Greetings and Happy Friday!

The answer for last week’s puzzle is the Olympic Stadium in London. This stadium seats 80,000 people and be the primary site for the 2012 Olympic games. The most recent publicly available satellite photo of the stadium was taken in 2010, hence the unfinished appearance. For fun, try logging into Google Earth and finding the Olympic Stadium in London. The timeline toolbar will let you see the land on which it was built from 1945 to 2010. You can watch the Stadium rise up right before your eyes!

Now, here is this week’s Where in the World challenge:

Hint 1: This image was taken in a country that was once part of the Roman Empire.

Hint 2: Humans have occupied this site as early as the third millenium BCE.

Happy Hunting!

The blasts happened near a military intelligence building during morning rush hour. State TV showed burnt cars and two deep craters in the road. The government and the opposition blamed each other for the attack – the deadliest in Damascus since the start of Syria’s uprising 14 months ago.

The attacks took place at 8am, local time, in the al-Qazzaz suburb south-east of Damascus. The target was a military compound, used by the government’s counter-terrorist agency and rumored to be the site of interrogations and torture.

During our recent First Look deployment, the Tomnod crowd examined DigitalGlobe’s imagery to identify military buildings in Damascus. We checked to see if the attacked building was identified:

Sure enough, our crowd tagged the 10-story, white building in the right of the image, as well as many other buildings nearby.
According to the BBC:

It is part of a broader military compound of the Palestine Branch, one of the most feared among the more than 20 secret police organisations in the country, correspondents say.

Stay tuned for new imagery as DigitalGlobe’s First Look service delivers satellite scenes of breaking news stories from around the world.

As the conflict in Syria intensifies, we can only hope that those committing these acts of violence realize that the eyes of the world are watching.

Crowdsourcing, microtasking, citizen science. If you have been following tech developments in the last few years, you have probably encountered all of these new terms and then some. What does it all mean? All of these terms refer to the rise of online volunteering. People around the world are working to solve scientific puzzles and help others in need. It is rewarding work, yet online volunteering has not yet made it to the mainstream. Why sign up? Well, here are five good reasons why you should look for a project to join today:
 

See the World (and Beyond!)

I have a bucket list of adventures I would love to go on. Every year, it just seems to get longer: monitor baby macaws in Peru, excavate a Roman ruin, see Earth from space. However, there is no way that I could possibly afford to do everything on that list. Chances are, you probably can’t quite drop everything to go off on your adventure, either.
 
This is where the beauty of online volunteerism comes in. You can go wherever you want, whenever you want. I was able to search Mongolia for Bronze Age tombs on our own Expedition Mongolia platform, all without leaving home. It’s not quite the same as having your picture taken in the Gobi Desert, but online volunteering can transport you to new places virtually. Volunteers have helped disaster victims around the globe with the Ushahidi platform, transcribed Egyptian papyri and even explored the surface of the Moon. Thanks to crowdsourcing technology, our whole universe is becoming more accessible for the armchair explorer. Your next adventure may be much closer home than you think!
 
Commit as Much or Little Time as You Want

In today’s world, free time is something hard to come by. Work, school and family often leave little time left to explore our interests. Traditional volunteering often requires a commitment ranging from several hours to months. In the case of online volunteering however, any time that you commit can go a long way. You can spend as little as twenty minutes on an individual project, or up to several months. The choice is yours! Either way, your contributions will be valuable.
 

Be your own Renaissance Man (or Woman)

Quick! What is anorthosite? What kinds of burial mounds can you find in Mongolia? Why is the shape of a protein important?
 
A decade ago, you would have had to take courses in geology, astronomy, archaeology and biochemistry just to answer those questions. Today, online volunteerism serves as an important educational tool in the sciences. Moon Zoo and Foldit (among others) provide excellent introductory materials on astronomy and biochemistry. Not only can they help you understand the projects, but they can foster an interest in science as well. I for one stuck to the humanities in college. However, thanks to getting involved in online volunteerism, I have folded proteins, identified Moon craters and done other activities that would have been strictly in the domain of STEM specialists in the past. No matter where you are in life, you too can learn and get involved in the scientific process.
 
