Day: December 16, 2010

Towards Web-Scale Geo-Semantic Crowd Discovery

/ Matt Artz / 1 Comment

2010 Specialist Meeting—Spatio-Temporal Constraints on Social Networks, UCSB

James Caverlee

“There is a growing need to fundamentally advance research for enabling a new generation of applications for monitoring, analyzing, and distilling information from the prospective web of real-time content that reflects the current activity of the web’s participants. Highlydynamic real-time social systems like Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz have already published terabytes of real-time human “sensor” data in the form of status updates. Coupled with growing location-based social media services like Gowalla, Foursquare, and Google Latitude, we can see unprecedented access to the activities, actions, and trails of millions of people, with the promise of deeper and more insightful understanding of the emergent collective knowledge (“wisdom of the crowds”) embedded in these activities and actions. Toward the goal of web-scale social media mining and inference, our lab (http://infolab.tamu.edu) is pursuing a set of related research activities, two of which are briefly described here: (i) Identifying and tracking the evolution of semantic crowds; and (i) Social media location estimation.”

Read the paper [PDF]

Landslide Monitoring with Multi-Temporal Airborne LiDAR

/ Matt Artz

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010

Glenn, N. F.; Spaete, L.; Shrestha, R.; O’Leary, P.; Thackray, G.; Chadwick, D. J.

“Airborne LiDAR (light detection and ranging) data can be used for fine-scale landslide characterization. New advances in data analysis of multi-temporal LiDAR provide the ability to monitor changes in landslides over time. This research is focused on leveraging LiDAR data and a multi-temporal analysis for a small landslide in southern Idaho. The analysis demonstrates the ability to monitor both horizontal and vertical movement over time. Field based analyses were performed to validate the LiDAR results. With a careful error analysis, a volume estimate of mass movement over time is made. Visualization of the multi-temporal LiDAR point clouds is used to minimize error and identify dominant earth surface processes. The methods and results can be directly transferred to other landslides.”

Get Ready for Redistricting with Helpful Podcasts

/ Matt Artz

While state and local governments await the delivery of the 2010 U.S. Census results, the redistricting process is already taking shape. Hear what redistricting experts, Esri staff, and our partners have to say about the redistricting process, how it is evolving, and what’s new this time around.

Esri’s Redistricting Podcast Series provides insight on

  • New technologies available to legislators and citizens
  • Where to find the data resources you need
  • Challenges facing public officials
  • How citizen engagement is changing the process

Listen to the first two podcasts:

  • Redistricting: A Geographic Problem  Play Download [ZIP]
  • Data: Laying the Groundwork for Redistricting  Play Download [ZIP]