Jennings Anderson | University of Colorado, Boulder (original) (raw)
Papers by Jennings Anderson
Collected all tweets from a 12-day period from when Florence first formed until remnants left the... more Collected all tweets from a 12-day period from when Florence first formed until remnants left the U.S. Tweets were collected using Twitter API searching for keywords of wind and water threats that co-occurred in the same tweet. Search terms included the following: ((tornado OR #tornado OR \"funnel cloud\" OR funnelcloud) (\"flash flood\" OR flood OR flashflood OR \"storm surge\" OR stormsurge)). Tweets were classified into three categories: public user (e.g. seeking information and sharing personal experience), authoritative user (e.g. sharing information but not personal information), or other (e.g. private or deleted accounts and bots). Tweets were classified into three categories: public user, authoritative user, or other. After classification, Twitter was re queried via the API to collect contextual tweet streams (entire user history) for the 12-day period for public and authoritative users. As January 2021, the dataset contains 60,007 tweets from 1...
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Apr 27, 2022
Vaccine hesitancy has always been a public health concern, and anti-vaccine campaigns that prolif... more Vaccine hesitancy has always been a public health concern, and anti-vaccine campaigns that proliferate disinformation have gained traction across the US in the last 25 years. The demographics of resistance are varied, with health, religious, and, increasingly, political concerns cited as reasons. With the COVID-19 pandemic igniting the fastest development of vaccines to date, mis-and disinformation about them have become infammatory, with campaigning allegedly including racial targeting. Through a primarily qualitative investigation, this study inductively examines a large online vaccine discussion space that invokes references to the unethical Tuskegee Syphilis Study to understand how tactics of racial targeting of Black Americans might appear publicly. We fnd that such targeting is entangled with a genuine discussion about medical racism and vaccine hesitancy. Across 12 distinct voices that address race, medical racism, and vaccines, we discuss how mis-and disinformation sit alongside accurate information in a "polyvocal" space. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.
† The views expressed are purely those of the author and may not in any circumstances be regarded... more † The views expressed are purely those of the author and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission. This abstract was accepted to the Academic Track of the State of the Map 2021 Conference after peer-review. The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project has come a long way since its establishment in 2004, celebrating the uploading of its 100 millionth changeset on 25 February 2021 [1]. From a project led by a small group of mapping enthusiasts, OSM has grown into a comprehensive global geographic database produced by a global community of contributors, attracting attention from governments, NGOs, and recently, also global tech giants [2-4]. Along with this increasing interest from organizations, the academic community had also kindled an interest in OSM, with the first scientific paper in English focusing on OSM (i.e. having OpenStreetMap in its title) published as early as 2007, according to Google Scholar [5]. Since then, the study of OSM has grown into a distinct research stream and community, with 119 publications focusing on OSM in 2020 alone (again, per Google Scholar) [6]. Yet, OSM is a unique study object for the fields that frequently interact with it (mainly geo-information, computer science, geography and engineering [7]). It is not an abstract notion, distant from the researcher, but rather a constantly evolving multifaceted entity, defined not only by the data it contains but also by its users and the communities they form, in which researchers can take an active role. Accordingly, there is no one way to engage with OSM in research-one may use its data for other applications, study the quality of OSM data, the dynamics of data production or the behavior of contributors, and even produce tools and approaches for enriching the data and supporting data production [7]. Furthermore, OSM research may include direct and indirect interactions with the ever-growing OSM community, starting from engagement with data and ending with becoming an active member of the OSM Foundation and affiliated organizations, such as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). The Academic Track at the State of the Map conference is perhaps the most
Business Information Systems Workshops, 2020
Charge separation effects in the expansion of magnetized relativistic electron-ion plasmas into a... more Charge separation effects in the expansion of magnetized relativistic electron-ion plasmas into a vacuum are examined using 2-1/2-dimensional particle-in-cell plasma simulations. The electrostatic field at the plasma surface decelerates electrons and accelerates ions. A fraction of the surface electrons are trapped and accelerated by the pondermotive force of the propagating electromagnetic pulse, a mechanism we call the DRPA (diamagnetic relativistic pulse accelerator). This charge separation is enhanced as the initial plasma temperature is decreased. The overall energy gain of the plasma particles through the expansion strongly depends on the initial plasma temperature. Moreover, the electrons become relatively less energized and the ions more energized as the plasma temperature decreases.
