Within the historical walled town of Derry (often referred to as Londonderry) in Northern Eire, the night-time economic system is colourful. However like many city centres, it items protection demanding situations for the ones looking to get house. At evening, a volunteer workforce referred to as the Interior Town Help Crew (iCat) continuously patrols the streets, intervening when other folks really feel susceptible – whether or not because of intoxication, a psychological well being factor, or just being by myself in unlit or unfamiliar spaces.
Lately within the town, iCat presented Most secure Manner, a pedestrian navigation app I co-developed all over my PhD analysis at UCL. The app employs AI generation to turn customers no longer simply quicker however more secure routes when strolling to and from a vacation spot – for instance, the most secure manner house after an evening out.
The need for such interventions is rooted in a stark disparity in how city protection is skilled through men and women.
Analysis through the Administrative center for Nationwide Statistics in 2022 discovered that 82% of girls really feel unsafe strolling by myself in parks or open areas after darkish, in comparison with 42% of guys. And 63% of girls actively steer clear of travelling by myself when it’s darkish, towards 34% of guys.
A survey through Plan Global UK in 2024 discovered that just about three-quarters of women and younger girls (ages 14-21) once in a while make a choice longer routes house to steer clear of doable threat, and virtually two-thirds take taxis house once or more a month as a result of the hazards related to public shipping or strolling.
Such fears are an instantaneous reaction to the constructed setting, with analysis appearing that components equivalent to side road lighting fixtures and prerequisites of pavements are key sides of the way protected girls really feel . Lights is continuously the deciding issue: 60% of girls who really feel unsafe strolling to and from public shipping cite deficient lighting fixtures as the main explanation why.
Nearly all of girls say they really feel unsafe strolling by myself after darkish.
Haru Pictures/Shutterstock
Bridging the knowledge hole
For many years, city walkers were handled like automobiles, with mapping equipment optimising routes for a unmarried metric – shuttle time – whilst treating a gloomy alley and a top side road as an identical, if the gap is similar. The query of feeling protected has been in large part lost sight of through this generation.
A part of the cause of this has been a loss of unified information. Whilst native government and police forces accumulate huge quantities of data relating to side road lighting fixtures, CCTV places and crime incidents, this knowledge is usually fragmented, incompatible or locked in static PDFs.
To bridge this hole, my workforce and I advanced an information pipeline to mixture those and different resources. In London, this required issuing dozens of freedom of data requests to borough councils to procure actual geospatial information on over part 1,000,000 side road lighting and 1000’s of public CCTV cameras. Our lighting fixtures map was once awarded first prize within the 2025 UCL information visualisation festival.
The Most secure Manner app suggests a course house in Derry.
Most secure Manner, Writer supplied (no reuse)
We then blended this knowledge with legitimate police crime datasets, city options equivalent to the positioning of parks, business spaces and run-down constructions, plus open-source Mapillary and OpenStreetMap information to “safety score” person side road segments.
Even then, purpose information is most effective part the image. Perceived protection – how protected a side road feels to any person strolling it – is significant to the course alternatives they make. To fashion this at scale, we grew to become to Synthetic Intelligence: in particular, OpenAI’s vision-language fashion Clip (Contrastive Language-Symbol Pre-Coaching).
In contrast to conventional laptop imaginative and prescient that detects discrete items equivalent to side road lamps, Clip (and an identical vision-language fashions) encodes the semantic which means of a complete scene – changing each visible information and user-provided textual content activates into mathematical vectors.
Classifying subjective viewpoints equivalent to “feels safe” or “quite risky” is an ongoing house of study. However in our 2025 find out about, we discovered a top correlation between the way in which AI and our human testers perceived protection, in keeping with 500 images of London side road segments.
Whilst we now hope to scale this solution to modelling city protection to thousands and thousands of streets in the United Kingdom and past, we’re reasonable concerning the barriers. Previous crime and concrete design information can tell more secure alternatives, however they can not are expecting person incidents. Our fashion is designed to toughen decision-making no longer ensure protection, and it will have to sit down along wider efforts through venues, councils and police to make night-time streets more secure.
Derry’s early adoption
Since launching its beta model, the Most secure Manner app has been followed through roughly 1,000 customers, basically in London and Derry, the place lots of the protection infrastructure is absolutely mapped.
Coordinating the Derry release from afar was once a problem. A Most secure Manner workforce member visited town early in 2025 to be told concerning the town’s advanced political panorama firsthand. However the pilot’s luck was once made conceivable in large part because of our companions, iCat.
The crowd now distributes beer mats with Most secure Manner trademarks and QR codes in native pubs. “We encourage staff to download the app too,” Henry issues out, “as they often don’t leave the premises until 3am or later”.
Having just lately showcased our generation on the Prototypes for Humanity convention in Dubai, we at the moment are scaling the app’s information protection – from side road lighting fixtures to AI-modelled belief of protection – to hide all of England after which the remainder of the United Kingdom. We goal to near the ideas hole that lately forces susceptible teams to pay a security tax.
In Derry, the generation already supplies a virtual layer of coverage that enhances the bodily presence of volunteers. By way of together with this tech of their vulnerability coaching for safety group of workers and the use of it all over their patrols, iCat is shifting past reactive help to proactive possibility relief.
This text was once commissioned along with Prototypes for Humanity, an international initiative that showcases and hurries up educational innovation to resolve social and environmental demanding situations. The Dialog is the media spouse of Prototypes for Humanity 2025.
