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Where 2.0: Disaster Tech
Jesse Robbins, Mikel Maron
We’re going to talk about how to innovate and how innovation in the disaster tech and how that can save lives. It’s really hard to innovate at times, the more experiences you are, the more resistant you are to take ideas from people with lots of passion but no experience. Geeks tend to think “We’re going ot think “We will save everybody with our great new teh!” but experienced people will say “You fools! you’re going to kill everyone!”
It is difficult to innovate, but there is a way to do it. We’ve spotted a pattern:
- Disaster
- Ad-Hoc Adaptation
- Championship
- Iterative Improvement
Please keep this in mind today.
“my story” (Jesse)
Katrina
- 1800+ Dead
- Millions Displaced
I was a taskforce leader, we built and gave shelters. Used my american red cross, helped to serve 10s of thousands of people. Getting around was hard because signs had blown dodn. There was an adaptation of old GPS technology + Google Maps. Worked for everyone with Internet Access. Couple of small problems. I90 bridge had fallen in.
Mikel:
The problem is timeliness, it’s not a specific problem with the data providers, more a problem with updating and getting updates out. Here we’re talking years of delay with web maps updating. A year ago I pointed out that the bridge was still showing up. I blogged and it got media exposure and it was finally updated. A few weeks later the bridge was opened and again the web sites were out of data.
Champion: OpenStreetMap (OSM - updated are immediately available to everyone else.
Tweaks to the model if we don’t want to rely on the crowd for disasters. Perhaps take a branch of the map tahta only certain people will update.
Iteration: UN considering OSM
- UNJLC Interagency Humanitarian Common Service
- Starting to explore collaborative mapping
- (still a long way to go)
We’ve done some experimenting and found some useful tweaks but the UN is slow moving and busy (with other disasters).
Showing a map of Burma. Has a small box on the bottom right saying “we need your help updating this map”.
Anti-pattern What if the technology isn’t championed and isn’t improved. Expectations can be let down and the lack of a champion can hinder a response.
Slide of Jim Grey - tragically went missing at sea. His friends used every innovative means to look for him. Digital Globe retrieved images, processed by Google, Amazon Mechanical Turk was used to coordinate searching. Unfortunately he was not found.
No champion. Public now believes that this is easily repeatable.
Iteration: Steve Fossett Search
- Inadequate training for volunteer.
- Many false positives.
- People called SAR teams directly which hindered search. Lessons weren’t learnt from previously. There was no wasy to compae old imagery with new imagery. Volunteers weren’t given feedback.
Quote from Maj. Cynthia Ryan - see slides.
San Diego Wildfires: Nate Ritter twittered. Red Cross followed suit. InSTEDD released a service called SMS GeoChat, they were a champion. They also iterated it as InSTEDD + Humanlink to create a localized and specific kind of twitter using GeoChat for the reponse in Burma that may also be used in China.
So to review the bulletpoints. Someone needs to emerge as a champion and then it needs to be improved iteratively. The message is “Be Champions”
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Where 2.0: AfricaMap
This is a “Birds of a Feather” - more of a discussion on a subject:
Ben Lewis, Infrastructure for Collaboration
Ben provides consulting services to researchers, professors,. research and focus areas. Been working with bunch of professors interested in Africa. Lack of data is a big problem. came to the job with a lot of interest and background in building web-based systems that serve up a lot of data and easy to access. Good fit for this academic environment because these systems tend to be inter-disciplinary orientated, webbased systems tend to be easy to use. Humanitarians, historians, social sciences.
The idea was to build a web-based system to bring together best available data for Africa, make it easy to find by making it visible, make it map layers. As we started thinking, we realised there’s basically no base-map. It’s a big place, it’s the US, Soviet Union and India combined. There hasn’t been commercial interest the way there has been for western europe and the US. You go to Google and it’s a big blank. We wanted to try to remedy that, we have a vast collection of maps in the Harvard map library, like 300 map drawers full of all kinds of stuff. The key stuff being map series data at 1:5,000,000 scale down to 1:1,000 scale. From 1980 to 1880, by the Russians, French. So there is quite a bit of data for the continent and we came up with this approach to provide a base map.
