Top Geospatial Predictions for 2014

December 19th, 2013 by Susan Smith

The following are GISCafe Voice’s Geospatial Predictions for 2014. Some of them were on last year’s list, but continue on as important predictions for change in 2014. There was big change in 2014, in the delivery of products, demand for certain types of products such as for disaster recovery, tracking and restoration and mobile apps, as well as the coming of age of indoor location mapping. See if our predictions line up with what your predictions are for 2014!

BYU's smart object recognition algorithm doesn't need humans

Salt Lake City UT (SPX) Jan 21, 2014

Dah-Jye Lee said the results show the algorithm could be used for a number of applications, from detecting invasive fish species (think of the carp in Utah Lake) to identifying flaws in produce such as apples on a production line. Image courtesy BYU Photo.

If we've learned anything from post-apocalyptic movies it's that computers eventually become self-aware and try to eliminate humans. BYU engineer Dah-Jye Lee isn't interested in that development, but he has managed to eliminate the need for humans in the field of object recognition. Lee has created an algorithm that can accurately identify objects in images or video sequences without human calibration.
"In most cases, people are in charge of deciding what features to focus on and they then write the algorithm based off that," said Lee, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. "With our algorithm, we give it a set of images and let the computer decide which features are important."
Not only is Lee's genetic algorithm able to set its own parameters, but it also doesn't need to be reset each time a new object is to be recognized-it learns them on its own.
Lee likens the idea to teaching a child the difference between dogs and cats. Instead of trying to explain the difference, we show children images of the animals and they learn on their own to distinguish the two. Lee's object recognition does the same thing: Instead of telling the computer what to look at to distinguish between two objects, they simply feed it a set of images and it learns on its own.

China's pollution seen from space

Paris (AFP) Jan 17, 2014
Scientists said Friday they had mapped ground-level air pollution in China from space for the first time, a feat that should help the fight against a notorious health hazard.
French and Belgian atmospheric scientists used an infrared sensor aboard a European MetOp weather satellite to map plumes of particles and carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and ammonia over the north China plain, blanketing Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei province in January 2013.
The experts were surprised to find the technology works, but discovered the success also depends on two conditions, France's National Centre for Space Research (CNRS) said.
There have to be "stable" weather conditions, so pollution accumulates at ground level.
There also has to be a big temperature difference between air at ground level and higher layers of the atmosphere for the warm emissions of pollution to stand out, it said.
Satellites could be a useful tool for monitoring the extent of pollution clouds and predicting their movement, according to the study published in the Geophysical Review Letters, helping authorities advise residents in time.
source:  http://www.spacedaily.com