Sarkar, D. & Anderson, J. (2021). Community interactions in OSM editing In: Minghini, M., Ludwing... more Sarkar, D. & Anderson, J. (2021). Community interactions in OSM editing In: Minghini, M., Ludwing, C., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Grinberger, A.Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2021 Online Conference, July 09-11 2021, 6-8. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2021
Veselovsky, V., Sarkar, D., Anderson, J. & Soden, R. (2021). An automated approach to identifying... more Veselovsky, V., Sarkar, D., Anderson, J. & Soden, R. (2021). An automated approach to identifying corporate editing activity in OSM In: Minghini, M., Ludwig, C., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Grinberger, A.Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2021 Online Conference, July 09-11 2021, 31-33. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2021
Grinberger, A.Y., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Ludwig, C. & Minghini, M. (2021). OpenStreetMap as a ... more Grinberger, A.Y., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Ludwig, C. & Minghini, M. (2021). OpenStreetMap as a multi-faceted research subject: the academic track at State of the Map 2021 In: Minghini, M., Ludwig, C., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Grinberger, A.Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2021 Online Conference, July 09-11 2021, 1-5. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2021
International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, 2016
Anderson, J. and Sarkar, D. (2020). Curious Cases of Corporations in OpenStreetMap In: Minghini, ... more Anderson, J. and Sarkar, D. (2020). Curious Cases of Corporations in OpenStreetMap In: Minghini, M., Coetzee, S., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P., Grinberger, A.Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2020 Online Conference, July 4-5 2020. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2020
Li, Y. & Anderson, J. (2021). Introducing OpenStreetMap user embeddings: Promising steps toward a... more Li, Y. & Anderson, J. (2021). Introducing OpenStreetMap user embeddings: Promising steps toward automated vandalism and community detection In: Minghini, M., Ludwig, C., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Grinberger, A.Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2021 Online Conference, July 09-11 2021, 23-26. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2021
Anderson et al. (2019). Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap: A Close Inv... more Anderson et al. (2019). Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap: A Close Investigation of the Impact to the Map & Community In: Minghini, M., Grinberger, A.Y., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2019, 17-18. Heidelberg, Germany, September 21-23, 2019. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2019 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3387693
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a volunteer-driven, globally distributed organization whose members work t... more OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a volunteer-driven, globally distributed organization whose members work to create a common digital map of the world. OSM embraces ideals of open data, and to that end innovates both socially and technically to develop practices and processes for coordinated operation. This paper provides a brief history of OSM and then, through quantitative and qualitative examination of the OSM database and other sites of articulation work, examines organizational growth through the lens of two catastrophes that spurred enormous humanitarian relief responses—the 2010 Haiti Earthquake and the 2013 Typhoon Yolanda. The temporally- and geographically- constrained events scope analysis for what is a rapidly maturing, whole-planet operation. The first disaster identified how OSM could support other organizations responding to the event. However, to achieve this, OSM has had to refine mechanisms of collaboration around map creation, which were tested again in Typhoon Yolanda. The ...
