The Safety Transformation in the Future Internet Domain

Public Safety is nowadays a priority, cornerstone and major concern for governments, majors and policy makers in current (and future) smart cities. Notwithstanding the foregoing, large advances in ICT technologies are foretold to revolutionize our society and enhance our feeling of safety (and hopefully, wellbeing). This chapter presents an introduction to three of the most promising technological pillars considered to be spearheads in this transformation: Internet of things, understood as the data capillarity through billions of sensors, Intelligent Video Analytics and Data Mining Intelligence, the latter two enabling smarter contextual awareness and prediction of potential threats leading to proactive prevention of them. The associated horizontal economic implications of this evolution and its impact into the societal and economic fabric are also tackled. Part of the results and analysis produced in this chapter are the outcome of the work carried out in the FP7 EU project SafeCity, one of the eight Use Cases of the FI Programme.