Mapping a flood of new data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rebecca Lipman at Economist Intelligence Unit Perspectives on “One city tweets to stay dry: From drones to old-fashioned phone calls, data come from many unlikely sources. In a disaster, such as a flood or earthquake, responders will take whatever information they can get to visualise the crisis and best direct their resources. Increasingly, cities prone to natural disasters are learning to better aid their citizens by empowering their local agencies and responders with sophisticated tools to cut through the large volume and velocity of disaster-related data and synthesise actionable information.

Consider the plight of the metro area of Jakarta, Indonesia, home to some 28m people, 13 rivers and 1,100 km of canals. With 40% of the city below sea level (and sinking), and regularly subject to extreme weather events including torrential downpours in monsoon season, Jakarta’s residents face far-too-frequent, life-threatening floods. Despite the unpredictability of flooding conditions, citizens have long taken a passive approach that depended on government entities to manage the response. But the information Jakarta’s responders had on the flooding conditions was patchy at best. So in the last few years, the government began to turn to the local population for help. It helped.

Today, Jakarta’s municipal government is relying on the web-based PetaJakarta.org project and a handful of other crowdsourcing mobile apps such as Qlue and CROP to collect data and respond to floods and other disasters. Through these programmes, crowdsourced, time-sensitive data derived from citizens’ social-media inputs have made it possible for city agencies to more precisely map the locations of rising floods and help the residents at risk. In January 2015, for example, the web-based Peta Jakarta received 5,209 reports on floods via tweets with detailed text and photos. Anytime there’s a flood, Peta Jakarta’s data from the tweets are mapped and updated every minute, and often cross-checked by Jakarta Disaster Management Agency (BPBD) officials through calls with community leaders to assess the information and guide responders.

But in any city Twitter is only one piece of a very large puzzle. …

Even with such life-and-death examples, government agencies remain deeply protective of data because of issues of security, data ownership and citizen privacy. They are also concerned about liability issues if incorrect data lead to an activity that has unsuccessful outcomes. These concerns encumber the combination of crowdsourced data with operational systems of record, and impede the fast progress needed in disaster situations….Download the case study .”

Crowdsourcing Human Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Faisal Al Mutar at The World Post: “The Internet has also allowed activists to access information as never before. I recently joined the Movements.org team, a part of the New York-based organization, Advancing Human Rights. This new platform allows activists from closed societies to connect directly with people around the world with skills to help them. In the first month of its launch, thousands of activists from 92 countries have come to Movements.org to defend human rights.

Movements.org is a promising example of how technology can be utilized by activists to change the world. Dissidents from some of the most repressive dictatorships — Russia, Iran, Syria and China — are connecting with individuals from around the globe who have unique skills to aid them.

Here are just a few of the recent success stories:

  • A leading Saudi expert on combatting state-sponsored incitement in textbooks posted a request to speak with members of the German government due to their strict anti-hate-speech laws. A former foundation executive connected him with senior German officials.
  • A secular Syrian group posted a request for PR aid to explain to Americans that the opposition is not comprised solely of radical elements. The founder of a strategic communication firm based in Los Angeles responded and offered help.
  • A Yemeni dissident asked for help creating a radio station focused on youth empowerment. He was contacted by a Syrian dissident who set up Syrian radio programs to offer advice.
  • Journalists from leading newspapers offered to tell human rights stories and connected with activists from dictatorships.
  • A request was created for a song to commemorate the life of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russia tax lawyer who died in prisoner. A NYC-based song-writer created a beautiful song and activists from Russia (including a member of Pussy Riot) filmed a music video of it.
  • North Korean defectors posted requests to get information in and out of their country and technologists posted offers to help with radio and satellite communication systems.
  • A former Iranian political prisoner posted a request to help sustain his radio station which broadcasts into Iran and helps keep information flowing to Iranians.

There are more and more cases everyday….(More)”

How to Crowdsource the Syrian Cease-Fire

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Colum Lynch at Foreign Policy: “Can the wizards of Silicon Valley develop a set of killer apps to monitor the fragile Syria cease-fire without putting foreign boots on the ground in one of the world’s most dangerous countries?

They’re certainly going to try. The “cessation of hostilities” in Syria brokered by the United States and Russia last month has sharply reduced the levels of violence in the war-torn country and sparked a rare burst of optimism that it could lead to a broader cease-fire. But if the two sides lay down their weapons, the international community will face the challenge of monitoring the battlefield to ensure compliance without deploying peacekeepers or foreign troops. The emerging solution: using crowdsourcing, drones, satellite imaging, and other high-tech tools.

