Patrick Meier: Crisis Tweets – Natural Language Processing to the Rescue?

Software
Patrick Meier

Crisis Tweets: Natural Language Processing to the Rescue?

My colleagues at the University of Colorado, Boulder, have been doing some very interesting applied research on automatically extracting “situational awareness” from tweets generated during crises. As is increasingly recognized by many in the humanitarian space, Twitter can at times be an important source of relevant information. The challenge is to make sense of a potentially massive number of crisis tweets in near real-time to turn this information into situational awareness.

Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML), Colorado colleagues have developed a “suite of classifiers to differentiate tweets across several dimensions: subjectivity, personal or impersonal style, and linguistic register (formal or informal style).” They suggest that tweets contributing to situational awareness are likely to be “written in a style that is objective, impersonal, and formal; therefore, the identification of subjectivity, personal style and formal register could provide useful features for extracting tweets that contain tactical information.” To explore this hypothesis, they studied the follow four crisis events: the North American Red River floods of 2009 and 2010, the 2009 Oklahoma grassfires, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

Read Full Post, Includes 9 Minute Video

Phi Beta Iota:  Humans will continue to outpace computers for the indefinite future.  Artificial Intelligence, of which Natural Language Processing is a sub-set, never fulfilled the expectations created for it, and to date all forms of proprietary technology remains retarded in relation to scalability, extendability, sustainabiliy, affordability, and agility.

See Also:

2012 The Open Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, & Trust (Evolver Editions, June 2012)

2012 PREPRINT FOR COMMENT: The Craft of Intelligence

2010 INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability

2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated

Reference: Stand Up for a Free and Open Internet

Access, Autonomous Internet, Hardware, P2P / Panarchy, Software, Spectrum
Click on Image to Enlarge

Last week, a group of activists and organizations came together to publish the Declaration of Internet Freedom, a set of principles that make up a vision for a free and open Internet. Groups behind the document include Free Press, Fight for the Future, Public Knowledge, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as others that fought against and helped defeat SOPA/PIPA earlier this year.

Since its launch, the Declaration has attracted a wide range of signees, including orgs like Amnesty International, the Harry Potter Alliance, and Mozilla; as well as individuals like artist/activist Ai Weiwei, musician Amanda Palmer, and Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf. And just yesterday, Rep. Darrell Issa became the first member of Congress to sign the document.

Read the handy infographic below and voice your support for an open Internet by joining thousands of others in signing the Declaration. Then use the EFF's action page to send a letter to your congressional representative asking her or him to join Issa in signing the Declaration. And if you've got ideas for additional principles or any general feedback about the document, you can contribute your thoughts and suggestions on Step2 and Reddit.

Read full post including Declaration of Internet Freedom.

Phi Beta Iota:  Another term of art is “Autonomous Internet.”  A broader term that includes this one is “Liberation Technology.”

See Also:

Autonomous Internet (139)

Liberation Technology (9)

Dave Lavinsky: 23 Crowd-Sourcing Tools

Advanced Cyber/IO, Software
Dave Lavinsky

Phi Beta Iota: Links have been added. Original Press Release

  • Elance, Guru, and Odesk – “These are the 3 old favorites for finding contractors that still got it. I suggest posting a project on each of these and hiring the best from among the total responses,” said Lavinsky.
  • OnlineJobs.ph – “A subscription site that gives you access to hiring skilled workers in the Philippines directly, often for $300-400 per month full-time!”
  • Amazon's Mechanical Turk – “This is a marketplace where you can request tasks requiring human intelligence-tasks from getting questions answered to writing product descriptions for you.”
  • Fiverr – “It amazes me all of the things you can get from people here for just $5. Professional voiceovers, fast logo designs, and all kinds of writing and search engine marketing gigs are available here.”
  • 99Designs – “A great place to get multiple designs or logos made BEFORE choosing a provider to pay. This is valuable if you've ever paid someone to make a design you didn't like.”
  • Hatchwise – “This site is nearly the same as 99Designs. I've used them both but have no real preference. Both are worth checking out.”

Continue reading “Dave Lavinsky: 23 Crowd-Sourcing Tools”

Worth a Look: Free Software at Pentagon, and on One Desktop

Software, Worth A Look

Free Software in Use at Pentagon

  • Apache
  • Mozilla Firefox
  • Mozilla Thunderbird, Evolution
  • OpenOffice.org
  • OpenSSH
  • OpenSSL
  • bind
  • Postfix
  • gcc –
  • GNAT
  • perl, Python, PHP
  • Samba
  • Mailman
  • MySQL and PostgreSQL
  • GIMP
  • MediaWiki

More specifically, they use the following open source software for specific military purposes:

  • FalconView – PC-based mapping application
  • Open Source Software for Imagery & Mapping (OSSIM) – geospatial image viewing (with classified plugins)
  • OSSIM Mapping ARchieve System (OMAR) – video indexing
  • BRL-CAD – solid modeling (Army)
  • Optics – MASINT toolset (with classfied plugins)
  • Delta3D – Game/Simulation engine for modeling and simulation

Source

Free Software on One Desktop

Source

See Also:

ROOT: The Open Source Everything Convergence

Microsoft’s Skype Goes Open Source – Both Ways

Software
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

SKYPE GOES OPEN SOURCE……FLAWLESS VICTORY:

AFTER MICROSOFT ACQUIRING SKYPE FOR 8.5 BILLION DOLLARS AND PROCEEDING TO ADD BACK DOORS FOR GOVERNMENT TO THE PROGRAM, THE SOFTWARE HAS BEEN HACKED AND IT'S SOURCE CODE RELEASEDadditional details: skypeopensource@conference.jabber.ru http://skype-open-source.blogspot.ch/Skype1.4_binaries http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6442887

SkypeKit_sdk+runtimes_370_412.zip skypekit binaries for Windows and x86_Linux + SDK http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7190651/

skype55_59_deobfuscated_binaries (Windows) http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7238404/

#Skype #Microsoft #OpenSource #Anonymous #Antisec #InfoSec #PoliceState #SecurityState #Surveillance #VOIP #OWS #OccupyTogether #Solidarity

Continue reading “Microsoft's Skype Goes Open Source – Both Ways”

DefDog: Musubi Brings Openness to Mobile Social Networking

Access, Culture, Economics/True Cost, Software
DefDog

Very interesting….from the summary statement:

Our point is that social networks are today’s version of AOL and CompuServe, not the Web and SMTP email—a service model that’s in conflict with the open, standards-based Internet. Furthermore,even though they’ve evolved to support mobile devices, today’s social services were designed for the era of PC-based Web browsers, not handheld smartphone apps.

If you’re thinking, “There must be a better way,” you’re right. In this report we’ll examine some groundbreaking research aimed at bringing openness to social networking on mobile devices.

Phi Beta Iota:  Google, Facebook, and Twitter are all “dead men walking.”  They have failed to make the leap to the mix of open source everything and creating intelligence (decision-support) with integrity, settling instead for information overload with no integrity.

PDF: Musubi Brings Openness to Mobile Social Networking

See Also:

ROOT: The Open Source Everything Convergence