#OSE Open Source Everything – Page 163 – Public Intelligence Blog

Using Twitter to Map Blackouts During Hurricane Sandy

I recently caught up with Gilal Lotan during a hackathon in New York and was reminded of his good work during Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record. Amongst other analytics, Gilal created a dynamic map of tweets referring to power outages. “This begins on the evening October 28th as people mostly joke about the prospect of potentially losing power. As the storm evolves, the tone turns much more serious. The darker a region on the map, the more aggregate Tweets about power loss that were seen for that region.” The animated map is captured in the video below.

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In sum, creating live maps of geo-tagged tweets is only a first step. Base-maps should be rapidly developed and overlaid with other datasets such as population and income distribution. Of course, these datasets are not always available acessing historical Twitter data can also be a challenge. The latter explains why Big Data Philanthropy for Disaster Response is so key.

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2013/07/02

Howard Rheingold: Primal Assistants – Personal Software Agents

Software

There was a lot of talk about software agents about ten years ago — computer code that would seek, filter, and deliver information specific to your interests I have not tried this yet, but I'm interested that people are trying with today's technology — and that RSS is one of its building blocks.

Introducing Primal Assistants: A framework for software agents

Derek Wyatt

Primal does a lot of heavy lifting in knowledge representation and content filtering. If you ask it to grab you some relevant content around your interests, it will do precisely that.

But what if you don’t want to have to ask? Search engines are fantastic, but they still require that you go to them and then try to figure out how to formulate your query in a way that gets you decent results.

Primal already has the ability to understand what you want, and we’re now working on some technology that will let Primal deliver you the content that you truly care about before you know you want it.

Read on to learn more about Primal’s new software agent and content streaming framework.

What we’ve got cooking

If you want Primal to bring you the content you care about, or send that content to someone else on your behalf, or mix it all up in a blender so you can drink it in your morning protein shake… no problem.Let’s say you have interests in Fitness and Travel. You’ve told Primal about these interests and Primal has dutifully created an interest graph to represent them. Now, you want to filter massive amounts of content through these interests as it becomes available, and route that to various places on your behalf.

Learn more.

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2013/07/02

Patrick Meier: Big Data Sensing and Shaping Emerging Conflict

Data, Design, Governance

Big Data: Sensing and Shaping Emerging Conflicts

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and US Institute of Peace (USIP) co-organized a fascinating workshop on “Sensing & Shaping Emerging Conflicts” in November 2012. I had the pleasure of speaking at this workshop, the objective of which was to “identify major opportunities and impediments to providing better real-time information to actors directly involved in situations that could lead to deadly violence.” We explored “several scenarios of potential violence drawn from recent country cases,” and “considered a set of technologies, applications and strategies that have been particularly useful—or could be, if better adapted for conflict prevention.”

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This explains why Sanjana is right when he emphasizes that “Technology needs to be democratized […], made available at the lowest possible grassroots level and not used just by elites. Both sensing and shaping need to include all people, not just those who are inherently in a position to use technology.” Furthermore, Fred is spot on when he says that “Technology can serve civil disobedience and civil mobilization […] as a component of broader strategies for political change. It can help people organize and mobilize around particular goals. It can spread a vision of society that contests the visions of authoritarian.”

In sum, As Barnett Rubin wrote in his excellent book (2002) Blood on the Doorstep: The Politics of Preventive Action, “prevent[ing] violent conflict requires not merely identifying causes and testing policy instruments but building a political movement.” Hence this 2008 paper (PDF) in which I explain in detail how to promote and facilitate technology-enabled civil resistance as a form of conflict early response and violence prevention.

Real full post.

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2013/07/012013/07/01

Patrick Meier: Automatically Identifying Fake Images Shared on Twitter During Disasters

Crowd-Sourcing, Data, Geospatial, Mobile, Science

Automatically Identifying Fake Images Shared on Twitter During Disasters

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used to automatically predict the credibility of tweets generated during disasters. AI can also be used to automatically rank the credibility of tweets posted during major events. Aditi Gupta et al. applied these same information forensics techniques to automatically identify fake images posted on Twitter during Hurricane Sandy. Using a decision tree classifier, the authors were able to predict which images were fake with an accuracy of 97%. Their analysis also revealed retweets accounted for 86% of all tweets linking to fake images. In addition, their results showed that 90% of these retweets were posted by just 30 Twitter users.

Read full post with table of indicators.

2013/07/012013/07/01

Jean Lievens: E-Education

Education

E-Education

A long-overdue technological revolution is at last under way

“IT IS possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture,” observed Thomas Edison in 1913, predicting that books would soon be obsolete in the classroom. In fact the motion picture has had little effect on education. The same, until recently, was true of computers. Ever since the 1970s Silicon Valley’s visionaries have been claiming that their industry would change the schoolroom as radically as the office—and they have sold a lot of technology to schools on the back of that. Children use computers to do research, type essays and cheat. But the core of the system has changed little since the Middle Ages: a “sage on a stage” teacher spouting “lessons” to rows of students. Tom Brown and Huckleberry Finn would recognise it in an instant—and shudder.

Now at last a revolution is under way (see article). At its heart is the idea of moving from “one-size-fits-all” education to a more personalised approach, with technology allowing each child to be taught at a different speed, in some cases by adaptive computer programs, in others by “superstar” lecturers of one sort or another, while the job of classroom teachers moves from orator to coach: giving individual attention to children identified by the gizmos as needing targeted help. In theory the classroom will be “flipped”, so that more basic information is supplied at home via screens, while class time is spent embedding, refining and testing that knowledge (in the same way that homework does now, but more effectively). The promise is of better teaching for millions of children at lower cost—but only if politicians and teachers embrace it.

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2013/07/012013/07/01

$99 Parallella Supercomputer is Now Open Source Hardware — Funded by Kickstarter

Hardware

$99 Parallella Supercomputer is Now Open Source Hardware

Parallella is a low cost supercomputer designed by Adapteva using Xilinx Zynq-7010/7020 FPGA+2x Cortex A9 SoC combined with Adapteva Ephipany 16 or 64 cores epiphany coprocessor. The project had a successful kickstarter campaign which allowed then to provide the 16-core version for $99, and the 64-core version for $750. The board will soon be shipped to people who pledged on kickstarter, and one of the promise of the campaign was to fully open source the platform, and today, they just fulfilled that.