Management of the Koforidua Technical University (KTU) in the Eastern Region, is urging the government to invest in the country’s technical universities to enable them to develop artificial intelligence tools to help security agencies in the fight against crime.
The call by the university comes after some students of the Mechatronics and Cybersecurity Department of the university successfully installed a locally manufactured traffic light with Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help fight crime on campus.
The limited use of technology in the fight against crime in Ghana has partly been blamed for the increase in crime in the country.
In the case of the recent bullion van robbery attack at Jamestown in Accra for instance, the absence of state-owned CCTV cameras is hampering the efforts of the police in apprehending the suspects who robbed the van and killed a police officer and a trader.
Management of the Koforidua Technical University is therefore proposing a more scientific and reliable method of intelligence gathering to help security agencies fight crime in the country.
The Vice-Chancellor of the University, Professor David Kofi Essuman, spoke to Citi News about the latest innovation of the university.
“As part of requirements for final year students in the university, they take on projects which are normally supervised by their lecturers and some of these students came out with this project which is a locally built traffic light with cameras which is able to monitor everything within its scope and transfers live signals to the cybersecurity room on campus. The traffic has successfully been installed on campus and it is currently being used to check our security on campus”.
“Already, we have installed CCTV cameras and yet still, the robberies are going on so it means that we need to do more and advance more on that, to be able to pick up individuals who are involved in all these kinds of activities.”
“So it is our mission that, we are going to work in that direction to reduce crime in this country, and so we have just begun, and hope that as we travel along, we want to accept challenges. As a country, we need to ask ourselves where we want to be in the next five years, and what do we want to do with artificial intelligence?”.
According to him, “once we have those concepts clear, it will guide us into how our research should go and how we can reduce the problems in this country. Crime is an issue, so we are going to focus on crime research and see how we can all help together to reduce and minimize the armed robbery that is happening in this country”.