OpenStreetMap (OSM), the largest crowdsourced geographic database has garnered interest from corp... more OpenStreetMap (OSM), the largest crowdsourced geographic database has garnered interest from corporations over the last four years. Today, major corporations including Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have dedicated teams contributing to OSM. More than 2,300 OSM editors are associated with corporate data teams, up from approximately 1,000 in 2019 [1]. As of March 2020, nearly 17% of the global road network (measured per kilometer) was most recently edited by a corporate data-team member. Each corporation edits according to their own agenda; displaying unique patterns of edits with respect to types of features edited, mode (manual, import, or machine assisted), locations, and volume of edits. We investigate the unique editing patterns associated with three corporations: Grab, Digital Egypt, and Tesla, the latter two's editing activity has never previously been quantified. Differing from corporations with high volumes of global editing [1], these corporations operate in specific geographies and exhibit uniquely specific patterns. We use a combination of OSM data processing pipelines including tile-reduce, osm-qa-tiles, and osm-interaction tilesets [2] to extract and quantify the edits associated with the corporations. Grab is a Singapore-based company active in SouthEast Asia offering ride-hailing transport, food delivery, and payment services. Grab is actively editing OSM data since 2018 and has thus far edited 1.6M features. Grab's focus on transport related services implies that a navigable road network is a priority. However, topology and navigation restrictions are difficult to encode. Grab dedicates efforts to improve road navigability. In Singapore, Grab has edited over 100,000 turn restrictions, comprising 95% of all turn restrictions in Singapore (and 7% of all turn restrictions globally). This represents a highly focused effort put in by a corporation in a specific place to build infrastructure needed to support their business. Overall, Grab's efforts of improving data and building a community of editors in SouthEast Asia is beneficial for the OSM ecosystem. Digital Egypt (DE) aims to produce detailed GIS and Mapping data in Egypt, Middle East and Africa. Active in a part of the world with sparse geographic data coverage, Digital Egypt's team of 24 mappers is working to improve the accuracy of OSM for geocoding. As of March 2020, DE has edited more than 2M features in Egypt, more than 1.7M of these edits involve objects with address tags (e.g. addr:housenumber
When a hazard such as a hurricane threatens, people are forced to make a wide variety of decision... more When a hazard such as a hurricane threatens, people are forced to make a wide variety of decisions, and the information they receive and produce can influence their own and others’ actions. As social media grows more popular, an increasing number of people are using social media platforms to obtain and share information about approaching threats and discuss their interpretations of the threat and their protective decisions. This work aims to improve understanding of natural disasters through social media and provide an annotation scheme to identify themes in user’s social media behavior and facilitate efforts in supervised machine learning. To that end, this work has three contributions: (1) the creation of an annotation scheme to consistently identify hazard-related themes in Twitter, (2) an overview of agreement rates and difficulties in identifying annotation categories, and (3) a public release of both the dataset and guidelines developed from this scheme.
This honors thesis focuses on Cryptography, Data Compression, and the link between the two in mod... more This honors thesis focuses on Cryptography, Data Compression, and the link between the two in modern applications. Beginning with the notion that a link could exist due to the similar structure of the general methods, chapters individually explore the processes. An analysis of classical cryptography starts in the classical age and describes methods used until World War II. Shifting to modern computer implementations, the call for National standards introduced a new generation of consumer computer based cryptographic methods that needed to be strong enough for world-wide use. Switching focus to data compression, compression methods from the 1950s through current day are explored and demonstrated. Ultimately, the original question is answered by accepting that a link does exist, but not in the form of a combination it was originally thought to be. Rather, when used in series: compression then encryption, the compression adds to the overall security of the data and yields a smaller enc...
When Hurricane Sandy swept over the US eastern seaboard in October 2012, it was the most tweeted ... more When Hurricane Sandy swept over the US eastern seaboard in October 2012, it was the most tweeted about event at the time. However, some of the most affected areas were underrepresented in the social media conversation about Sandy. Here, we examine the hurricane-related experiences and behaviors shared on Twitter by residents of Far Rockaway, a New York City neighborhood that is geographically and socioeconomically vulnerable to disasters, which was significantly affected by the storm. By carefully filtering the vast Twitter data, we focus on 41 Far Rockaway residents who offer rich personal accounts of their experience with Sandy. Analyzing their first-person narratives, we see risk perception and protective decision-making behavior in their data. We also find themes of invisibility and neglect when residents expressed feeling abandoned by the media, the city government, and the overall relief efforts in the aftermath of Sandy.
Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management, 2021
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free and openly-editable database of geographic information. Over the ye... more OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free and openly-editable database of geographic information. Over the years, OSM has evolved into the world's largest open knowledge base of geospatial data, and protecting OSM from the risk of vandalized and falsified information has become paramount to ensuring its continued success. However, despite the increasing usage of OSM and a wide interest in vandalism detection on open knowledge bases such as Wikipedia and Wikidata, OSM has not attracted as much attention from the research community, partially due to a lack of publicly available vandalism corpus. In this paper, we report on the construction of the first OSM vandalism corpus, and release it publicly. We describe a user embedding approach to create OSM user embeddings and add embedding features to a machine learning model to improve vandalism detection in OSM. We validate the model against our vandalism corpus, and observe solid improvements in key metrics. The validated model is deployed into production for vandalism detection on Daylight Map. CCS CONCEPTS • Computing methodologies → Learning latent representations; Supervised learning.
Journal of Geographical Systems, 2020
OpenStreetMap (OSM), often thought of as a technological tool or platform, can be envisioned as a... more OpenStreetMap (OSM), often thought of as a technological tool or platform, can be envisioned as a community of communities and informed by a broad understanding of geographical systems. In this article, we explore the community of university students known as YouthMappers, who utilize OSM and related tools for humanitarian data creation, analysis and learning. Students approach OSM simultaneously as aspiring members of the workforce in a global digital economy and as emerging world citizens of a global society. Established in 2014, YouthMappers is a campus-based consortium of more than 200 chapters in approximately 50 countries that networks and supports engagement in humanitarian data with practitioners, government agencies, and other actors. Open geospatial data are contributed to authentic campaigns through OpenStreetMap and an ecosystem of open source and proprietary tools. A 2019 survey of YouthMappers and an analysis of YouthMappers data contributions allow us to explore the following questions: Who are using open geospatial tools, and in what context? Which open geospatial tools are being used and where? How proficient are they as users? How confident do they feel? How prepared does this make them for the future? How do these patterns vary across the global digital divide? Results show evidence of mapping both locally and globally. They also reveal a gendered confidence gap, and tool use patterns hint at a gendered division of geospatial labor in some global contexts. Internships are key to unlocking job opportunities, and are prevalent among YouthMappers members. Findings also reveal that with growing self-reported proficiency, a commitment to the ethic of being a good global citizen increases, underscoring the potential promise for open geospatial tools to support not only workforce capacity, but also meaningful connections to learning about geography, place, people, and the world.
Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2019
Scientific Reports, 2021
In the past 10 years, the collaborative maps of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have been used to support hum... more In the past 10 years, the collaborative maps of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have been used to support humanitarian efforts around the world as well as to fill important data gaps for implementing major development frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals. This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the evolution of humanitarian mapping within the OSM community, seeking to understand the spatial and temporal footprint of these large-scale mapping efforts. The spatio-temporal statistical analysis of OSM’s full history since 2008 showed that humanitarian mapping efforts added 60.5 million buildings and 4.5 million roads to the map. Overall, mapping in OSM was strongly biased towards regions with very high Human Development Index. However, humanitarian mapping efforts had a different footprint, predominantly focused on regions with medium and low human development. Despite these efforts, regions with low and medium human development only accounted for 28% of the buildings and ...
Collected all tweets from a 12-day period from when Florence first formed until remnants left the... more Collected all tweets from a 12-day period from when Florence first formed until remnants left the U.S. Tweets were collected using Twitter API searching for keywords of wind and water threats that co-occurred in the same tweet. Search terms included the following: ((tornado OR #tornado OR \"funnel cloud\" OR funnelcloud) (\"flash flood\" OR flood OR flashflood OR \"storm surge\" OR stormsurge)). Tweets were classified into three categories: public user (e.g. seeking information and sharing personal experience), authoritative user (e.g. sharing information but not personal information), or other (e.g. private or deleted accounts and bots). Tweets were classified into three categories: public user, authoritative user, or other. After classification, Twitter was re queried via the API to collect contextual tweet streams (entire user history) for the 12-day period for public and authoritative users. As January 2021, the dataset contains 60,007 tweets from 1...
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Apr 27, 2022
Vaccine hesitancy has always been a public health concern, and anti-vaccine campaigns that prolif... more Vaccine hesitancy has always been a public health concern, and anti-vaccine campaigns that proliferate disinformation have gained traction across the US in the last 25 years. The demographics of resistance are varied, with health, religious, and, increasingly, political concerns cited as reasons. With the COVID-19 pandemic igniting the fastest development of vaccines to date, mis-and disinformation about them have become infammatory, with campaigning allegedly including racial targeting. Through a primarily qualitative investigation, this study inductively examines a large online vaccine discussion space that invokes references to the unethical Tuskegee Syphilis Study to understand how tactics of racial targeting of Black Americans might appear publicly. We fnd that such targeting is entangled with a genuine discussion about medical racism and vaccine hesitancy. Across 12 distinct voices that address race, medical racism, and vaccines, we discuss how mis-and disinformation sit alongside accurate information in a "polyvocal" space. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.