Will all be tilecache, open layers, open source stuff and creative commons. The problem isn’t that there’s a lot of data, it’s just impossible to get to. Instead of building years to get something useful we can do it in a matter of months, by fall 2008.
This is largely about historical GIS, it will be a historical basemap. Most recently 1980, large amounts 1950s (JMCK: crown copyright limits?). Everything we can bring in as web services will be a no brainer.
Also have lots of researchers who study Africa, then finish their research and the data “disappears”. It’s a particular problem for Africa where resources are tight. People can end up reinventing the wheel. Permanent data source for Africa projects.
Internal funding only so far. Build this thing then go after additional funds.
Suzanne Blier and Peter Bol mane investigators.
Data can be hard to find because if it’s in digital form it’s buried on one server somewhere. Encourage replication, make it easy for people to download and make available. Text based search of contents - “Google-type text search”. Throw all data, text, vector, etc. into PostGIS and “see what we get back”.
Place name gazetteer, starting with the data from geonames.org, as you combine gazetteer with old data, new entries will show up and these will need feeding back into geonames.org. Gazetteer becomes useful for unstructured texts to be geocoded. Decentralized architecture - we’ll be serving up some of these data layers. Would like to share tile caches. As data is brought out into the light of the web, would be good if it didn’t all need to sit on Harvard’s servers. Other interested parties could host their own. Have multiple sources of “hybrid” as backdrops. Interesting possibilities, historic basemaps, 1950s for Ghana for example. Combined with Google’s satellite from 2006 you can see where new roads are and all kinds of change. Quite practical change analysis that can be done by anyone with simple tools. Multiple scales, key datalayer will be US as the licensing is very simple - public domain - down to 500K in some areas. Russian mapping at few scales. Several countries and cities will go down to 1:50k. Working out the process but it’s more efficient than we expected. Country in Africa can do it inexpensively “Mad Mappers” in South Africa. Countries in this country have already digitised and are eager to work with us. Will let us bring a whole lot of data out quickly that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Concurrent layer viewing, ability to view data in 3 dimensions. Data in web client exported to Google Earth via superoverlays (allows smoother zooming). Google Earth will require it in Plate Carré. Ben is a huge huge enemy of slow web systems. Lots of ideas for other datasets. David Rumsey will be contributing his Africa maps. Ethnographic data form Murdoch. Socio-cultural-political-economic data. Lots of collections at Harvard are going geographical. Harvard museum has millions of specimens taken from Africa that could be georeferenced.
Building the base, showing Google for Africa and some data they have for the area.
[Showing coverage maps]
Geonomy map, query of large vector dataset in WMS on top of google map. Africa map will be an openlayers client.
Q: What software are you using from scanning/georeferencing?
A: In some cases we buy them already done. It will be creative commons in some form. Depends partly on the source.
Languages, cultures, currently from commercial data but could perhaps be user generated.
Q: Are you mainly looking to put this data out or looking for collaboration from users to develop it?
A: The basic goal is to prime the pump. There’s not much data for Africa and it’s difficult to get hold of, it’s paper maps buried away. Bringing out key strategic data layers out of the map bins and putting it onto the web with some simple collaboration tools
Key concept is a projects layer, researchers working on a particular part of Africa can draw a polygon and advertise that they’re working on a project/topic and give contact details. General purpose, very simple place where people can coordinate across departments and disciplines.
Q: Africa’s a big place, could you perhaps be looking too broad?
A: It would be easy to spin-off smaller views of this. We could be focussed on a city. One very obvious enhancement would be to be able to create a login and create a “my Africa map”. Specify an area of interest and be able to load in your own data layers, photos, documents, other digital artifacts and save and organise those. We’re opening this up to all disciplines who might want to work on Africa based projects.