Contribute directly to Research

No matter what online projects you choose to do, you can guarantee that your time will be well spent. Many such initiatives are connected to academic institutions that are actively working to use the data that you provide to tackle big questions in science. Foldit players for instance managed to solve a problem in AIDS research that biochemists struggled with for years. Most of the players had no biochemistry experience past high school, but their puzzle-solving abilities helped make a major breakthrough. As of this writing, user work from the Galaxy Zoo platform has managed to produce thirty published academic papers. The next time you want to indulge in procrastination, you might want to consider moving to an online citizen science project. You could be at the forefront of the next major discovery.
 
Save a Life

I know what you are thinking. How can you save a life online? Does it involve donating money to charity? Or help solve a scientific problem in medical research? Yes, all of these things can help. However, there is yet another way to make a difference that has only come about in the last few years. Satellite imagery and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) have been used to involve the public in disaster management.
 
During the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, some victims trapped under rubble used their mobile phones to make calls for help. Ushahidi volunteers in Boston intercepted the phone’s GPS signals and transmitted their coordinates to on-the-ground rescue teams. They also coordinated efforts to identify the addresses of buildings where victims were trapped. Similarly, after the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch New Zealand, Tomnod’s platform was used to identify building damage to aid in the recovery efforts. This combination of traditional humanitarian aid and online response helped speed up the rescue effort and recovery efforts. Not only that, it saved lives as well.
 
So, what are you waiting for? Get involved and volunteer online today!
 

Report Highlights:

• 1,500km² imaged around the Syrian capital Damascus
• Persistent imagery surveillance over a 1-month period
• 59 volunteers identified signs of military and protestor activity
• 2,400 tagged points of insight
• CrowdRankTM consensus locations disseminated via a real-time private Twitter feed

Overview
Syrian civilians came in to violent conflict with the Assad regime in late 2011 / early 2012 in the cities of Homs, Hamah and Latakia. In March 2012, the protests spread to the Syrian capital, Damascus. With an entire country in turmoil, the huge area to examine and regular imagery updates exceeded the capabilities of DigitalGlobe’s in-house analysis center. Tomnod’s Global InSight crowdsourcing platform was deployed to enlist volunteer assistance in monitoring the unfolding crisis. The result was First Insight – a combination of Tomnod’s crowd insight with DigitalGlobe’s First Look fast-delivery, subscription imagery service.

First Insight: Damascus
First Insight: Damascus went live on March 1, 2012, running in a web browser. Given the sensitivity of the Syrian crisis, First Insight: Damascus employed a “community sourcing” approach with a password-protected site sent to invite-only groups. The example below shows the user interface where a volunteer in the community tagged a landmark, a crowd and a possible military building.

Figure 1 — Screenshot of the FirstInsight: Damascus user interface for tagging satellite imagery. In this example, a volunteer in the community tagged a landmark, a crowd and a possible military building.

Crowdsourcing Imagery Insight
The imagery in First Insight was updated immediately after new DigitalGlobe collects. New imagery was added 3 times throughout the month of March and displayed on First Insight within 24 hours of arriving on DigitalGlobe servers. A trusted community of 59 volunteers visited the First Insight website where they viewed small segments of the most current Damascus imagery (~1km2 per view, Figure 1). Imagery segments were presented to volunteers based on areas of interest prioritized by DigitalGlobe analysts to emphasize downtown Damascus and the airfield (Figure 2(a)). In total, multiple independent volunteers viewed 1,829 segments, densely covering the priority areas (Figure 2(b)). Volunteers were asked to examine each segment and identify 4 features of interest by dropping pins or “tags” on the image. The 4 features of interest were:

• Military buildings
• Military vehicles
• Crowds
• Landmark

The First Insight website included examples and instructions for how to identify each of these 4 feature types.