† The views expressed are purely those of the author and may not in any circumstances be regarded... more † The views expressed are purely those of the author and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the European Commission. This abstract was accepted to the Academic Track of the State of the Map 2021 Conference after peer-review. The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project has come a long way since its establishment in 2004, celebrating the uploading of its 100 millionth changeset on 25 February 2021 [1]. From a project led by a small group of mapping enthusiasts, OSM has grown into a comprehensive global geographic database produced by a global community of contributors, attracting attention from governments, NGOs, and recently, also global tech giants [2-4]. Along with this increasing interest from organizations, the academic community had also kindled an interest in OSM, with the first scientific paper in English focusing on OSM (i.e. having OpenStreetMap in its title) published as early as 2007, according to Google Scholar [5]. Since then, the study of OSM has grown into a distinct research stream and community, with 119 publications focusing on OSM in 2020 alone (again, per Google Scholar) [6]. Yet, OSM is a unique study object for the fields that frequently interact with it (mainly geo-information, computer science, geography and engineering [7]). It is not an abstract notion, distant from the researcher, but rather a constantly evolving multifaceted entity, defined not only by the data it contains but also by its users and the communities they form, in which researchers can take an active role. Accordingly, there is no one way to engage with OSM in research-one may use its data for other applications, study the quality of OSM data, the dynamics of data production or the behavior of contributors, and even produce tools and approaches for enriching the data and supporting data production [7]. Furthermore, OSM research may include direct and indirect interactions with the ever-growing OSM community, starting from engagement with data and ending with becoming an active member of the OSM Foundation and affiliated organizations, such as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). The Academic Track at the State of the Map conference is perhaps the most
Business Information Systems Workshops, 2020
Charge separation effects in the expansion of magnetized relativistic electron-ion plasmas into a... more Charge separation effects in the expansion of magnetized relativistic electron-ion plasmas into a vacuum are examined using 2-1/2-dimensional particle-in-cell plasma simulations. The electrostatic field at the plasma surface decelerates electrons and accelerates ions. A fraction of the surface electrons are trapped and accelerated by the pondermotive force of the propagating electromagnetic pulse, a mechanism we call the DRPA (diamagnetic relativistic pulse accelerator). This charge separation is enhanced as the initial plasma temperature is decreased. The overall energy gain of the plasma particles through the expansion strongly depends on the initial plasma temperature. Moreover, the electrons become relatively less energized and the ions more energized as the plasma temperature decreases.
Sarkar, D. & Anderson, J. (2021). Community interactions in OSM editing In: Minghini, M., Ludwing... more Sarkar, D. & Anderson, J. (2021). Community interactions in OSM editing In: Minghini, M., Ludwing, C., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Grinberger, A.Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2021 Online Conference, July 09-11 2021, 6-8. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2021
Veselovsky, V., Sarkar, D., Anderson, J. & Soden, R. (2021). An automated approach to identifying... more Veselovsky, V., Sarkar, D., Anderson, J. & Soden, R. (2021). An automated approach to identifying corporate editing activity in OSM In: Minghini, M., Ludwig, C., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Grinberger, A.Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2021 Online Conference, July 09-11 2021, 31-33. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2021
Grinberger, A.Y., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Ludwig, C. & Minghini, M. (2021). OpenStreetMap as a ... more Grinberger, A.Y., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Ludwig, C. & Minghini, M. (2021). OpenStreetMap as a multi-faceted research subject: the academic track at State of the Map 2021 In: Minghini, M., Ludwig, C., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Grinberger, A.Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2021 Online Conference, July 09-11 2021, 1-5. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2021
International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, 2016
Anderson, J. and Sarkar, D. (2020). Curious Cases of Corporations in OpenStreetMap In: Minghini, ... more Anderson, J. and Sarkar, D. (2020). Curious Cases of Corporations in OpenStreetMap In: Minghini, M., Coetzee, S., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P., Grinberger, A.Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2020 Online Conference, July 4-5 2020. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2020
Li, Y. & Anderson, J. (2021). Introducing OpenStreetMap user embeddings: Promising steps toward a... more Li, Y. & Anderson, J. (2021). Introducing OpenStreetMap user embeddings: Promising steps toward automated vandalism and community detection In: Minghini, M., Ludwig, C., Anderson, J., Mooney, P., Grinberger, A.Y. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2021 Online Conference, July 09-11 2021, 23-26. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2021
Anderson et al. (2019). Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap: A Close Inv... more Anderson et al. (2019). Corporate Editors in the Evolving Landscape of OpenStreetMap: A Close Investigation of the Impact to the Map & Community In: Minghini, M., Grinberger, A.Y., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2019, 17-18. Heidelberg, Germany, September 21-23, 2019. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2019 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3387693
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a volunteer-driven, globally distributed organization whose members work t... more OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a volunteer-driven, globally distributed organization whose members work to create a common digital map of the world. OSM embraces ideals of open data, and to that end innovates both socially and technically to develop practices and processes for coordinated operation. This paper provides a brief history of OSM and then, through quantitative and qualitative examination of the OSM database and other sites of articulation work, examines organizational growth through the lens of two catastrophes that spurred enormous humanitarian relief responses—the 2010 Haiti Earthquake and the 2013 Typhoon Yolanda. The temporally- and geographically- constrained events scope analysis for what is a rapidly maturing, whole-planet operation. The first disaster identified how OSM could support other organizations responding to the event. However, to achieve this, OSM has had to refine mechanisms of collaboration around map creation, which were tested again in Typhoon Yolanda. The ...
