Berkeley Research on Aerial Imagery

[Peter Swigert]

Hi all,

I've spoken with a few folks across the Public Lab community, but wanted to give a brief introduction to a research project I'm a part of at the UC Berkeley School of Information that relates to the original goals of Grassroots Mapping and some of Public Lab's current projects.

A small group of graduate students, including myself, are working on a short term (~4 month) research project exploring how people capture, share and use aerial imagery. Our general interest is in the gap between increasing capabilities of individual citizens to capture aerial imagery (from balloons and kites as Public Lab promotes, but also increasingly from quadcopters/"drones") and the value that we see people currently deriving from these photos and videos for themselves and for others.

We are aware that is an enormously broad topic, and we just hope to make a modest contribution by building a prototype of a general use online platform for sharing imagery. This prototype would illuminate some of the technical and design challenges with dealing with online sharing, collaboration and analysis of aerial images.Obviously Grassroots Mapping/Public Lab has years of experience in this area, and I want to thank everyone who I've already gotten thoughts and advice from.

We'll definitely be sharing progress and results with the Public Lab community over the next couple of months, and hopefully our work can provide some value to you.

If anyone would like to hear more about our research and our goals, don't hesitate to shoot me a note, we'd love to chat and get your thoughts!

Thanks!
-Pete

Peter Swigert
University of California, Berkeley | School of Information
peter....@berkeley.edu | 703.472.7756