Space Apps Challenge 2018

ViralSAT | Looking GLOBE-ally

Awards & Nominations

ViralSAT has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

The Challenge | Looking GLOBE-ally

Analyze and/or display data to communicate interesting findings or improve public understanding of our home planet.

ViralSAT

ViralSAT combines satellite images with crowd sourced images of disaster events to provide better information for critical decision making

ViralSAT

Project Description

In the event of a disaster, be it flooding, forest fire, earthquake or terrorism, satellite imagery is used by relief agencies to develop disaster management plans.

Although satellite images can provide data with regards to disasters, they often lack context. For example, a satellite image can show flooding, but it lacks some important information such as depth of water and damage to surrounding infrastructure. In the event of a volcanic eruption, the ash cloud blocks the view of the ground below.

ViralSAT has developed a platform that uses the combination of social media and satellite images to provide a better story of a disaster to relief organizers that will help them make better decisions.

We believe that the additional information that ViralSAT can provide will

  • Save lives through better initial response plans
  • Provide faster information analysis thus providing faster response time
  • Allow for quicker infrastructure damage reports and economic damage estimates

Furthermore, the images provided by ViralSAT can be used as training and reference data for remote sensing algorithms.

Current Status of Technology: ViralSAT has completed a proof of concept of the technology by altering publicly licensed opensource code to facilitate searching for real-time pictures of disasters. We have also developed some front end code for the portal, however the front end and back end have yet to be integrated.

Next Steps: There are several direction that we want to pursue in the development of the ViralSAT technology:

  • We want to develop Artificial Intelligence (AI) functionality to automate event detection.
  • We will develop a plug-in that can be used by imagery portals (ESA, NASA)
  • We will continue to scrape data from additional social media outlets

Resources Used








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