The Advent of Geospatial Crowdsourcing

It is mid-morning in New Guinea during this early July visually reviewing the vast amounts of imagery coming from day. The year is 1937. Amelia Earhart and her navigator DigitalGlobe. Barrington coincidently was working on his PhD Fred Noonan are departing from the city of Lae for the next research using crowdsourcing to analyze massive photo and leg of their journey around the world. As they are in transit music data sets. This crowdsourcing research inspired what is over the central Pacific Ocean they make their last radio now Tomnod. The team shared the DigitalGlobe imagery on a communication. It is reported that the plane never arrived at National Geographic web interface and the first crowdsourcing their destination on Howland Island. For the next few weeks campaign began, tasking people from around the globe to help the U.S. Navy conducted a sea and air search over 250,000 guide the explorers in their search for the tomb of Genghis square miles. As the disappearance has remained a mystery Khan. for years, no remnants of the plane, Ms. Earhart, or Mr. In deciding on a new name for their start-up company Noonan were ever found in the mid-Pacific Ocean region. Fast specializing in geospatial crowdsourcing, Lin, Barrington, forward almost 77 years later to March 2014 and Malaysia Har-Noy and Ricklin chose “Tomnod”, a Mongolian phrase Airlines Flight 370 disappears during flight. With social media meaning “Big Eye”. Tomnod’s vision is to use the “big eyes” of and satellite technology, many people from around the world everyone on the planet to analyze imagery. In 2013 Tomnod (even the author of this column) felt a connection to help and was acquired by DigitalGlobe. Now the Tomnod platform use Tomnod from DigitalGlobe to assist in the search to bring deploys at least one to two campaigns a week (540 to date) closure to the families of the passengers. Several countries on their website (www.tomnod.com) and uses their Facebook tasked their satellites and naval resources in the search. To page (facebook.com/tomnod) and Twitter account (@tomnod) this date no location has been identified in the search of the to engage people to volunteer in a variety of campaigns that plane or its passengers. include identifying damage after natural disasters, detecting There was hope in the two months after the tragic important and changing infrastructure across the globe and disappearance of Flight 370 that the latest in social media searching for missing planes, ships and people. concepts and remote sensing technology could lead us to an “You may think that people who volunteer only have an answer. “We have reached a point in time where we can task interest in looking at imagery but the audience that joins satellites and analyze imagery within minutes to hours after Tomnod Campaigns are genuinely interested in the topic at an event occurs on the planet”, stated Luke Barrington (Senior hand and have a desire to contribute to solving the issue,” Manager, DigitalGlobe’s crowdsourcing platform, Tomnod). stated Barrington. Barrington goes on to explain that for Barrington stated that even though Malaysia Airlines Flight decades we have had computers crunching numbers to solve 370 was not found with the Tomnod search, the eight million geospatial problems and now we are realizing we need human people who tagged more than 15 million satellite image clues interaction to make visual conclusions for some of these from over one million square kilometers helped to rule out tougher to solve queries. Through the use of interpretative possible locations where the plane could have crashed. insight, only humans can draw on past knowledge to finalize Tomnod was founded out of a yearning for exploration and the analysis. This visual insight is the technique needed to a curiosity to search for the 800 year old tomb of the Mongol make geospatial crowdsourcing a success. Emperor, Genghis Khan. In a National Geographic Society By definition, crowdsourcing is the use of many people to (NGS) Exploration led by Dr. Albert Lin, a Research Scientist solve an issue. Commercial soft drink companies use passive at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), the Valley crowdsourcing as they perform random data mining on Twitter of the Khans Project helped to initiate the early development of hashtag names to analyze product trends. Tomnod uses the of crowdsourcing of satellite imagery. News about this NGS concept of active crowdsourcing. The active method provides Exploration reached the DigitalGlobe Foundation who offered for a controlled system as you are trying to solve a known to provide satellite imagery to assist in the search. Around this problem and you are targeting a specific crowd. That specific time Albert Lin had begun collaborating with fellow graduate crowd could be a group of people near natural or man-made students at UCSD, Luke Barrington, Shay Har-Noy and Nate disasters or people like me, geospatial imagery geeks who like Ricklin. The four colleagues quickly realized the magnitude of looking at satellite imagery and solving real world issues.

718 August 2014 PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING