Accuracy Of Image Tagging In Flickr: A Natural Disaster Case Study

We recently received word that we had a paper accepted for the upcoming  2016 International Conference on Social Media and Society entitled "Accuracy Of User-Contributed Image Tagging In Flickr:  A Natural Disaster Case Study." In the paper we assess the reliability of user-generated tags during a natural disaster event. Below you read the abstract of the paper.

Social media platforms have become extremely popular during the past few years, presenting an alternate, and often preferred, avenue for information dissemination within massive global communities. Such user-generated multimedia content is emerging as a critical source of information for a variety of applications, and particularly during times of crisis. In order to fully explore this potential, there is a need to better assess, and improve when possible, the accuracy of such information. This paper addresses this issue by focusing in particular on user-contributed image tagging in Flickr. We use as case study a natural disaster event (wildfire), and assess the reliability of user-generated tags. Furthermore, we compare these data to the results of a content-based annotation approach in order to assess the potential performance of an alternative, user-independent, automated approach to annotate such imagery. Our results show that Flickr user annotations can be considered quite reliable (at the level of ~50%), and that using a spatially distributed training dataset for our content-based image retrieval (CBIR) annotation process improves the performance of the content-based image labeling (to the level of ~75%).

Study methodology for comparing user-annotated to CBIR-annotated Flickr imagery

Sample of training set images (yellow) and the retrieved fire images (green).

Full reference:

Panteras, G., Lu, X., Croitoru, A., Crooks, A.T. and Stefanidis, A. (2016), Accuracy Of User-Contributed Image Tagging In Flickr:  A Natural Disaster Case Study. In Gruzd, A., Jacobson, J., Mai, P.,  Ruppert, E. and Murthy , D. (eds), Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Social Media and Society, London, UK. (pdf)

Street View and Photo Spheres

In the past I have written several pieces about Google, Google Maps and how its been pushing the boundaries of geography. The other day I was fortunate enough to attend a talk by John Bailey from Google's Geo Education team when he was visiting Masons GGS Department. Overall it was excellent talk showing the Googles technologies can be used to map the world and used for teaching and raising the public's awareness about our world.

One thing which was particularly neat was how you could use your own phone with the Google Street View app to create photo spheres and publish them on Google Maps.

After the talk I went and downloaded the Google Street View app and tried it out. Below is my first attempt of creating a photo sphere on the Fairfax campus at Mason. Next time I need to try harder and not move so much, so the images scene do not get so much motion blur and stitching errors. 

Call For Papers: Smart Buildings and Cities

Special Issue on Smart Buildings and Cities for IEEE Pervasive Computing

Submission deadline: 1 July 2016  Extended to July 18th, 2016
Publication date: April–June 2017

One of Mark Weiser’s first envisionments of ubiquitous and pervasive computing had the smart home as its central core. Since then, researchers focused on realizing this vision have built out from the smart home to the smart city. Such environments aim to improve the transparency of information and the quality of life through access to smarter and more appropriate services.

Despite efforts to build these environments, there are still many unanswered questions: What does it mean to make a building or a city “smart”? What infrastructure is necessary to support smart environments? What is the return on investment of a smart environment?

The key to building smart environments is the fusion of multiple technologies including sensing, advanced networks, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data analytics, and mobile devices. This special issue aims to explore new technologies, methodologies, case studies, and applications related to smart buildings and cities. Contributions may come from diverse fields such as distributed systems, HCI, ambient intelligence, architecture, transportation and urban planning, policy development, and cyber-physical systems. Relevant topics for issue include

• Applications, evaluations, or case studies of smart buildings/cities
• Architectures and systems software to support smart environments
• Big data analytics for monitoring and managing smart environments
• Economic models for smart buildings/cities
• Models for user interaction in smart environments
• Formative studies regarding the design, use, and acceptance of smart services
• Configuration and management of smart environments
• Embedded, mobile ,and crowd sensing approaches
• Cloud computing for smart environments
• Domain-specific investigations (such as transportation or healthcare)

The guest editors invite original and high-quality submissions addressing all aspects of this field, as long as the connection to the focus topic is clear and emphasized.

Guest Editors

• Andrew Hudson-Smith, Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London
• Anind K. Dey, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
• Andrew Crooks, College of Science, George Mason University
• Katja Schechtner, MIT Media Lab

Submission Information

• To present works-in-progress directly to the community, visit our Reddit community: www.reddit.com/r/pervasivecomputing.
• For general author guidelines or submission details: www.computer.org/web/peer-review/magazines or email pervasive@computer.org.
• To submit your article directly to our online peer-review system, go directly to https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/pc-cs.