We’re working on these various parts of the projects, tilecache, WMS, gazetteer and we’ll see how things develop, some parts may be more useful and will be developed specifically.
[discussion about geonames being owned by Google/Teleatlas, GNS being a cleaner alternative]
Q: What do you see your audience being?
A: We have a steering committee. They have to be impressed, and the Harvard community. They are, however, not isolated, they’ll be professors, researchers. If they say this is valuable, that will be important. In reality we’re building an OpenLayers client with historic base layers. That doesn’t exist for Africa.
Technorati tags: africamap, map, africa, where, where2.0, where2008
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Where 2.0: Live Blogging Update
So I’ve been live blogging the talks all day. Has been pretty difficult at times and also a little stressful. I was wondering whether I should bother continuing but after seeing references to them on Slashgeo and Ed Parsons’ blog I think I will continue.
If you haven’t liked my notes you might like Chris Spagnuolo’s alternative. You can also see things on O’Reilly’s Radar but they’re lagging slightly, there’s also live video feeds that I can’t find links for right now, and an IRC channel on irc.freenode.net in #where2008, say “Hi” to mcknut if you’re on there!
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Where 2.0: DIY Drones: An Open Source Hardware and Software Approach to Making “Minimum UAVs”
Chris Anderson, Wired
Talking about a hobby gone horribly wrong :)
Attempt to be a geek and a father, doing fun things with children. Got some model aircraft, played around, crashed a lot. Also had lego mindstorms, but we were never going to be really good at that either. Thought about “airplanes, robotics” what can I do? Ooh, put them together and get a UAV.
Predator UAV costs $4 million.
In a quest to do something cool and original, we realised there was a dimension of aerial robotics that we could compete in, cost. Couldn’t make the best UAV but could make the cheapest. Want to be the minimal UAV project.
Why? Low-cost access to the sky, any time, any place
What if you could have eyes in the sky, low cost ubiquitous access to the sky?
Started by looking at how to simplify the project? Two functions - stabilization project, kinda 3D. Then there’s navigation, following GPS waypoints, kinda 2D. Can use commercial stabilization hardware. How can we do navigation?
Stuck Lego mindstorms in lego planes. Put a camera with lego pan/tilt on the bottom. Got the world’s first semi-lego UAV.
Not autonomous. Brought in bluetooth GPS. Mindstorms has bluetooth. Added accelerometrs, gyros. Now have fully functional inertial measurement. Now have autonomous UAV. Take off manually and land manually, flick switch and it follows waypoints. All driven by lego, cool.
“Turning the military industrial complex into a toy”
Proof of concept, nice to use lego - easy, non-threatening. Have been accused of weaponising lego :)
Taken an export controlled technology and recreated with lego.
How to do cellphone easily? With a cellphone? On-board processing, on-board memory, very good wireless. 2-way communications. Can send text messages with waypoints, it can send back telemetry and imagery through various methods. Strap it to the plane and the autopilot into a software app.
Can do better…
Attach phone to stablisers. Set phone to continous snapping (0.5Hz) mode, get 3cm resolution with toys. When you want it, no waiting for satellites to come around.
Showing photo of the google campus, actually done by UAVs and helicopters. Showing very high resolution image.
You get close to finding out what’s happening right now. Can find that Google don’t really have their logo on their infinite pools.
Responsibility with UAVs. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Something was to be torn down so wanted to record it. Launched easystar with basic “altitude hold”, something went wrong and it went down behind the gates of the secure national laboratory. I could run, call 911, surrender. Or I could go to the gates and explain what happened. I went and took my child with me. They took mercy and found the plane, blew it out with a hose and knocked it down. They collected the pieces and found GPS sensors, cameras, etc. We promised never to do this again.
