How Safe Do Cities Feel? Machine Learning Techniques Could Help Find Out!

The career path of Colombian physicist Luisa Fernanda Chaparro Sierra took her from studying the Higgs Boson at CERN, to using similar machine learning techniques to gauge perceptions of crime in the Colombian capital of Bogota. Chaparro, currently a Research Professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Monterrey, México, says that after finishing her Phd, she had the opportunity to be part of the DataLab (Laboratorio de Datos) of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia where she used the techniques of handling large databases to help understand the problem of the perception of security in Bogota via machine learning methods. "At CERN, we handled large amounts of data and to differentiate between signal and background; we used supervised machine learning techniques, so I used similar methods and adapted others for the case of perception of security," she says, adding that DataLab was composed of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers with knowledge in programming and statistics. "We used Twitter as our data source and reviewed tweets that talked about security in the city for a year," Chaparro says, "The goal was to design a model that would allow us to quantify something as subjective as perception." The researchers were also hoping to find a relationship between it and real crimes by comparing the results with the databases provided by the National Police.