Crowdsourced Landslide Tracking – Lessons from Field Experiences of Landslide Tracker Mobile App

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Balaji Hariharan ◽  
Ramesh Guntha
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Application ◽  
Monsoon Season ◽  
Mobile App ◽  
Institutional Management ◽  
Governmental Agencies ◽  
Volunteer Participation ◽  
The World ◽  
Impact Area ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Google Play

<p>With the <em>Landslide Tracker</em> mobile app's launch to track landslides through a crowdsourcing model during the monsoon season of 2020, we learned several important lessons that may help us improve the data quality, volunteer participation, and participation from institutions. The '<em>Landslide Tracker</em>' mobile application allows tracking the landslides and details such as GPS location, date & time of occurrence, images, type, material, size, impact, area, geology, geomorphology, and comments. This app is available on Google Play Store for free, and at http://landslides.amrita.edu, with software conceived and developed by Amrita University in the context of the UK NERC/FCDO funded LANDSLIP research project (http://www.landslip.org/). The <em>Landslide tracker</em> app was released during the 2020 monsoon season, and more than 250 landslides were recorded through the app across India and the world.</p><p>Due to the nature of crowdsourcing, we have seen test entries, duplicate entries, entries with apparent mistakes such as the wrong location. In many cases, these entries were deleted by the administrator through proactive verification. To sustain the removal of invalid entries with continued usage, we can allow users to mark a landslide for verification. The administrator can remove invalid entries or approach the original contributor to update the data with minimum effort. Currently it takes under three minutes to record a landslide. To reduce the time further, it is requested to make a single page form to record date, location, images and few questions. To improve volunteer participation for contributing and validating landslide entries, we can implement digital rewards such as points, badges, titles, leader boards, etc. Additionally, allow users to like, comment, and share the landslide entries to improve the engagement. To improve the participation of universities, disaster management authorities, district authorities, and other governmental and non-governmental agencies for contributing and using landslide information, we can implement the institutional management functionality. It allows the institution to configure the staff and manager user. The manager can review, update, delete entries from the team, get reports on the contribution of the staff, and download and share the landslides contributed by the whole institution.</p>

scholarly journals Detection of Forgery and Fabrication in Passports and Visas using Cryptography and QR Codes

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Cheman Shaik
Keyword(s):  
Mobile App ◽  
Public Key ◽  
Qr Code ◽  
Clear Indication ◽  
Qr Codes ◽  
The Public ◽  
Private Key ◽  
The World ◽  
Cryptographic Key ◽  
Google Play

In this paper, we present a novel solution to detect forgery and fabrication in passports and visas using cryptography and QR codes. The solution requires that the passport and visa issuing authorities obtain a cryptographic key pair and publish their public key on their website. Further they are required to encrypt the passport or visa information with their private key, encode the ciphertext in a QR code and print it on the passport or visa they issue to the applicant. The issuing authorities are also required to create a mobile or desktop QR code scanning app and place it for download on their website or Google Play Store and iPhone App Store. Any individual or immigration uthority that needs to check the passport or visa for forgery and fabrication can scan its QR code, which will decrypt the ciphertext encoded in the QR code using the public key stored in the app memory and displays the passport or visa information on the app screen. The details on the app screen can be compared with the actual details printed on the passport or visa. Any mismatch between the two is a clear indication of forgery or fabrication. Discussed the need for a universal desktop and mobile app that can be used by immigration authorities and consulates all over the world to enable fast checking of passports and visas at ports of entry for forgery and fabrication

scholarly journals Determining Areas of Improvement in Quranic Arabic Vocabulary Learning Mobile Applications through Analysis of App User Reviews

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (5C) ◽  
pp. 1188-1191
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Applications ◽  
Vocabulary Learning ◽  
Mobile App ◽  
Pricing Strategy ◽  
World Population ◽  
User Reviews ◽  
Arabic Speakers ◽  
The World ◽  
Technical Capability ◽  
Google Play

Muslims constitute roughly around one fifth of the world population, the majority of which are not Arabic speakers. This poses a problem for them in their devotional activities such as performing the five obligatory daily prayers and reading the Holy Qur’an because they could not understand what they are reciting or reading. Added to this, Muslim adults who are busy working usually find it hard to find the time to attend Quranic Arabic classes. In order to rectify this problem, some mobile app developers have created apps with the objective of teaching Muslims Quranic Arabic vocabulary items so that they could begin to learn and understand Quranic Arabic. In March 2019, there are about eleven Quranic Arabic vocabulary teaching mobile applications which could be downloaded from Google Play Store. These apps come with differing features and are of varying quality. This exploratory qualitative study aims to analyze the user reviews of these apps in order to determine areas where they can be further improved by the developers. The findings of this research found that generally developers should concentrate on three areas of improvement; their applications’ content, technical capability, and pricing strategy. It is hoped that the findings from this study can be used by Quranic Arabic vocabulary mobile app developers to further improve their apps so that the Muslim public can benefit more from them.

Technical Considerations for Building a Landslide Tracker Mobile App

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramesh