The University of Maryland College Park (UMD) has a new groundbreaking device that can curb crime on campus. Kristin Fisher of WUSA9, Michelle Basch of WTOP and The Baltimore Sun released stories on the launching of the M-Urgency application which premiered on January 25.
The breakthrough, first released by UMD's media department, also stated that the device was created by UMD Computer Science Professor Ashok Agrawala and his team in collaboration with the university's Department of Public Safety. "We created this application to not only serve the university - a community of 50,000 - but any city across the nation," Agrawala says. "The technology, the way it is developed, can be deployed by anybody anywhere."
M-Urgency is the first of its kind in the world as an emergency smartphone application, has GPS capability and used only for Android phones. Right now it is only available on the College Park campus but will expand with other mobile features in the future.
"It gives a lot of information that's not easily conveyable by words," Agrawala says.
The UMD media release also reported that M-Urgency “is a culmination of more than a decade's worth of research in wireless communications by Agrawala's Maryland Information and Network Dynamics (MIND) Lab. It has resulted in the decrease of background electronic "noise" in wireless systems that previously made it difficult to pinpoint precise locations. In the coming months, he and his team hope to add more functions to the app, including the ability to pinpoint a person's location within 10 feet - which would work inside buildings and could identify the room and floor - based on Wi-Fi routers throughout the campus.”
Major Jay Gruber, head of the Technology Services Unit for Public Safety, had this to say: "If we get four or five M-Urgency calls that show a fire glowing out the window of one of the sorority houses in College Park," then responders could see which side of the house is on fire and what type of fire it is. "It's huge - you can prep your mind and your crew before you get to the scene."
Basch reported that David Mitchell, police chief of UMD, says that the app can be used as a virtual police escort service. Video is transferred from the emergency center to laptops in the cars of responding officers.
"Let's say someone, one of our students, was getting off the Metro on the Green Line in College Park and they had concerns for whatever reason. They could use the application and we in our dispatch center could actually monitor them as they walked...through College Park back to their place on campus," Mitchell says.
"It is a lot smarter to have a smartphone to defend yourself than a gun," said Professor Ashok Agrawala who designed the M-Urgency. "No place in the world has this kind of an app supporting the public safety.”
Watch WUSA9's Video below:
University of Maryland develops an App to catch criminals
http://www.wusa9.com/video/default.aspx?bctid=1118769633001
Comments