Crowdsourcing Situational Awareness (Crowd- SA)

The basic need in a crisis situation, whether it is a natural or unnatural disaster, political or social unrest, or some combination, is relevant, timely and accurate information, filtered to present the most pertinent data to the decision makers. Commanders have unique information requirements due to short timelines and unknown background data on their assigned Area of Operations. Crowdsourcing data, properly filtered and managed, provides an instant"quicklook"into the human terrain, atmospherics, and current events. This also assists the Intelligence Operational planners to direct their assets to confirm or deny conclusions drawn from the crowdsourcing data. Our solution, implemented as a monitoring system to world events, could act as a"first alert"capability that would indicate an upcoming problem or crisis well in advance of the typical news and intelligence channels. Modus Operandi proposes to develop a crowdsourcing system to analyze and fuse data from witnesses and participants to find relevant information in times of disaster or emerging crisis. The final system will accept input from the crowd, extract events and entities in the context of natural language, normalize the information, and fuse it with data from other sources using cloud-based distributed processing.