The high-level interest in finding a technological solution to the monitoring challenge was on full display last month at a closed-door meeting convened by the White House that brought together U.N. officials, diplomats, digital cartographers, and representatives of Google, DigitalGlobe, and other technology companies. Their assignment was to brainstorm ways of using high-tech tools to keep track of any future cease-fires from Syria to Libya and Yemen.

The off-the-record event came as the United States, the U.N., and other key powers struggle to find ways of enforcing cease-fires from Syria at a time when there is little political will to run the risk of sending foreign forces or monitors to such dangerous places. The United States has turned to high-tech weapons like armed drones as weapons of war; it now wants to use similar systems to help enforce peace.

Take the Syria Conflict Mapping Project, a geomapping program developed by the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a nonprofit founded by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, to resolve conflict and promote human rights. The project has developed an interactive digital map that tracks military formations by government forces, Islamist extremists, and more moderate armed rebels in virtually every disputed Syrian town. It is now updating its technology to monitor cease-fires.

The project began in January 2012 because of a single 25-year-old intern, Christopher McNaboe. McNaboe realized it was possible to track the state of the conflict by compiling disparate strands of publicly available information — including the shelling and aerial bombardment of towns and rebel positions — from YouTube, Twitter, and other social media sites. It has since developed a mapping program using software provided by Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto-based big data company that does contract work for U.S. intelligence and defense agencies, from the CIA to the FBI….

Walter Dorn, an expert on technology in U.N. peace operations who attended the White House event, said he had promoted what he calls a “coalition of the connected.”

The U.N. or other outside powers could start by tracking social media sites, including Twitter and YouTube, for reports of possible cease-fire violations. That information could then be verified by “seeded crowdsourcing” — that is, reaching out to networks of known advocates on the ground — and technological monitoring through satellite imagery or drones.

Matthew McNabb, the founder of First Mile Geo, a start-up which develops geolocation technology that can be used to gather data in conflict zones, has another idea. McNabb, who also attended the White House event, believes “on-demand” technologies like SurveyMonkey, which provides users a form to create their own surveys, can be applied in conflict zones to collect data on cease-fire violations….(More)

The Wisdom of Networks – and the Lessons of Wikipedia

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Philip Reitinger at the Analogies Project: “Douglas Merrill said “All of us are smarter than any of us.”  This motto of crowdsourcing – looking to the information that can arise from the combined observation by and intelligence of many – is also the prescription for a more secure cyber future. Crowdsourcing security among machines – rather than people – is our best path forward.

Attackers have the advantage online for many reasons, including the ability to leverage a simple error into a significant compromise, to scale attacks more readily than defenses can scale, and to attack at a distance.  While the maxim that defenders have to be right all the time, while attackers only have to be right once, is not literally true, it conveys the dilemma of defenders.   The connectivity of our devices and agents is inexorably increasing, creating more targets for attack.  The complexity of the software we use and the network we must defend is also increasing, making an attack on the individual target or the network easier.  And the criticality of our connected systems to our lives is also growing and will continue to grow.  Together, this means that we live in a world of steadily increasing risk.

In this environment, the good guys and gals have one significant but counter-intuitive advantage:  the size of the network being defended. The soaring prevalence of smart devices is a risk only until it is not, until we combine the abilities of these devices to observe, to induce, and to act to defend the network itself.  The cyber ecosystem is the greatest sensor network imaginable, and the data generated by its sensors can drive collective intelligence and collective action to stem threats and isolate infections.  The ability of the network components to defend the network may make the future of cybersecurity on the Internet look very much like Wikipedia – one of the best known examples of crowdsourcing – with some obvious failures, but if of importance, generally quickly corrected….


What is necessary to enable the crowdsourcing of defense among network components?  A few years ago, while I was at the Department of Homeland Security, it published a paper entitled “Enabling Distributed Security in Cyberspace: Building a Healthy and Resilient Cyber Ecosystem with Automated Collective Action.” This paper posits three requirements:  

  • Automation so the network can act at Internet speed;
  • Interoperability so the barriers to effective collective (network or “crowd”) action are those we impose by policy, as opposed to those imposed on us by technology or process; and
  • Authentication to enhance the decision-making and action of the network against attacks.

