Public Intelligence Blog

News Discovery: Here's The Cream of the Crop – Best Apps and Services To Find The News You Like

Robin Good: Here is a good and well written overview of some of the best news discovery tools out there.

These services, generally avaliable as mobile apps and/or desktop tools, aggregate a large number of relevant news sources in different categories of interest, and leverage in many cases your Facebook and Twitter network of contacts to suggest the type of stories you may be interested in the most.

Covered in the article:  Pulse Zite Google Currents Flipboard Taptu Prismatic News.me LinkedIN Today The Browser Longreads and more

Excellent overview. 8/10  Full article

Situational Awareness in Mass Emergency: Behavioral & Linguistic Analysis of Disaster Tweets

Sarah Vieweg‘s doctoral dissertation from the University of Colorado is a must-read for anyone interested in the use of twitter during crises. I read the entire 300-page study because it provides important insights on how automated natural language processing (NLP) can be applied to the Twittersphere to provide situational awareness following a sudden-onset emergency. Big thanks to Sarah for sharing her dissertation with QCRI. I include some excerpts below to highlight the most important findings from her excellent research.

Read full post with many tables.

Phi Beta Iota:  Dr. Patrick Meier has rapidly become the single most important focal point for the emergence of public intelligence in the public interest.  This one post is so important that we have put it into a single ten page document for ease of study: Situational Awareness in Mass Emergency   William Binney's Thin Thread–the cost effective meta data analytics program that respected privacy by drawing extraordinary insights from data in the aggregate–is now in the public domain.  We view this as a tipping point.

Computer forecasting matched rises, ebbs in Afghanistan violence

Phys.Org, July 17, 2012

By Jon Bardin

In August 2010, shortly after WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of classified documents that cataloged the harsh realities of the war in Afghanistan, a group of friends – all computer experts – gathered at the New York City headquarters of the Internet company Bitly Inc. to try and make sense of the data.

The programmers used simple code to extract dates and locations from about 77,000 incident reports that detailed everything from simple stop-and-search operations to full-fledged battles. The resulting map revealed the outlines of the country's ongoing violence: hot spots near the Pakistani border but not near the Iranian border, and extensive bloodshed along the country's main highway. They did it all in just one night. Now one member of that group has teamed up with mathematicians and computer scientists and taken the project one major step further: They have used the WikiLeaks data to predict the future.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Wikileaks, Open Data, Big Data, & Predicting Violence in Afghanistan”