Sages’ Oculi

Introduction
The Sages’ Oculi – or in layman terms, a seer’s eye – is a project created by Cellect Technologies to better inform and forecast citizens about crime patterns and promote community safety.

Statement of the Problem
Crime rates in the Philippines, despite their slow decline, have always been a prevalent issue. According to the Philippine National Police (2023), a total of 26,044 police cases were filed in Manila alone with the top three most prevalent crimes being rape, theft and physical injury. The abundance of these crimes have left a lot to be desired for a majority of Filipino citizens, making them question their safety whilst commuting, working, or even staying at their homes.

Solution
By leveraging data analysis and visualization techniques, Sages’ Oculi provides users with location-specific insights and forecasts into current crime rates and trends, as well as allow users to contribute in making their own community safer by reporting suspected activities and incidents. Our goal is to empower individuals to make informed decisions about their safety and engage in community-driven initiatives to promote peace, justice, and strong institutions.

Sustainable Development Goals
Sages’ Oculi mostly deals with SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions). To expand, SDG 16, according to the United Nations website, is to promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels. Sages’ Oculi aims to help this development goal by lowering crime rates thru both technological and community efforts- users could observe various levels of crime heat maps as well as report suspicious activites, fostering a sense of involvement on public safety. Through this, the goal of Sages’ Oculi to better inform the public about crime patterns would be achieved, advancing the objectives of SDG 16.

How It Is Achieved
Sages’ Oculi is currently planned to be webhosted through a number of languages, notably PHP. Due to the large amount of data involved (including data validation from any future data submission from community-based efforts), various predictive data models will be used while validating information during the project building process: linear regression, logistic regression as well as gradient boosting to name a few. While research by Ingilvech and Ivanov (2018) has placed gradient boosting as the most effective predictive model, our team still plans to test the efficacy of various types of data. Subsequently, Sages’ Oculi is poised to leverage an array of machine learning algorithms to enhance its functionality in mapping out crime rates. Through the integration of machine learning algorithms and predictive data models, Sages’ Oculi aims to achieve precision and insight in its crime rate mapping capabilities.

Current Limitations
Currently, Sages’ Oculi is only set to be launched for the Philippines, due to the large amount of data involved.

References:
Philippine National Police (2023), PH CRIME DIPS FURTHER IN 2023.
https://pnp.gov.ph/ph-crime-dips-further-in-2023/

United Nations (2023), Sustainable Development.
https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal16

Ingilvech and Ivanov (2018), Crime rate prediction in the urban environment using social factors.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050918315667