surVIGILANCE

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Inspiration

In light of recent events, we wanted to address the following: Sandy Hook. Quebec. Pittsburgh and now Christchurch. These cities all share a dark and tragic past related to gun violence. As our society moves towards push-notifications and the need for information at our fingertips, media news outlets are often overlooked as the first source for warnings and alerts.

In a 2014 pilot project, cities which adopted a gunshot detection system saw a reduction in homicide rates by an incredible 35%. However, this system only relays this information to local authorities, not civilians. By the time this information is conveyed and processed by the police, it’s sometimes too late for those in the immediate area. This is why we created surVigilance: a first-line phone respondent and alert system.

What it does

surVigilance is a prototype of a first-line phone respondent and alert system.

There is a pattern in sound frequencies that occurs after gunfire and surVigilance uses this very trend, along with sound intensity, to detect local shootings. We plan to install sensors in areas at high risk which convey this information when a sound matches this gunfire pattern and intensity. surVigilance’s system would leverage audio fingerprinting to learn the sound of gunfire in order to be able to match this sound to any sound detected, through audio machine learning algorithms.