Posted on 10/04/2017 3:24:05 PM PDT by Jagermonster
NEW THINKING NEW THINKING Want to help Puerto Rico recover? Amateur analysts of satellite imagery around the world are pointing relief workers to where they are needed most. Anyone can do it!
PARIS—As President Trump paid his visit to hurricane-wracked Puerto Rico on Tuesday a small army of individuals, sitting at their desks far from the spotlight and scattered around the globe, were doing their anonymous bit to put the ravaged island back together again.
They are a new breed of “digital humanitarians.” Crowdsourcing the raw data of hurricane Maria’s trail of destruction, they are helping artificial intelligence experts create maps that will point relief workers to where they are needed most. The project enables individuals who may not have a lot of time or money to make a meaningful contribution to rescue and relief efforts from practically anywhere in the world.
“This is authentic,” says Brooke Simmons of Zooniverse, the citizen-science web platform that has rallied the volunteers to pore over their computers and classify satellite images of storm damage by their severity. “They are really contributing to something that does make a difference.”
This is how it works: Zooniverse takes satellite images of Puerto Rico and posts tens of thousands of “before” and “after” shots of the island on its website. (They have done the same thing for other Caribbean islands hit by hurricanes Irma and Maria, using satellite imagery made freely available for humanitarian use by satellite companies.)
Volunteers – about 10,000 of them have been working on Caribbean imagery since Irma struck the region in early September – then study those images and note features in the “after” shots, such as flooding, blocked roads, damaged buildings, or temporary structures indicating homeless people, that were not there in the “before” photos.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
I LOVE this - individual humanitarian initiative! Just because you can't get the volunteers to Puerto Rico doesn't mean the volunteers can't help!
It’s so unfortunate that trumps Whitehouse didn’t think of this.
Just in case anybody thinks I’m serious /s
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