Do You Have A Smoke Alarm? Enigma Pinpoints America's Most At Risk From Fire
Enigma Technologies has released an open source prediction engine in collaboration with the Red Cross and DataKind to identify the blocks in 178 American cities most likely to lack smoke alarms, and most at risk for fire fatalities.
NEW YORK, Sept. 24, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- 25,000 people are killed or injured in 1 million fires across the United States each year. With over 130 million housing units across the country, 4.5 million of them do not have smoke detectors, placing their inhabitants at substantial risk. Driving this number down is the single most important factor for saving lives put at risk by fire.
Up until now, mitigation of this problem has been dependent on the experience and instinct of local first responder and community outreach personnel. Our open source prediction engine is designed to inform and add insight into which blocks within a city are the best to focus on the ground outreach efforts. Smoke Signals can be accessed at: http://labs.enigma.io/smoke-signals.
Adoption of fire risk analytics has already begun in New Orleans and several other cities, where our work enables a more intelligent and actionable outreach strategy. Furthermore, the Red Cross has engaged in a collaborative effort to make use of our work to inform fire safety outreach programs. Additionally, the non-for-profit data science organization DataKind will continue to help develop and improve on the model we've designed.
The impetus for this project began with yet another fire-related tragedy. In November of 2014 there was a house fire in the Broadmoor neighborhood of New Orleans, killing five people, including three children. The house did not have a smoke alarm in it. Enigma collaborated with the City of New Orleans to build a prototype of this data model in order to guide local smoke detector outreach.
The crux of the tool involves a novel and systematic join of two US Census datasets: the American Housing Survey (AHS), a resource for nationally-representative, detailed housing characteristics, and the American Community Survey (ACS), the Census' most extensive and thorough demographic survey. The research underlying this analysis will be presented in September 2015 at the Bloomberg Data For Good Exchange conference in New York City.
We are proud to share this tool as an actionable first step towards making public data not only useful to people, but a vital part of improving the quality of public life. In the words of Andy Kopplin, First Deputy Mayor and CAO for the City of New Orleans, "We used analytics to help our Fire Department target smoke alarm installation outreach to those neighborhoods that need it the most. We're thrilled that Enigma.io is applying this practice nationwide so that more fire fatalities are prevented."
About Enigma
Enigma maintains the world's largest open-source collection of public data. Through its intelligence and platform products, Enigma enables organizations to bring data to bear on their most important problems. Enigma's solutions are used across the Fortune 500 in industries as diverse as banking, insurance and manufacturing. Enigma won the 2013 TechCrunch Disrupt startup competition, and received a $4.5 million Series A funding round in 2014 and a $28.2 million Series B funding round in 2015 to expand its operations. For more information, visit www.enigma.io.
Contact Us
Mike Flowers
Chief Analytics Officer
[email protected]
Marc DaCosta
Co-founder
[email protected]
Jeremy Krinsley
Public Labs
[email protected]
SOURCE Enigma
Share this article