Effectively Crowdsourcing the Acquisition and Analysis of Visual Data for Disaster Response
Dr. Seonho Kim (Research Scientist and Associate Director in the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC, NSF Engineering Research center))
- Date: 25 Mar. 2016, 11:00~
- Place: Engineering building 416
Abstract
Efficient and thorough data collection and its timely analysis are critical for disaster response and recovery in order to save people’s lives during disasters. However, access to comprehensive data in disaster areas and their quick analysis to transform the data into actionable knowledge are challenging. With the popularity and pervasiveness of mobile devices, crowdsourcing data collection and analysis has emerged as an effective and scalable solution. This talk addresses the problem of crowdsourcing mobile videos for disasters by identifying two unique challenges of 1) prioritizing visual data collection and transmission under bandwidth scarcity caused by damaged communication networks and 2) analyzing the acquired data in a timely manner. We introduce a new crowdsourcing framework for acquiring and analyzing the mobile videos utilizing fine granularity spatial metadata of videos for a rapidly changing disaster situation. We also develop an analytical model to quantify the visual awareness of a video based on its metadata and propose the visual awareness maximization problem for acquiring the most relevant data under bandwidth constraints. The acquired visual data are effectively distributed to off-site analysts to collectively minimize crowdsourcing efforts for analysis.
Speaker bio:
Dr. Seon Ho Kim is a Research Scientist and Associate Director in the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC, NSF Engineering Research center) at the University of Southern California. Before joining IMSC, he worked at the University of Denver and the University of the District of Columbia as a faculty member for eleven years. Dr. Kim is currently the President of KSEA (Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association) Southern California Chapter and also the President-elect of KOCSEA (Korean Computer Scientists and Engineers Association in America). He received his BS degree in Electronic Engineering from the Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea in 1986. He also received his MS in Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, in 1994 and 1999, respectively.
Dr. Kim’s primary research interests include multimedia systems, databases, GIS, and mobile video data management, where he has more than 70 publications including a textbook, major journal papers, and top conference papers. He has been serving the research community as conference program committee member, journal editorial board member and reviewer.