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Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

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Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#31

Post by enjeyw »

yourapostasy wrote: post #9

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…

So this is phenomenal interesting to me - I cofounded a startup looking at exactly this space: we want to use crowdsourcing and AI to make the information published online in the aftermath of disasters useful for response organization. We're still very much early days, but we have been lucky enough to pick up some seed funding :-)

If your SO is interested, I'd be really grateful for the opportunity to have a chat with them about their experiences!

We've got a website at https://sempo.ai if you'd like a bit of background...

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#32

Post by enjeyw »

thebiglebrewski wrote: post #27
yourapostasy wrote: post #9

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!

Ooooo oooo pick me! We're doing something in this space. Very much early days but we DO have seed funding :)

Https://sempo.ai if you're interested

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#33

Post by thebiglebrewski »

enjeyw wrote: post #32
thebiglebrewski wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ooooo oooo pick me! We're doing something in this space. Very much early days but we DO have seed funding :) Https://sempo.ai if you're interested

Why do you need "AI" to solve this problem?

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#34

Post by enjeyw »

thebiglebrewski wrote: post #33
enjeyw wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ooooo oooo pick me! We're doing something in this space. Very much early days but we DO have seed funding :) Https://sempo.ai if you're interested

Why do you need "AI" to solve this problem?

Yeah good question - we're particularly interested in filtering, categorising and verifying the social media data that published during a disaster - the volume of this data is absolutely huge, so if you can use some sort classification algorithm (even basic stuff like SVM), then you can potentially massively reduce the workload of responders, who just don't have the time to that sort of manual work themselves - they're too busy doing the actual response.

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#35

Post by thebiglebrewski »

enjeyw wrote: post #34
thebiglebrewski wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need "AI" to solve this problem?

Yeah good question - we're particularly interested in filtering, categorising and verifying the social media data that published during a disaster - the volume of this data is absolutely huge, so if you can use some sort classification algorithm (even basic stuff like SVM), then you can potentially massively reduce the workload of responders, who just don't have the time to that sort of manual work themselves - they'…

Is that really an AI though or just a bunch of if-elsif-else loops? Is a true artificial intelligence really required?!

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#36

Post by enjeyw »

thebiglebrewski wrote: post #35
enjeyw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah good question - we're particularly interested in filtering, categorising and verifying the social media data that published during a disaster - the volume of this data is absolutely huge, so if you can use some sort classification algorithm (even basic stuff like SVM), then you can potentially massively reduce the workload of responders, who just don't have the time to that sort of manual work themselves - they'…

Is that really an AI though or just a bunch of if-elsif-else loops? Is a true artificial intelligence really required?!

If-elif loops definitely get you part of the way there;

Lets say we're trying to find the tweets that actually come from people affect by a disaster, rather than just supplying commentary about them.

You could just say "if tweet is not within x distance of disaster, then tweet is likely to be commentary rather than from someone actually affected". However this could always miss a tweet like

"My elderly mother just called me, and she's in trouble but doesn't know who to contact"

So really this is a case of "Given tweet is not within x distance, likelihood of being from affected person is lower", but of course we don't know what the affect on likelihood is (I couldn't even ballpark it for you).

If you had some classified data though, you could start to get and idea of what all these Bayes Factors are. And just like that, you're doing a naive bayesian classifier. As I said, not fancy "Deep learning with CNNs", but ML nonetheless.

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#37

Post by thebiglebrewski »

enjeyw wrote: post #36
thebiglebrewski wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that really an AI though or just a bunch of if-elsif-else loops? Is a true artificial intelligence really required?!

If-elif loops definitely get you part of the way there; Lets say we're trying to find the tweets that actually come from people affect by a disaster, rather than just supplying commentary about them. You could just say "if tweet is not within x distance of disaster, then tweet is likely to be commentary rather than from someone actually affected". However this could always miss a tweet like "My elderly mother just ca…

I guess I see what you're saying.

...couldn't you classify the data with if/elsif/else statements though? And store likelihoods of past records within the database?

Do you need to use a, "Bayesian Classifier"?

Is this all that Artificial Intelligence means now? I thought it was like, "a machine that can pass the Turing test"? Sorry if I'm just naive.

Re: Drones Are Speeding Hurricane Harvey Response

#38

Post by paulmd »

yourapostasy wrote: post #9

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…

Modern phones support an "Enhanced 9-1-1" capability, GPS data will automatically be sent to emergency services when you dial 9-1-1 or similar emergency numbers.

Would it be possible to do a reverse 9-1-1 call and then pull the E-GPS data en-masse to measure water levels?

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