It has been five years since the paper was published, and I still think these are the key elements of a more secure Internet future.  Until we enable the network to defend itself, using its own wisdom of crowds (of agents), offense wins.  People should do what people do best, adjust how the network defends itself, and take action when necessary based on intuition, rather than responding to alerts.  So when you think about future Internet security problems, think about Stephen Colbert and Wikipedia….(More)”

Next Generation Crowdsourcing for Collective Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by John Prpić : “New techniques leveraging IT-mediated crowds such as Crowdsensing, Situated Crowdsourcing, Spatial Crowdsourcing, and Wearables Crowdsourcing have now materially emerged. These techniques, here termed next generation Crowdsourcing, serve to extend Crowdsourcing efforts beyond the heretofore dominant desktop computing paradigm. Employing new configurations of hardware, software, and people, these techniques represent new forms of organization for IT-mediated crowds. However, it is not known how these new techniques change the processes and outcomes of IT-mediated crowds for Collective Intelligence purposes? The aim of this exploratory work is to begin to answer this question. The work ensues by outlining the relevant findings of the first generation Crowdsourcing paradigm, before reviewing the emerging literature pertaining to the new generation of Crowdsourcing techniques. Premised on this review, a collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive typology is formed, organizing the next generation Crowdsourcing techniques along two salient dimensions common to all first generation Crowdsourcing techniques. As a result, this work situates the next generation Crowdsourcing techniques within the extant Crowdsourcing literature, and identifies new research avenues stemming directly from the analysis….(More)”

States’ using iwaspoisoned.com for outbreak alerts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dan Flynn at Food Safety News: “The crowdsourcing site iwaspoisoned.com has collected thousands of reports of foodborne illnesses from individuals across the United States since 2009 and is expanding with a custom alert service for state health departments.

“There are now 26 states signed up, allowing government (health) officials and epidemiologists to receive real time, customized alerts for reported foodborne illness incidents,” said iwaspoisoned.com founder Patrick Quade.
Quade said he wanted to make iwaspoisoned.com data more accessible to health departments and experts in each state.

“This real time information provides a wider range of information data to help local agencies better manage food illness outbreaks,” he said. “It also supplements existing reporting channels and serves to corroborate their own reporting systems.”

The Florida Department of Health, Food and Waterborne Disease Program (FWDP) began receiving iwaspoisoned.com alerts beginning in December 2015.

“The FWDP has had an online complaint form for individuals to report food and waterborne illnesses,” a spokesman said. “However, the program has been looking for ways to expand their reach to ensure they are investigating all incidents. Partnering with iwaspoisoned.com was a logical choice for this expansion.”…

Quade established iwaspoisoned.com in New York City seven years ago to give people a place to report their experiences of being sickened by restaurant food. It gives such people a place to report the restaurants, locations, symptoms and other details and permits others to comment on the report….

The crowdsourcing site has played an increasing role in recent nationally known outbreaks, including those associated with Chipotle Mexican Grill in the last half of 2015. For example, CBS News in Los Angeles first reported on the Simi Valley, Calif., norovirus outbreak after noticing that about a dozen Chipotle customers had logged their illness reports on iwaspoisoned.com.

Eventually, health officials confirmed at least 234 norovirus illnesses associated with a Chipotle location in Simi Valley…(More)”

A new data viz tool shows what stories are being undercovered in countries around the world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jospeh Lichterman at NiemanLab: “It’s a common lament: Though the Internet provides us access to a nearly unlimited number of sources for news, most of us rarely venture beyond the same few sources or topics. And as news consumption shifts to our phones, people are using even fewer sources: On average, consumers access 1.52 trusted news sources on their phones, according to the 2015 Reuters Digital News Report, which studied news consumption across several countries.

To try and diversify people’s perspectives on the news, Jigsaw — the techincubator, formerly known as Google Ideas, that’s run by Google’s parentcompany Alphabet — this week launched Unfiltered.News, an experimentalsite that uses Google News data to show users what topics are beingunderreported or are popular in regions around the world.