Figure 2(a) — Priority locations in the 1,500km² of regularly updated satellite imagery are input by First Insight administrators.

Figure 2(b) — Imagery segments from priority regions are viewed by multiple, independent volunteers in the crowd. Each yellow box corresponds to a single view by a crowd volunteer.

Figure 2(c) — Volunteers tag locations of interest, including possible military buildings (yellow) and vehicles (green), crowd or protestors (red) and landmarks (blue).

CrowdRank Consensus
First Insight volunteers identified 2,400 tags, with the following breakdown across the 4 features of interest:

•    773 Military Buildings
• 1,169 Military Vehicles
•      52 Groups of People
•    446 Landmarks

Figure 2(c) illustrates locations tagged by independent members of the community. To quantify consensus between multiple volunteers, Tomnod’s CrowdRank algorithm consumes all the tagged locations and computes the points with maximum agreement. CrowdRank iteratively estimates consensus between tags, as well as the reliability of each individual, resulting in probabilistic estimates that rank the most salient locations in the image. CrowdRank estimates update every hour and, whenever the consensus exceeds a confidence threshold, a confirmed location is disseminated to First Insight’s administrators and analysts.

See the gallery below for examples of top image locations identified by CrowdRank’s consensus.

Real-Time Reporting
As CrowdRank identifies consensus locations, image “chips” (small highlights) are extracted and disseminated via a real-time, protected Twitter feed @crowdrank_out (Figure 3). Authorized administrators were given access to this stream of intelligence tips, providing rapid, reliable updates about areas of interest in Damascus.

Figure 3 — Real-time dissemination of CrowdRank insight via a protected Twitter feed.
Move your mouse over the image to see an example Tweet.

Figure 3(b) — Individual tweet highlighting the image and location of a group of people identified by CrowdRank.

Conclusions
Modern imaging sensors collect vast amounts of data every day, capturing high-resolution detail of every inch of the planet. DigitalGlobe’s FirstLook offers real-time imagery of the most interesting events and objects across the world. However, with such huge amounts of information available, imagery analysts face the challenge of how to examine every pixel.

In response to the humanitarian crisis in Syria, Tomnod and DigitalGlobe partnered to launch First Insight – a crowdsourcing platform that engaged communities of trusted volunteers to transform pixels into points of interest. Tomnod’s CrowdRank algorithm extracted consensus from thousands of human inputs. The result was a stream of intelligence tips about hotspots in Damascus, delivered in real-time to administrators and analysts via web browsers and mobile devices.

[UPDATE May 7, 2012] DigitalGlobe rejects acquisition offer and refers to it as ‘hostile’.
 
This morning has been met by a flurry of activity concerning the commercial space sector. GeoEye has reached out publicly to DigitalGlobe with an acquisition offer of $792m of part stock and part cash. The combined company would be the biggest space imaging company in the world with the largest number of assets in space.
 
For both GeoEye and DigitalGlobe, the majority of revenue comes from the EnhancedView contract from the US government’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Unlike space imaging assets managed by the National Reconnaissance Office, the EnhancedView contract allows the US Government to more easily share geographic intelligence with its international allies.
 

Faced with reduced defense budgets, this contract, which has been a pillar in the commercial space imagery market has come under fire. “This proposal represents the most prudent course of action for both GeoEye and DigitalGlobe, given the continuing uncertainty in the market created by the U.S. government’s budget review process for 2013 and beyond,” GeoEye CEO Matt O’Connell.
 

At Tomnod we have been working with the commercial space imaging sector for our GlobalInsight crowdsourced image annotation platform. Our work with GeoEye during the Valley of the Khans expedition and our recent work in Somalia and Syria with DigitalGlobe leaves us bullish about the capabilities of both of these companies.
 