Embedded processors (under $500). Comparing to Steve Jobs and Wozniak and how they were putting together their own machines. We’re back there now and with open source hardware. Arduino chip. Using FlightGear they’ve created the ArduPilot a $110 open source autopilot. Uses IR stabilization, GPS, fully programmable, can control camera.
“Indoors and under $100?”
Using blimps - BlimpDuino a $70 autonomous blimp using $15 toys from toys’r’us.
DIYDrones website/community. Open source in this context.
Is this legal? We don’t know. Two regulatory classes for UAV, military and commercial. Can get regulatory permission commercially. They never considered that this can be so cheap and easy. Keeping under 400 feet, away from built in areas, have a pilot in control at all time. Trying to be responsible. Cannot ban anything here, these are toys. This is global too. We don’t know how to create regulatory guidelines.
How do we export these? Currently a license is required to export, but we’re an open source community. Some of our participants are teenagers from Iran, but some people would think we shouldn’t do that. I’d rather it was done in public in a community than they just do it on the quiet as all the technology is available now anyway. We’re testing the boundaries of how to get robots and machinery into the skies.
Ending on one picture, “What’s this good for?” “Because we can, because it’s fun, because nobody had done it before”
- Our job is to make the technology cheap, easy and ubiquitous.
- Then users will show us what it’s for.
We don’t know what people will do with it, but we’re hoping people will show us.
DIY Drones: An Open Source Hardware and Software Approach to Making “Minimum UAVs”
Technorati tags: drones, diydrones, uav, opensource, openhardware, where, where2.0, where2008
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Where 2.0: Global Weather Visualization: Utilizing Sensor Networks to Monetize Realtime Data
Michael Ferrari
We try to utilise as much data as possible.
This is not your father’s weather forecast.
Weather presenters are basically presenting information from basic weather models. After a few days the weather information is basically useless.
When you’re trying to base financial decisions on short term weather forecast, it’s very [bad/difficult].
We offer a completely different approach.
The world is warming, it’s a trend so won’t be constant and everywhere. Using traditional methods you can’t predict this properly.
We can do weather forecasts up to 10 months out using ~400 sensors around the world.
We can’t predict everything. Down to the daily level we can produce a granular forecast. We use multiple sensor networks.
Usually seasonal forecast that your tax dollars pay for say “there’s equal chances of everything happening”. We offer a more granular level showing, e.g. daily temperature changes. A lot of this information is supplemented by the sensor datas constantly.
Last year there was a landmark paper published Craig Venter recreated the darwin journey and sampled sea water at regular locations across the globe. We put the information into a geo-spatial context.
In evolutionary biology there’s always been a saying that “everything is everywhere”, took samples from around the globe. the thought before the study was that genes would be similar, but study showed that repeatability of some genomes was very specific. Caribbean vs Indian Ocean for instance.
Paradigm shift for future sampling studies. We now have a great dataset to base this stuff on.
Some of this will be addressed in further talks. We’re not at the point where we can prevent weather disasters but with realtime monitoring we can plan and react better.
Global Weather Visualization: Utilizing Sensor Networks to Monetize Realtime Data
Technorati tags: weather, sensors, where, where2.0, where2008
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Where 2.0: Bringing Spatial Analysis to your Mashups
Jeremy Bartley, ESRI
What is ESRI’s role in the geoweb? GIS is all about the fat tail. They have all that data but it’s not really accessible. We’re really excited about the ArcGIS9.3 release that will make this data more available. Our users create maps and datasets. We’ve been open in the past with OGC and SOAP. In 9.3 we’re also creating KML and REST interfaces. “When it’s open, it’s accessible”.
[demo]
http://mapapps.esri.com/serverdemos/siteselection/index.html
Showing some of the applications that we’ve built. We’re developing our own JavaScript APIs and Flex APIs. Based on the Dojo framework. Showing very simple mapping tile application. Standard basic JS mapping API.
