Safety is a prime concern for everybody. Keeping this in consideration, a smartphone application has been developed that will keep you safe even in the middle of riots. When everything is in the midst of a chaos, you can be rest assured that this application will take you to a safe place. It has been shown at the TEDGlobal event in Edinburgh.
It has been developed by Salvatore Laconesi who is a newly created TED Fellow. Though the software has not been published yet, it takes data from a range of social networks. It uses these networking sites to let people know about the places that are least affected by the trouble. Those who have these applications installed on their phones can point their gadgets and get to know of the dangerous areas just by using a colour interface.
At TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) when this application was displayed, Mr Laconesi pointed out that that it could really help demonstrators and people caught up in a chaos to get out of it. He added, “We followed movements in the UK, Italy, Tunisia and Egypt and designed technologies to help them.”
He went on to say, “The platform captures everything on a range of social networks, from Flickr, Instagram, FourSquare, Facebook and Twitter and processes it using natural language analysis to understand what the messages are saying.” The system has thus been programmed in a way that the system counts all messages which suggest of an impending danger and those that suggest of a safe place. All areas that are dangerous will show up in red while those safe will display in green. It has been tested in UK riots as well as in
student protests in both England and Milan.
Mr Laconesi was quoted saying, “It has wider applications for disaster zones and for governments to understand things such as traffic jams.” Now as to how far this application goes into delivering results, is a matter of question.