Still some questions remain:
* At the time of the acquisition offer, the market cap of DigitalGlobe was ~$607M vs. GeoEye’s ~$535M. Is it possible that GeoEye, the smaller player, made this public offer in order to establish a superior position over DigitalGlobe? Was this a result of broken down talks between the two companies behind closed doors?
[update] According to the investor call, DigitalGlobe and GeoEye had been talking for the last few months in private and DigitalGlobe has already rejected this exact offer. GeoEye’s response was to make it public. Interesting strategy.
[UPDATE May 7, 2012] Looks like we were right about this one. DigitalGlobe rejects acquisition offer and refers to it as ‘hostile’ whereas GeoEye referred to it as ‘friendly’.
 

* How will the EnhancedView contract be shaped for the combined company?
 

* As of 10AM EST May 4, 2012, Reuters reported that DigitalGlobe has already turned down the offer. That seems like a fast turnaround if Reuter’s reporting is true.
[update] Turns out the DigitalGlobe board is reviewing the offer according to Reuters.
 

* How does this move affect Skybox Imaging who recently closed a series C venture financing of $70m to deploy their own commercial space assets. Also, how does this affect the entire commercial space industry?
 

Here is another good article with good commentary.
 

What do you think? Leave a comment below.
 

Here is this week’s Where in the World Challenge:

Hint 1: Construction began on this building in 2007. You can even see it being built on Google Earth!

Hint 2: It is the third structure of its kind to be built in its home city.

But having data about every place in America is also great material for a pretty challenging trivia quiz…
See if you can “state” the correct answers to these teasers — and no Wikipedia!!

1. What is the most popular county name in all US states?
answer

2. What is the most popular county name that is NOT named for a US President?
answer

3. Which state has most counties?
answer

4. Which state has fewest counties?
answer

5. Which state has the most disjoint land regions (islands, etc.), distinct from it’s main land-mass?
answer

6. What state claims the location of the “center” of the USA?
answer

7. What state is the location of the “center” of the contiguous USA?
answer

8. What state is 3rd largest, by area?
answer

9. What state has the 2nd longest perimeter?
answer

10. Which is the least populated state?
answer

The title of my talk was “From Adventure to Venture”. I described our crowdsourcing innovations for our expedition in Mongolia to search for the Tomb of Genghis Khan and how Tomnod is now bringing collaborative geospatial analysis to the marketplace.

The 50 MBA students in attendance were razor sharp and primed to attack the business world. A fantastic audience. But how do you convey business concepts to a group of students that have way more formal training than you? From interacting with the students, I came up with a few key points I have learned about startups that they might not teach you in business school:

• To your friends and that person you meet at the bar you want to be a startup. But when dealing with other companies, you are a business.
• Bring a gun to a knife fight. You need to do everything in your power to make your business and product succeed. If you are not aggressive, someone else will be. This might mean using guerilla marketing at the local conference, testing your new UI at the mall, doing due diligence on the people you are will be meeting with, or leveraging the best technologies to drive your costs down and your productivity up.
• The people you work with are more important than what you are working on. This goes for people within your company and with the people on the other side of the table.
• Companies don’t do business with companies. People do business with people. Don’t forget that.
• Don’t be too proud to do anything. Some of my most rewarding days are when I am getting coffee to keep the technical team hacking.
• Get after it! There is no time like the present. Conditions will never be as perfect as they are today (this statement is always valid).

The location of last week’s image was the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Every manned spaceflight from the United States has originated from Kennedy since 1968. One little known fact you may not have known about Kennedy Space Center is that the surround area is an important wildlife sanctuary.

Now, here is this week’s challenge:

Hint 1: The man-made structures that you can see in this image are over 2000 years old.

Hint 2: The photo was not taken in Egypt.

Good luck!

The Daily Crowdsource is the predominant source of crowdsourcing news and industry reports. They have been cited as an authority by Forbes magazine. Their CrowdLeader program invites the top thinkers in the field to share their thoughts in this rapidly changing industry.

We look forward to this collaboration and cannot wait to see what is awaiting us on the horizon!