This is actually a leyer to a mappign service running on the server. But they’re more than simple maps. We also have geo-processing models. Showing heatmap population dataset. Can define a polygon, sent it to the server using a restful interface and find out how many people are living there.
Showing census information for the US, you can view the attribution information.
Showing tile maps on virtual earth.
Bringing Spatial Analysis to your Mashups
Technorati tags: esri, arcgis, map, where, where2.0, where2008
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Where 2.0: Navigating the Future: Mapping in The Long Tail
Pat McDevitt
Worked in “University cap and gown” as a student. Seasonal business. Would go out and deliver these and return them later. Would load boxes into vans. Dispatcher give us list of addresses and directions. His van had no radio and no speedometer. Would get very used to finding signs of where schools would be, speeds changing. People would generally know where schools would be. People would say “it’s just down the street, you can’t miss it”. “just down the street” means different things in different people.
More recently worked at a company that would map hazmats. We would pull out these directions from envelopes. Asked colleagues for strangest things they’d found. One set including going to the end of a fence, continue north for the distance of two cigarettes on a slow horse. Not an uncommon measure of surveying in texas.
“All ‘navigation’ is local” “‘Where’ is relative”
Why in the past 25-30 years has this content been concentrated in a small number of companies?
The Long Tail. Hit based - older companies map places that get more “traffic”. “Niche”-based is newer organisations.
In the past this data was hand created. Eventually GIS applications became standard, modern, affordable. More people found they could become creators of GEO content. Local councils started having “geo” divisions. They could collect information that wouldn’t be economic for a big company to collect.
More recently tools were launched that would allow almost anyone to map data. We see that people will still go in and hand digitise this data. Filtering technologies are becoming much more important in where this long tail is going to go.
There’s a future that will contain both paleogeographers & neogeographers. I think the answer is “yes”.
Graph showing the types of data that people are mapping, words like “popular” “scenic” “clean” don’t describe data that a huge mapping company is likely to collect, but smaller more local ones might.
The smaller data could be collected better by local communities so we think we might leave it for them to collect.
Navigating the Future: Mapping in The Long Tail
Technorati tags: thelongtail, teleatlas, map, where, where2.0, where2008
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Where 2.0: What about the inside?
Mok Oh, EveryScape
[Video]
3D imagery of time square. Similar to street view.
“The Real World. Online”
- Photorealistic Immersive Interactive
- Scalable Distributable Maintainable Extensible Self-Healing
- Annotatable scriptable searchable shareable “my world”
“What about the inside?”
- Outside’s getting all the attention
- Inside is important and valuable
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- Your valuable time We’re indoors most of the time for this conference. We’re indoor at home, indoor at work.
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- POI quality Categorise it as indoors and outdoors, most of them are inside.
- WTF?
EveryScape has a platform to build their applications are, can separate outside and inside: Two lists of “Local search, travel, real estate” showing they apply to the outside and the inside.
“Just the outside is not enough…”
- We focus on eye-level visul representation - inside & outside
- Perceptual accuracy, not geometric accuracy - Visual Turing Test - Does it look like Boston, feel like Boston?
“Ambassador Program” Providing the means to paint the world.
[Demos]
www.everyscape.com, go to Boston. Can look around a panorama. Clicking on an orange disk in the ground and you actually move. you then get to the “Cheers” bar, you can also go down the stairs and into the bar. Can leave a memo for his friend on a poster on the wall of “Red Sox”.
Showing another demo, inside a building. MIT corridor. It’s a 3D model. Very fast, seems native. Showing as a FPS game and have multiple people playing the game.
We need to answer the question “What about the inside?”
Technorati tags: inside, everyscape, where, where2.0, where2008
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Where 2.0: A NeoGeographical Approach to Aerial Image Acquisition and Processing
Jeffrey Johnson, David Riallant
We have a background of GIS and remote sensing. We were very excited when we had virtual globes as it gives us new opportunities to visualise our data. Neogeography is not so new, for a long time geographers have been using external technology to get the big picture, which is all neogeography is about.
