Brothers Receive US Patent for Crime Data Collection Method Utilizing Images from the Internet, such as Google StreetView®

APPLETON, Wis., Aug. 24, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Two Wisconsin brothers have developed and successfully patented an invention that uses visual information about a location in conjunction with other data to generate a likely crime profile of a neighborhood. As just an example, a computer could review pictures available on Google StreetView® and generate a profile for that neighborhood based on the scoring of images such as graffiti visible in the pictures or bars on windows, burned out cars, the space between houses, or other visual clues that could augment other crime data to generate a more relevant crime map for use in navigation systems.

Dominic Trinko and Tom Trinko were awarded US Patent 8,515,673 on August 20, 2013, and were represented by patent attorney Keith Baxter of Boyle Fredrickson, S.C., the largest intellectual property law firm in Wisconsin. Dominic Trinko holds a BSME from the University of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and has worked in the field of automation since 1997 having held a variety of engineering roles in this field. Tom Trinko is an entrepreneur with an International Executive MBA from IE Business School in Madrid, Spain and a bachelor's degree in philosophy from UW-Eau Claire. He also recently earned a Certified Licensing Professional designation.

Dominic Trinko conceived of the idea as an out of the box way to address some of the difficulties inherent in building out sets of data related to crime. Dominic Trinko and Tom Trinko are also co-owners of The Trinko Group LLC, thetrinkogroup.com, an intellectual property licensing firm that has 3 patents and has licensed several of its inventions to the packaging industry.

Patent 8,515,673 has been licensed to Rio Sisa Idea Farm LLC, riosisaideafarm.com, a startup headed by Tom Trinko and created to develop crime mapping for GPS navigation devices and smartphones. This is the second patent related to crime mapping and navigation systems held by Rio Sisa.  An earlier patent, 8,290,705, was awarded in October 2012 to Tom Trinko, Keith Baxter, and Paul Hager, who is CEO of Information Technology Professionals, LLC and the CTO of Rio Sisa. Further patents are in the works.

"We believe that the use of images widely available on the internet can provide additional veracity to the relevance of publicly available and privately held crime data," said Tom Trinko, "Humans actually rely heavily on visual cues in their whereabouts to evaluate the likely safety of their surroundings. It stands to reason that algorithms can be created to make these same sorts of visual evaluations and that data can be overlaid onto another set of crime statistics, resulting in better and more relevant data." 

Rio Sisa plans to release a working version of CrimeAware™, its banner product, sometime in 2014.  CrimeAware™ will provide customers with a color coded map of the crime activity in a neighborhood based on publicly available data, proprietary data, and user preferences for mobile navigation devices such as portable GPS units.

PRLog ID: www.prlog.org/12198904

SOURCE Rio Sisa Idea Farm LLC