OpenStreetMap (OSM), the largest crowdsourced geographic database has garnered interest from corp... more OpenStreetMap (OSM), the largest crowdsourced geographic database has garnered interest from corporations over the last four years. Today, major corporations including Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have dedicated teams contributing to OSM. More than 2,300 OSM editors are associated with corporate data teams, up from approximately 1,000 in 2019 [1]. As of March 2020, nearly 17% of the global road network (measured per kilometer) was most recently edited by a corporate data-team member. Each corporation edits according to their own agenda; displaying unique patterns of edits with respect to types of features edited, mode (manual, import, or machine assisted), locations, and volume of edits. We investigate the unique editing patterns associated with three corporations: Grab, Digital Egypt, and Tesla, the latter two's editing activity has never previously been quantified. Differing from corporations with high volumes of global editing [1], these corporations operate in specific geographies and exhibit uniquely specific patterns. We use a combination of OSM data processing pipelines including tile-reduce, osm-qa-tiles, and osm-interaction tilesets [2] to extract and quantify the edits associated with the corporations. Grab is a Singapore-based company active in SouthEast Asia offering ride-hailing transport, food delivery, and payment services. Grab is actively editing OSM data since 2018 and has thus far edited 1.6M features. Grab's focus on transport related services implies that a navigable road network is a priority. However, topology and navigation restrictions are difficult to encode. Grab dedicates efforts to improve road navigability. In Singapore, Grab has edited over 100,000 turn restrictions, comprising 95% of all turn restrictions in Singapore (and 7% of all turn restrictions globally). This represents a highly focused effort put in by a corporation in a specific place to build infrastructure needed to support their business. Overall, Grab's efforts of improving data and building a community of editors in SouthEast Asia is beneficial for the OSM ecosystem. Digital Egypt (DE) aims to produce detailed GIS and Mapping data in Egypt, Middle East and Africa. Active in a part of the world with sparse geographic data coverage, Digital Egypt's team of 24 mappers is working to improve the accuracy of OSM for geocoding. As of March 2020, DE has edited more than 2M features in Egypt, more than 1.7M of these edits involve objects with address tags (e.g. addr:housenumber
When a hazard such as a hurricane threatens, people are forced to make a wide variety of decision... more When a hazard such as a hurricane threatens, people are forced to make a wide variety of decisions, and the information they receive and produce can influence their own and others’ actions. As social media grows more popular, an increasing number of people are using social media platforms to obtain and share information about approaching threats and discuss their interpretations of the threat and their protective decisions. This work aims to improve understanding of natural disasters through social media and provide an annotation scheme to identify themes in user’s social media behavior and facilitate efforts in supervised machine learning. To that end, this work has three contributions: (1) the creation of an annotation scheme to consistently identify hazard-related themes in Twitter, (2) an overview of agreement rates and difficulties in identifying annotation categories, and (3) a public release of both the dataset and guidelines developed from this scheme.
This honors thesis focuses on Cryptography, Data Compression, and the link between the two in mod... more This honors thesis focuses on Cryptography, Data Compression, and the link between the two in modern applications. Beginning with the notion that a link could exist due to the similar structure of the general methods, chapters individually explore the processes. An analysis of classical cryptography starts in the classical age and describes methods used until World War II. Shifting to modern computer implementations, the call for National standards introduced a new generation of consumer computer based cryptographic methods that needed to be strong enough for world-wide use. Switching focus to data compression, compression methods from the 1950s through current day are explored and demonstrated. Ultimately, the original question is answered by accepting that a link does exist, but not in the form of a combination it was originally thought to be. Rather, when used in series: compression then encryption, the compression adds to the overall security of the data and yields a smaller enc...