Screen Shot 2016-03-18 at 11.45.09 AM

Unfiltered.News’ main data visualization shows which topics are most reported in countries around the world. A column on the right side of the page highlights stories that are being reported widely elsewhere in the world, but aren’t in the top 100 stories on Google News in the selected country. In the United States yesterday, five of the top 10 underreported topics, unsurprisingly, dealt with soccer. In China, Barack Obama was the most undercovered topic….(More)”

Crowdsourcing On-street Parking Space Detection

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ruizhi Liao et al in: “As the number of vehicles continues to grow, parking spaces are at a premium in city streets. Additionally, due to the lack of knowledge about street parking spaces, heuristic circling the blocks not only costs drivers’ time and fuel, but also increases city congestion. In the wake of recent trend to build convenient, green and energy-efficient smart cities, we rethink common techniques adopted by high-profile smart parking systems, and present a user-engaged (crowdsourcing) and sonar-based prototype to identify urban on-street parking spaces. The prototype includes an ultrasonic sensor, a GPS receiver and associated Arduino micro-controllers. It is mounted on the passenger side of a car to measure the distance from the vehicle to the nearest roadside obstacle. Multiple road tests are conducted around Wheatley, Oxford to gather results and emulate the crowdsourcing approach. By extracting parked vehicles’ features from the collected trace, a supervised learning algorithm is developed to estimate roadside parking occupancy and spot illegal parking vehicles. A quantity estimation model is derived to calculate the required number of sensing units to cover urban streets. The estimation is quantitatively compared to a fixed sensing solution. The results show that the crowdsourcing way would need substantially fewer sensors compared to the fixed sensing system…(More)”

Crowdsourcing Site Works to Detect Spread of Zika

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Suzanne Tracy at Scientific Computing Source: “Last month, the Flu Near You crowdsourcing tool expanded its data collection to include Zika, chikungunya and dengue symptoms, such as eye pain, yellow skin/eyes and joint/bone pain. Flu Near You is a free and anonymous Web site and mobile application that allows the public to report their health information by completing brief weekly surveys.

Created by epidemiologists at Harvard, Boston Children’s Hospital and The Skoll Global Threats Fund, the novel participatory disease surveillance tool is intended to complement existing surveillance systems by directly engaging the public in public health reporting. As such, it relies on voluntary participation from the general public, asking participants to take a few seconds each week to report whether they or their family members have been healthy or sick.

Using participant-reported symptoms, the site graphs and maps this information to provide local and national views of illness. Thousands of reports are analyzed and mapped to provide public health officials and researchers with real-time, anonymous information that could help prevent the next pandemic.

The survey, which launched in 2011, is conducted year-round for several reasons.

  • First, it is possible for an influenza outbreak to occur outside of the traditional flu season. For instance, the first wave of pandemic H1N1 hit in the spring of 2009. The project wants to capture any emerging outbreak, should something similar occur again.
  • Second, the project’s symptoms-based health forms allow it to monitor other diseases, such as the recently-added Zika, chikungunya and dengue, which may have different seasons than influenza….(More)

See also: http://flunearyou.org and video: Fight the flu. Save lives

Don’t know where to go when the volcano blows? Crowdsource it.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Frances Johnson in ThrivingEarthExchange: “In the shadow of a rumbling volcano, Quito, Ecuador solicits just-in-time advice from the world’s disaster experts…

Cotopaxi’s last large-scale eruption was in 1877, and the volcano’s level of activity suggests another one is inevitable. In addition to spewing lava, a major eruption would melt Cotopaxi’s glaciers and send a large flow of material barreling down the mountain, posing an immediate risk to people and potentially causing rivers to overflow their banks. Some 120,000 people living in the valley beneath the volcano would have a mere 12 minutes to escape the lava’s path, and more than 325,000 other area residents would have only slightly more time to evacuate. An eruption could also create significant long-term challenges across a broad area, including dangerous air quality and disruptions to infrastructure, food systems and water supplies.

As danger looms, a city gets coaching from the crowd

Aware that the city was underprepared for a significant eruption, The Governance Lab, a program of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, volunteered its time and expertise to help local officials accelerate preparation efforts. The GovLab, which helps governments and other institutions work collaboratively to solve problems, teamed up with Linq, the city’s innovation agency.

“We were very aware that this was a time-sensitive matter—we needed experts, and we needed them fast,” explained Dinorah Cantú-Pedraza, a human rights lawyer and Research Fellow at The GovLab who collaborated on the project. “So that’s why we decided to create online sessions focused on how innovations can solve specific problems facing the city.”…

GovLab’s “fail-fast, learn-by-doing” approach is crucial to its projects’ success in remaining responsive to the problems at hand. “That was a central element in how we worked with our partners and improved the approach as we went forward,” said Cantú-Pedraza.

To help translate the Cotopaxi crowdsourcing model for other circumstances, GovLab is working to build a network of innovators and experts that can be tapped on short notice to address problems as they emerge around the world. Although we can hope for the best in Quito and elsewhere, the reality is that we must plan for the worst…(More)