The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Using Flash Crowds to Automatically Detect Earthquakes & Impact Before Anyone Else It is said that our planet has a new nervous system; a digital nervous system comprised of digital veins and intertwined sensors that capture the pulse of our planet in near real-time. Next generation humanitarian technologies seek to leverage this new nervous system to …
Automatically Classifying Text Messages (SMS) for Disaster Response Humanitarian organizations like the UN and Red Cross often face a deluge of social media data when disasters strike areas with a large digital footprint. This explains why my team and I have been working on AIDR (Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response), a free and open source platform …
Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Big Data Done Right — Free Open Source Real Time Twitter Base”
UN Experts Meeting on Humanitarian UAVs The Humanitarian UAV Network (UAViators) and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) are co-organizing the first ever “Experts Meeting on Humanitarian UAVs” next month at UN Headquarters in New York. This full-day strategy meeting, which is co-sponsored by the ICT for Peace Foundation (ICT4Peace) and QCRI, will …
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Low-Cost UAV Applications for Post-Disaster Assessments: A Streamlined Workflow Colleagues Matthew Cua, Charles Devaney and others recently co-authored this excellent study on their latest use of low-cost UAVs/drones for post-disaster assessments, environmental development and infrastructure development. They describe the “streamlined workflow—flight planning and data acquisition, post-processing, data delivery and collaborative sharing,” that they created “to deliver acquired images and orthorectified …
Integrating Geo-Data with Social Media Improves Situational Awareness During Disasters A new data-driven study on the flooding of River Elbe in 2013 (one of the most severe floods ever recorded in Germany) shows that geo-data can enhance the process of extracting relevant information from social media during disasters. The authors use “specific geographical features like hydrological data and …
Crowdsourced Crisis Map of UAV/Aerial Videos for Disaster Response The first version of the Humanitarian UAV Network’s Crisis Map of UAV/aerial videos is now live on the Network’s website. The crowdsourced map features dozens of aerial videos of recent disasters. Like social media, this new medium—user-generated (aerial) content—can be used by humanitarian organizations to complement their damage assessments and thus …
Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Crowdsourced Crisis Map of UAV/Aerial Videos for Disaster Response”
Using UAVs for Community Mapping and Disaster Risk Reduction in Haiti “What if, to solve our problems, we simply need to rise above them?” CartONG and France’s OpenStreetMap (OSM) community recently teamed up to support OSM Haiti’s disaster risk reduction efforts by deploying a small UAV, “which proved very useful for participatory mapping.” The video documentary below provides an excellent …