When Hurricane Sandy swept over the US eastern seaboard in October 2012, it was the most tweeted ... more When Hurricane Sandy swept over the US eastern seaboard in October 2012, it was the most tweeted about event at the time. However, some of the most affected areas were underrepresented in the social media conversation about Sandy. Here, we examine the hurricane-related experiences and behaviors shared on Twitter by residents of Far Rockaway, a New York City neighborhood that is geographically and socioeconomically vulnerable to disasters, which was significantly affected by the storm. By carefully filtering the vast Twitter data, we focus on 41 Far Rockaway residents who offer rich personal accounts of their experience with Sandy. Analyzing their first-person narratives, we see risk perception and protective decision-making behavior in their data. We also find themes of invisibility and neglect when residents expressed feeling abandoned by the media, the city government, and the overall relief efforts in the aftermath of Sandy.
Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management, 2021
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free and openly-editable database of geographic information. Over the ye... more OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free and openly-editable database of geographic information. Over the years, OSM has evolved into the world's largest open knowledge base of geospatial data, and protecting OSM from the risk of vandalized and falsified information has become paramount to ensuring its continued success. However, despite the increasing usage of OSM and a wide interest in vandalism detection on open knowledge bases such as Wikipedia and Wikidata, OSM has not attracted as much attention from the research community, partially due to a lack of publicly available vandalism corpus. In this paper, we report on the construction of the first OSM vandalism corpus, and release it publicly. We describe a user embedding approach to create OSM user embeddings and add embedding features to a machine learning model to improve vandalism detection in OSM. We validate the model against our vandalism corpus, and observe solid improvements in key metrics. The validated model is deployed into production for vandalism detection on Daylight Map. CCS CONCEPTS • Computing methodologies → Learning latent representations; Supervised learning.
Journal of Geographical Systems, 2020
OpenStreetMap (OSM), often thought of as a technological tool or platform, can be envisioned as a... more OpenStreetMap (OSM), often thought of as a technological tool or platform, can be envisioned as a community of communities and informed by a broad understanding of geographical systems. In this article, we explore the community of university students known as YouthMappers, who utilize OSM and related tools for humanitarian data creation, analysis and learning. Students approach OSM simultaneously as aspiring members of the workforce in a global digital economy and as emerging world citizens of a global society. Established in 2014, YouthMappers is a campus-based consortium of more than 200 chapters in approximately 50 countries that networks and supports engagement in humanitarian data with practitioners, government agencies, and other actors. Open geospatial data are contributed to authentic campaigns through OpenStreetMap and an ecosystem of open source and proprietary tools. A 2019 survey of YouthMappers and an analysis of YouthMappers data contributions allow us to explore the following questions: Who are using open geospatial tools, and in what context? Which open geospatial tools are being used and where? How proficient are they as users? How confident do they feel? How prepared does this make them for the future? How do these patterns vary across the global digital divide? Results show evidence of mapping both locally and globally. They also reveal a gendered confidence gap, and tool use patterns hint at a gendered division of geospatial labor in some global contexts. Internships are key to unlocking job opportunities, and are prevalent among YouthMappers members. Findings also reveal that with growing self-reported proficiency, a commitment to the ethic of being a good global citizen increases, underscoring the potential promise for open geospatial tools to support not only workforce capacity, but also meaningful connections to learning about geography, place, people, and the world.
Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2019
Scientific Reports, 2021
In the past 10 years, the collaborative maps of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have been used to support hum... more In the past 10 years, the collaborative maps of OpenStreetMap (OSM) have been used to support humanitarian efforts around the world as well as to fill important data gaps for implementing major development frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals. This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the evolution of humanitarian mapping within the OSM community, seeking to understand the spatial and temporal footprint of these large-scale mapping efforts. The spatio-temporal statistical analysis of OSM’s full history since 2008 showed that humanitarian mapping efforts added 60.5 million buildings and 4.5 million roads to the map. Overall, mapping in OSM was strongly biased towards regions with very high Human Development Index. However, humanitarian mapping efforts had a different footprint, predominantly focused on regions with medium and low human development. Despite these efforts, regions with low and medium human development only accounted for 28% of the buildings and ...