When we look at the geoweb today we have 2 main sources of information, large scale base maps and site specific annotations from users. We notice that site specific base maps are missing. With PictEarth data becomes information as it’s captured in real time.
[Showing slide of two planes with N95 plane]
N95 has good camera, reasonable GPS, and we have a python script and could stream too. Downlinking video and telemetry from the phone. Also have a more advanced solution. Have softwae that takes down the video and telemetry and imports to google earth. Also thermal cameras, some windows software, platforms are autonomous capable. General aviation aircraft too. Also ultralites. Using lon/lat/altitude/bearing to work out the geoprint of the imagery. Can see it live from an aircraft. The height of the plane and focal length give the area covered by the camera, visualizing in google earth.
Software is for S60 phones, using N95. Showing some mosaics from imagery.
Usually you have to wait a long time for new imagery and it costs a lot, but you might just want a small amount of imagery. This is what we’re aiming for. Can overlay with other types of data too. Can also shoot images at the time that you want them to be shot. Showing example of pictures taken in the Mediterranean sea 15m below the water level. Shooting when you wants makes sure you can control the data. If you can see the data in real time you can make decisions in real time.
Last year in San Diego could take photos during the wild fires.
GIS and remote sensing guys so make sure the data can be used in regular GIS systems.
Example of N95 pictures, pretty good detail.
Another example of UAV over dense urban area. Great success, interesting to see how it could operate. Aim to create 3D modelling.
Burning man image.
Goal is that images are not just a nice background, they become a source of information. Just like any information, geo-aerial information has it’s value from its accuracy, freshness and flexibility.
A NeoGeographical Approach to Aerial Image Acquisition and Processing
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Where 2.0: Indexing Reality: Creating a Mine of Geospatial Information
Anthony Fassero, Earthmine
We all agree that there’s a renaissance happening for mapping, an explosion of online geo-spatial platforms that allow us to visualise dense layers of data. Also allow us to attach information to these frameworks.
The baselayer allows us to enable this connection of data. Satelite imagery is precisely registered to the earth’s surface, we can work out the coordinate for every pixel. We can do the same for bird’s eye together with some advanced computation.
Also more recently street view. Street view doesn’t really link to the base layer, you don’t really have a lat/lon/altitude for the imagery. Showing a video of a 3d rendering from street imagery. Stereophotogrammetry. There’s so much information, curbs, etc. that it can’t be delivered too easily.
base layer = resolution + fidelity + accuracy
there’s a wealth of information but we need to be able to percieve it, e.g. text. Fidelity, we need 1-1 pixel to coordinate information.
generative, we’re able to extract road and building information.
[demo]
3D view on a bridge, can be dragged around similar to google street view. Can also double click on features in the image and it will jump to the nearest location. Start on bridge, click on a building at a distance and it jumps to that view, seems like spiderman jumping from point to point. Can also search for features, “gas lamps”, geocodes. Can also click on traditional overhead map/imagery and can be taken to that point.
Can also link to new imagery. Can click on an image and add a point, labelling it as a “bakery”. We’re actually tagging this on 3D imagery so you can rotate the image around and the point stays possible.
Can also do measurement. Dragging a line can give you a measurement, e.g. lane width. Can also take snapshots of nice views, virtually taking photos. Can measure the height of a (small) building. Tagging a manhole, street light. These are also showing up on the traditional inset map. Exporting this, exported as KML and loaded in google earth. This information isn’t stuck in the image but is really generating real world coordinates.
We’re also looking to provide data services to distribute this data. Software and tools to allow integrating it.
Announcing APIs JS and Flex: www.earthmine.com/beta
Indexing Reality: Creating a Mine of Geospatial Information
Technorati tags: earthmine, streetview, map, where, where2.0, where2008
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