Scientific Visualization

Humanitarian aid workers help fight cholera in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photo: OCHA/J-L. Mbalivoto

unmultimedia.org - 22 December 2017

Access to data is crucial for humanitarians responding to various crises worldwide.

For example, aid workers feeding hungry people in Nigeria use a mobile-based platform to monitor the price of rice and other staples to know when costs increase.

To better assist these professionals, the UN has opened a global humanitarian data centre in the Netherlands that aims to improve lives by connecting people and data.

Veronique Durroux spoke to Javier Terán Castro, a statistician with the UN humanitarian affairs office, OCHA, who explained how it functions.

http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/2017/12/un-centre-aims-to-connect-people-and-humanitarian-data-to-improve-lives/#.Wj0Cma3MzFR

The Centre for Humanitarian Data - https://centre.humdata.org

HDX - https://data.humdata.org

Guessing the location of a randomly chosen Street View image is hard, even for well-traveled humans. But Google’s latest artificial-intelligence machine manages it with relative ease.

CLICK HERE - PlaNet - Photo Geolocation with Convolutional Neural Networks

CLICK HERE - GeoGuessr

technologyreview.com - by Emerging Technology from the arXiv - February 24, 2016

Here’s a tricky task. Pick a photograph from the Web at random. Now try to work out where it was taken using only the image itself. . . .

. . . Tobias Weyand, a computer vision specialist at Google, and a couple of pals . . . have trained a deep-learning machine to work out the location of almost any photo using only the pixels it contains.

Their new machine significantly outperforms humans and can even use a clever trick to determine the location of indoor images and pictures of specific things such as pets, food, and so on that have no location cues.

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submitted by Sarah Slaughter         

At The Epidemic’s Epicenter: A Liberian child sits in an Ebola isolation ward housing people who might have contracted the contagious disease.  Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Did real-time epidemic modeling save lives in West Africa?

spectrum.ieee.org - by David Brown - May 28, 2015

. . . “agent-based” models will give a more nuanced picture of how pathogens affect and sicken a population. “This is the wave of the future,” says Stephen Eubank, deputy director of the Virginia Tech lab. “It’s going to take a concerted effort to gather the data and the expertise. But it’s going to happen.”

And so, too, will another Ebola outbreak.

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un.org - February 26, 2015

Delegates in the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a consensus resolution last week, by which they addressed global geospatial information management. The document entitled “A global geodetic reference frame for sustainable development” (A/RES/69/266) urges States to voluntarily implement open sharing of geodetic data, standards and conventions, inviting them to improve national geodetic infrastructure and engage in multilateral cooperation that addressed infrastructure gaps and duplications, towards the development of a more sustainable geodetic reference frame.

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