Megacities through the Lens of Social Media

Megacities, which can be roughly defined as cities with a population of over 10 million people are on the increase due to ongoing urbanization trends. The United Nations notes that since the 1970’s the number of megacities has more than tripled (from 8 to 34), and is expected to further double until 2050 (to exceed 60).

The question we are wondering is how can GeoSocial analysis help understand such cities. To this end, we have recently had a paper published  entitled: "Megacities: Through the Lens of Social Media" in the Journal of the Homeland Defense and Security Information Analysis Center (HDIAC). In the paper we discuss opportunities and challenges that social media brings with respect to understanding the physical and cyber spaces within megacities. Below you can see the synopsis to our paper.

Due to ongoing urbanization trends the worldwide urban population is projected to grow from half of the global population (today) to two thirds of it by 2030. Almost all the new megacities that will emerge through this process are in geopolitical hotspots of southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, the U.S. Department of Defense must consider the challenges presented by engagement in such environments when planning for the future. The physical challenge of operating in such dense, highly three-dimensional, environments is only compounded by the added challenge presented by the advanced functional complexity of these environments: megacities function at the intersection of the physical, social, and cyber spaces. Accordingly, military operations in these locations must prepare to engage in environments where news, ideas, and opinions are shaped in cyberspace and propagated across the physical urban landscape. As social networks connect (or, often, divide) populations they form communities and facilitate their mobilization.

We have observed these processes time and again, from the streets of Cairo during the Arab Spring, to the streets of Tokyo during the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the streets of Paris during the recent ISIL terrorist attacks. Advancing our capability to analyze crowd-generated content in the form of social media feeds is a substantial scientific challenge with considerable implications for future DoD operations. In this publication, we use representative examples to demonstrate the opportunities and challenges associated with such information, especially as they relate to large urban areas. 

An emerging framework to study urban systems.

Social networks embedded within a geographical content, leading to connected, non-contiguous areas.

Full Reference: 

Stefanidis, A., Jenkins A., Croitoru, A. and Crooks, A. (2016). “Megacities Through the Lens of Social Media”, Journal of the Homeland Defense & Security Information Analysis Center (HDIAC), 3(1): 24-29. (pdf)

AAG: Symposium on Human Dynamics Research - Urban Analytics

Urban Analytics Sessions @ the AAG 2016

 

As part of the Symposium on Human Dynamics Research we have organized three great sessions sessions relating to Urban Analytic which will take place on Thursday, 3/31/2016, from 1:20 PM - 7:00 PM in Union Square 18, Hilton Hotel, 4th Floor.

Session Description: A deluge of new data created by people and machines is changing the way that we understand, organize and model urban spaces. New analytics are required to make sense of these data and to usefully apply findings to real systems. This session seeks to bring together quantitative or mixed methods papers that develop or use new analytics in order to better understand the form, function and future of urban systems. We invite methodological, theoretical and empirical papers that engage with any aspect of urban analytics. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• New methodologies for tackling large, complex or dirty data sets;
• Case studies involving analysis of novel or unusual data sources;
• Policy analysis, predictive analytics, other applications of data;
• Intensive modelling or simulation applied to urban areas or processes;
• Individual-level and agent-based models (ABM) of geographical systems;
• Validating and calibrating models with novel data sources;
• Ethics of data collected en masse and their use in simulation and analytics.

Organizers:

• Nick Malleson - University of Leeds
• Paul Longley - University College London
• Seth Spielman - University of Colorado
• Andrew Crooks - George Mason University
• Alex Singleton -University of Liverpool
• Mark Birkin - University of Leeds

3445 Symposium on Human Dynamics Research: Urban Analytics (I)

Thursday, 3/31/2016, from 1:20 PM - 3:00 PM in Union Square 18, Hilton Hotel, 4th Floor

Chair: Nick Malleson

Talks:

• *Marynia Aniela Kolak,  Luc Anselin and Julia Koschinsky, 
• Title: A Spatial Perspective on the Econometrics of Health Program Evaluation
• *Paul A. Longley, Wen Li, Guy Lansley and James Cheshire 
• Title: Spatial dynamics and data infrastructures
• *Apolline Coralie Rohard 
• Title: Can we predict crime beyond central urban areas? Models and theories of geo-criminality in question

Discussant: Mark Birkin

3545 Symposium on Human Dynamics Research: Urban Analytics (II)

Thursday, 3/31/2016, from 3:20 PM - 5:00 PM in Union Square 18, Hilton Hotel, 4th Floor

Chair: Paul Longley

Talks:

• *Qing Lu - University of Waterloo
• Title: Potential and challenges of mobile technologies in the public sector: a case study of 311 requests in Edmonton, Canada
• *Juanjuan Zhao, Michael Bentlage and Alain Thierstein 
• Title: When knowledge-workers trade off workplace, residence and commute: inter-dependent choices in the metropolitan region of Munich
• *Martin Clarke
• Title: Big Data: Validating the veracity of spatially referenced consumer related data sets
• *Geoff Boeing and Paul Waddell
• Title: Understanding housing markets through Craiglist rental listings data
• *Heike Flämig, Christian Matt, Sören Christian Trümper and Jutta Wolff 
• Title: Mobility behavior of companies in urban areas: A triangulation approach using questionnaire-based surveys, repertory grid technique and GPS-based trip data

3645 Symposium on Human Dynamics Research: Urban Analytics (III) 

Thursday, 3/31/2016, from 5:20 PM - 7:00 PM in Union Square 18, Hilton Hotel, 4th Floor

Chair: Andrew Crooks

Talks:

• *Kostas Cheliotis
• Title: Agent-Based Models of Public Space Use
• *Kurtis  Garbutt, Claire Ellul and Taku Fujiyama
• Title: Developing a geo-spatial agent-based model to support the strategic and operational understanding of relief distribution during flood emergencies in the UK
• *Robert Babin, Dawn Parker,  Andre Antanaitis,  Jeff Casello,  Pedram Fard,  Yu Huang, Xiongbing Jin, Markus Moos, Erica Ogden, Xinyue Pi, Veronica Sullivan,  Filiz Tamer, Jinny Tran and Kevin Yeung
• Title: Investigating Homebuyer Preferences Under Regional Intensification: a first-stage hedonic model for an integrated land-use transport model
• *Yunchao Qu and Xuesong Zhou
• Title: Optimizing agent-based household activity scheduling pattern using a dynamic space-time-state method

Discussant: Andrew Crooks 

Lessons from the Ebola Outbreak: Action Items for Emerging Infectious Disease Preparedness and Response

We recently co-authored a paper entitled "Lessons from the Ebola Outbreak: Action Items for Emerging Infectious Disease Preparedness and Response" in EcoHealth" with several other researchers from George Mason University. 

In the paper we discuss the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which was the longest, largest and most widespread of its type up to now. Now as it wanes, we argue in the paper that it is time for the international scientific community to  reflect on how to improve the detection of and coordinated response to future epidemics. Our interdisciplinary team (17 authors! from a varity of Deparments and Colleges from Mason including Global and Community Health, Environmental Science and Policy, Biomedical Research, Systems Biology, Computational Social Science, Geography and GeoInformation Science, Communication and Mathematical Sciences) identified key lessons learned from the Ebola outbreak that can be clustered into three areas: 1) environmental conditions related to early warning systems, 2) host characteristics related to public health, and 3) agent issues that can be addressed through the laboratory sciences". Below is the abstract for the paper:

As the Ebola outbreak in West Africa wanes, it is time for the international scientific community to  reflect on how to improve the detection of and coordinated response to future epidemics. Our interdisciplinary team identified key lessons learned from the Ebola outbreak that can be clustered into three areas: environmental conditions related to early warning systems, host characteristics related to public health, and agent issues that can be addressed through the laboratory sciences. In particular, we need to increase zoonotic surveillance activities, implement more effective ecological health interventions, expand prediction modeling,  support medical and public health systems in order to improve local and international responses to epidemics,  improve risk communication, better understand the role of social media in outbreak awareness and response, produce better diagnostic tools, create better therapeutic medications, and design better vaccines. This list  highlights research priorities and policy actions the global community can take now to be better prepared for  future emerging infectious disease outbreaks that threaten global public health and security.

Keywords: Ebola infection, emerging infectious diseases, epidemics, surveillance, one health, public health.

Full reference:

Jacobsen, K.H., Aguirre, A.A., Bailey, C.L., Baranova, A.V., Crooks, A.T., Croitoru, A., Delamater, P.L., Gupta, J., Kehn-Hall, K., Narayanan, A., Pierobon, M., Rowan K.E., Schwebach, J.R., Seshaiyer, P., Sklarew, D.M., Stefanidis, A. and Agouris, P. (2016), Lessons from the Ebola Outbreak: Action Items for Emerging Infectious Disease Preparedness and Response, EcoHealth, 13(1): 200-212 DOI: 10.1007/s10393-016-1100-5 (pdf)