Tell Me Where You Live and I'll Tell You How Safe You Are

MINE CRIME, A STARTUP ACCELERATED BY B4I – BOCCONI FOR INNOVATION, USES AI TO PROCESS CRIME DATA AND PRODUCE DATABASES AND REPORTS AVAILABLE TO PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS

It is a topic on the agenda in the newspapers but also one of the first thoughts that those who want to buy a house in a new neighborhood or are about to start a business have: what is the level of urban degradation in that area? Is it safe to move on foot or by means of transport, buses or taxis?  In Italy there is no single archive consultable by companies and individual which can provide quantitative, and therefore objective, data  on the problem: the information in the hands of the police is not available to the public. Yet, there is a series of open sources, from the media to specialized platforms to reports shared by the Police or Carabinieri, which can be processed and made known to private individuals. "Mine Crime scans and analyzes precisely this set of information from open and verified sources, in the field of micro-crime. Our   software thus comes  to create in almost real time, with a delay of up to 24 hours, a database that puts in order every offense according to date, time, place and type," says Giacomo Salvanelli, crime analyst but above all co -founder and CEO of the homonymous startup Mine Crime, launched in December 2020 and grown  in the accelerator of Bocconi University B4i-Bocconi for innovation.  After transforming big data into risk indicators using Artificial Intelligence (AI), the newborn company also offers among its services the publication of reports, the design of crime prevention events and training courses.

The crawler software, which moves by scanning the web, works on about 60% of the information that is also in the possession of institutions (especially with regard to crimes against important assets) and comes to process 40% more data in the hands of law enforcement agencies about economic crimes, violence or drug dealing, snatching, and prostitution.  Processing that, without the use of AI, would be expensive for companies and prohibitive for citizens.

by Camillo Papini