Tag: humanitarian

  • Happy Birthday MapSwipe!

    Already one year ago that MapSwipe was officially launched! A big thank you to our contributors for your support – one year of tapping, swiping and putting families on the map! In just one year thousands of users contributed more than 10 million taps and thereby provided crucial information on unmapped places. In projects like…

  • MapSwipe Analytics: Map each Swipe and Tap

    Since the launch of the MapSwipe Analytics webpage three month ago we were able to improve our service and offer more detailed information on each project in MapSwipe. MapSwipe is a mobile App for crowdsourcing geographic information needed by humanitarian organisations like Red Cross and Doctors without Borders (MSF) introduced earlier. In particular the data can be used for priorizing areas…

  • Towards evaluating the mobile crowdsourcing of geographic information about human settlements

    Geographic information crowdsourcing is an increasingly popular approach to derive geographic data about human settlements from remotely sensed imagery. However, crowdsourcing approaches are frequently associated with uncertainty about the quality of the information produced. Although previous studies have found acceptable quality of crowdsourced information in some application domains, there is still lack of research about…

  • DeepVGI: Deep Learning with Volunteered Geographic Information

    Deep learning techniques, esp. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), are now widely studied for predictive analytics with remote sensing images, which can be further applied in different domains for ground object detection, population mapping, etc. These methods usually train predicting models with the supervision of a large set of training examples. However, finding ground truths especially…

  • Keynote at GEOINFO 2016 Brazil

    This week Alexander Zipf was giving an invited keynote presentation at the 18th Geoinfo Conference in Campos do Jordão, São Paulo, Brazil. The GEOINFO conferences aim to bring together leading GIScience and spatial database researchers, to present to the local community a perspective of the state-of-the-art in the area. Past speakers have included Max Egenhofer,…

  • HOT Summit MapSwipe and Pybossa Video Online

    The presentations of this years HOT summit that was held in Brussels (September 22, 2016) were recorded and are now available in the Youtube channel of HOT, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. If you missed the summit and are interested in what we are doing, have a look at the video of the joint presentation of…

  • The Tasks of the Crowd: A Typology of Tasks in Geographic Information Crowdsourcing and a Case Study in Humanitarian Mapping

    In the past few years, volunteers have produced geographic information of different kinds, using a variety of different crowdsourcing platforms, within a broad range of contexts. However, there is still a lack of clarity about the specific types of tasks that volunteers can perform for deriving geographic information from remotely sensed imagery, and how the…

  • GIScience at CartONG GeOnG Conference 2016

    The last couple of days the pictuesque city of Chambery became a gathering place for humanitarian actors, researchers and organizations. CartONG organized their biannual GeOnG conference in their headquarter city. This years conference was at the same time the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the NGO. CartONG is a French non-governmental organization that fosters the…

  • Radio Interview on activities @ Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology

    recently Prof. Zipf gave an radio interview in German about some of the activities of the GIScience Research Group and the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technologies (HeiGIT); which is currently being established with core funding by the Klaus Tschira Stiftung Heidelberg. The short radio broadcast (mp3) covers e.g. work on improving and generating Geographic Information…

  • With one swipe and tap you put a family on the map

    We are happy to announce the launch of MapSwipe – an app that allows you to support humanitarian aid by simply using your mobile. In a disaster or humanitarian crisis, knowledge regarding the location of possibly affected and vulnerable people is crucial to provide effective support. MapSwipe allows you to map these locations using your…