Demonstrating PlanetSense: gathering geo-spatial intelligence from crowd-sourced and social-media data

Crowd-sourced and volunteered information, social media, and participatory sensors are capable of providing real-time activity data. Monitoring these sources in time of relevance and then using them to gather operational knowledge is important during crisis management. Beyond that, it's important to curate this information for geo-spatial research purposes, including land use classification and population occupancy analysis. In this demonstration, we will showcase PlanetSense - a geo-spatial research platform built to harness the existing power of archived data and add to that, the dynamics of heterogeneous real-time streaming data from social media and volunteered sources, seamlessly integrated with sophisticated machine learning algorithms and visualization tools. A demonstration will focus on - 1) Recent initiative emphasizing the need to harness crowd-sources, volunteered, and social media data at scale; 2) Anatomy and insight into data collection workflow. We will show the ability to harvest and process several terabytes of raw data in real-time; 3) A detailed discussion with insight into more than 20 sources of data will be given. These sources include text, sensors, as well as imagery data; 4) PlanetSense's end to end distributed architecture will be discussed with focus on collecting and processing high-volumes of streaming data in a Geo-Data Cloud. Data fusion methods and algorithms for integrating disparate data sources with existing legacy products. Data analytics and machine learning methods for generating operational intelligence on the fly; 5) In addition, PlanetSense "App" platform will be shown with hands-on application enabling interested audience to quickly develop and deploy solutions. 6) Several case studies will be discussed relevant to, land use classification, monitoring transient population, high-resolution occupancy analysis, mapping special events population, ability to uncover global breaking events and reactions in near-real time, ability to track protest, unrest, and monitor other societal turbulences as they happen, and real-time monitoring of infrastructure outages.