down a dark alleyway where she had a bad encounter.From that experience, she started looking into developing an app that uses Google Maps and information from the police to provide you with information that you need. Reliving this experience, she stated: “It’s not about being scared, but having something there to make better decisions and also, to leave an accountability marker outside businesses, so they know there is this sort of behavior being shown by their staff which is unacceptable ” (Flockett, nd, np).
The focus is put on public transport and walking since it is where someone’s safety is most at risk and where the least amount of technology for personal protection exists. At least with ride-hailing apps, there are clear processes for reporting a driver, and signposting areas that need to change, but it’s only with this app that we allow users to signal problem areas, find the nearest emergency service, and have a 2 -click in-app process to quickly contact officials, integrating safety into the navigation system. The main aim is to keep people safe with a completely free app (Montebello, 2020).
The app, launched in March 2017, was first introduced in the UK app store and uses information from the metropolitan police focusing on areas that have seen a high number of sexual assaults or harassment in the past, to places where several Anti-Social Behavior Order (ASBO) have been assigned. Additionally, the founder stated: “We are more focused now on the community and getting our different stakeholders and businesses engaged […] [and] want people to see that information will be turned into something tangible to keep more people safe” ( Flockett, nd, np). So, what is different about Safe and the City? The answer is that users can rate their journey afterwards. Regarding this, the founder explained: “This is us being able to feedback information over time, and people being safer,then we take information from the police to show where there might be an area with a heightened risk of crime [and] I guess we are a bit of a hybrid; we are trying to look at prevention, but if you do need to call emergency services, you do have that at your fingertips” (Flockett, nd, np).
5.2. Use and application of the innovation
As we previously discussed in the first paragraph, when we think about the term “Smart City”, we must consider that there is no agreed definition on what makes a city smart, perhaps because it is a result of the meaning ‘smart’ still transitioning from a human-centric word into a more broadly technological and artificial intelligence form. Connecting to the use and application of our innovation we can see that it is related to the Smart Cities Innovation concept because the application we described uses Perceptual Intelligence to improve women’s safety in public and digital spaces (StartUs Insights, nd). Nowadays things, like mobile phones and electronic devices, are generally changing from being static and inanimate, becoming objects with more reactive, adaptive systems known to be more useful and efficient.To change in this way, they need what Pentland (2000) calls Perceptual Intelligence, meaning that it is “paying attention to people and the surrounding situation in the same way another person would, thus allowing these new devices to learn to adapt their behavior to suit us, rather than adapting to them as we do today” (p. 35). From this perspective, we understand that the key to the process is having devices connected, not being isolated anymore, but working intelligently together to achieve new and unexpected results (Pentland, 2000).
5.3. The Effect of the Innovation on the Performance
The algorithm-based platform keeps people updated on real-world problems while they are occurring, followed by data collection leading to better management of several aspects of the city. Two products are part of the i3 Intelligence Application Programming Interface (API) that make this happen: i3 Risk and i3 React. The i3 Risk is the daily prediction service, using official data and trend analysis. The company goes through over 250,000 data points every day to produce risk estimates for public spaces and make these available to feed directly into other mobile apps or products. This prediction service has been a core part of the business since the beginning, providing the groundwork for preventative safety; it gives teams the data they need to send intelligent notifications, evaluate risk at a user’s location, and suggest alternative destinations or actions, people can take to minimize the risk of harm. Moreover, the i3 React is the emergency alerting service: the machine learning model continuously scans various data sources across different digital channels, like social media, news channels, and many more. It is concerned with looking out for potential terror, or public order threats, or to locate protests to find out when a serious incident is unfolding.For instance, during the 2019 London Bridge terrorist attack, i3 React identified and flagged this incident as it was unfolding, the ongoing incident has been verified and triggered a mobile notification to all Safe & The City users within a 5 kilometer radius providing official police guidance , within only 10 minutes.
They both have been released on the Safe & The City i3 Intelligence Platform in March 2021 and are the result of testing during the last few years and refinement of the algorithm, strengthening partnerships and expertise (Safe & the City, 2021 a).
5.4. Safe & The City’s Strategy
Objectives, in terms of improvement, are stated clearly on the company’s website: deliver more accurate information about safety emergencies and risks to customers faster. To have faster incident discovery, instead of addressing news organizations to gather information (it could take longer than 30 minutes to address them), they turn to Twitter. That is because Twitter’s API allows ingesting a real-time, filtered stream of tweets using in-built rules and operations. Over the last few months, they dramatically improved the speed and accuracy of the detection system using Machine Learning; due to the guidance provided by Dr. Marek Rei of Imperial Consultants at Imperial College London.Because of this, they have been implementing the Natural Language Processing (NLP) model using PyTorch and Hugging Face Transformers to detect and flag new public safety incidents in real-time as they unfold. In preliminary training and testing, it was possible to detect protests and riots unfolding with very high accuracy. Each new incident detected is then flagged to a member of the Safe & The City team to review for accuracy and measured against several metrics for information reliability. Upon acceptance, positive results are forwarded to i3 React customers via their registered webhook endpoints; Once live, customers can expect to receive i3 React notifications in as little as a few minutes, and this i3 React upgrade comes as a standard (Safe & the City, 2021 b).
This is just one example of how Safe & The City is using state-of-the-art Machine Learning models to increase public and personal safety and, given their ambitions for the future, will be joined by more in the next few years.
5.5. Campaigns and Activism
Safe & The City is a consolidated limited liability company, has been in business for 5 years, and is operating in the field “Other publishing activities” (Companies House, nd). A big step for the company has been a crowdfunding campaign that helps engage with more influencers, growing the team and their community (Flockett, nd). Launched on September 28th, 2017, it focuses on the important issue of the street and sexual harassment, centering on the fact that millions of these experiences are minimized, not reported, as they tell women it was ‘just’ a comment, ‘just’ a joke or that it is all based on the way women dress whether they feel safe to walk alone at night (Harris, 2020).
The company now has teams located in London and Berlin, but they would like to expand to all major cities. Furthermore, they want to create change with their local partners and see themselves as a global data company, wanting to be a leader in the field to help enable the design of smarter and safer cities. Most importantly, they want to show how people can report, and bring about meaningful change in local areas (Montebello, 2020). Especially this shows how Safe & The City actively contributes to the innovation of Smart Cities and why it could be used as an additional resource for cities, like Berlin, to integrate into their Smart City strategy. Moreover, the direct connection to the Smart City concept is shown in the publicly available use of data.As previously stated, public participation is a key part of Smart Cities and should be promoted, for example, by companies like Safe & The City.
Part 2 of 4. We hope you enjoyed reading and are looking forward to the next part!