Live data from Hacker News

Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

3dinsider.com

21–30 of 38 posts

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#21

My SO helped with the crowdsourced civilian effort to dispatch water rescues of stranded people. The effort is wound down now; it will likely be hailed as a coup of "social media", but that's overhyping the social media aspect. Social media got the word out of where to go online to enter the coordination, but had little to do with the actual coordination itself. The group my SO worked with coordinated mostly through…

> * There was initial concern about fake rescuers. This concern should not be dismissed, but as far as we could tell, this didn't happen.

My biggest concern related to this watching twitter during the initial period was not so much 'fake rescuers' as people with good intentions going bad.

e.g. those that setup a website/twitter handle/phone number soliciting rescue requests either not handling information correctly, not being able to handle the volume influx, going dark while sleeping or days later, etc. But then people assuming that their requests to that service were being handled - the flip side of that is people making requests to multiple services potentially overwhelming not just actual rescuers but even just the information collection services themselves.

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#22
Huh? The article title makes a claim of 8x speed up in disaster recovery through drone use, but the text of the article says the government has restricted all civilian drone use for a month in the Houston area (to deconflict with military aircraft). These two things don't seem to jibe.

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#23
post #22

Huh? The article title makes a claim of 8x speed up in disaster recovery through drone use, but the text of the article says the government has restricted all civilian drone use for a month in the Houston area (to deconflict with military aircraft). These two things don't seem to jibe.

The insurance investigators appear to be commercially licensed.

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#24

Why would insurance companies want to speed up payments. This would cost them millions?

Moving from unrealized to realized cost faster, sure is worse to a quarter, etc, but eventually it will all be realized. It is on their balance sheets in some way regardless. The bigger picture is that human capital to assess all the claims is quite expensive and having to spend 8x less on that is a benefit to them.

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#25
post #19
post #8

I've said in the past, over a few beers, that instead of just switching the doodle over, google should integrate disaster images and video into google maps and allow people to see the damage first hand. The effect of spatializing this information is truly profound. I did not understand katrina until I visited the 9th ward and saw the damage myself. I've also said over beers that we need a system to aggregate disaster…

Real time drone control from your browser could have a similar effect, and even help find people who are stranded: http://cape.com

Can't wait to try that out when I get back to my laptop.

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#26
post #14
post #5

At tensorflight.com we are building deep learning model for hurricane Harvey damage segmentation. We already have 12K instances of partial building damage and 400 of total damage annotated and preliminary segmentation model is just being trained on 4 K80s. If you want to collaborate in any way please let me know at kozikow@tensorflight.com

Very interested in this work. What imagery source is even available this quick?

NOAA has some post storm imagery:

https://storms.ngs.noaa.gov/storms/harvey/index.html

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#27

My SO helped with the crowdsourced civilian effort to dispatch water rescues of stranded people. The effort is wound down now; it will likely be hailed as a coup of "social media", but that's overhyping the social media aspect. Social media got the word out of where to go online to enter the coordination, but had little to do with the actual coordination itself. The group my SO worked with coordinated mostly through…

Awesome post! Something tells me a non-profit startup is in the works!

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#28

Why would insurance companies want to speed up payments. This would cost them millions?

Insurance companies are actually interested in taking care of their customers after a catastrophic event. It’s core to their business. Faster payment means people can get back on their feet faster and are likely to stay with the company longer.

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#29

My SO helped with the crowdsourced civilian effort to dispatch water rescues of stranded people. The effort is wound down now; it will likely be hailed as a coup of "social media", but that's overhyping the social media aspect. Social media got the word out of where to go online to enter the coordination, but had little to do with the actual coordination itself. The group my SO worked with coordinated mostly through…

Seems like building an app for say music festivals has a lot of the same requirements. If you can build an app that supports Glastonbury and Burning Man that can be your commercial underpinning and testbed, and disaster relief can be the free part of the service.

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#30

My SO helped with the crowdsourced civilian effort to dispatch water rescues of stranded people. The effort is wound down now; it will likely be hailed as a coup of "social media", but that's overhyping the social media aspect. Social media got the word out of where to go online to enter the coordination, but had little to do with the actual coordination itself. The group my SO worked with coordinated mostly through…

A belated thanks to you and your SO for your work.
Post reply on HN