India seems to have a penchant for taking risky selfies. A team of researchers developing an app to warn you if a selfie is likely to kill you have found out one horrifying fact. More people in India die attempting to take selfies than anywhere else in the world.
The researchers compiled incidences of selfie deaths around the world. If a death would not have occurred had a selfie not been taken, it was considered as a selfie death. There were 127 selfie related deaths, with the first incident happening in March 2014. Since then, 76 people in India have died trying to take a selfie. All other countries have single digit numbers. Pakistan comes in a distant second at 9 deaths, USA has 8 and 6 people have died in Russia.
In Mangrul Lake, near Nagpur, 7 people died in a single incident when a boat with 10 passengers on board toppled while a group of youth tried to take a groupfie, or a group selfie. India, please stop taking dangerous selfies. The most dangerous places to attempt a selfie are at heights, water, water and heights, trains, weapons, vehicles, electricity and animals. The research is published on Arxiv.
The researchers used their learnings to identify and sort dangerous selfies on Twitter. Machine learning algorithms process a photo to identify the most dangerous features. A combination of text, location data and image based features were used to predict if a selfie was dangerous. For those who want to dive in deep, the codebase and the dataset is available here.
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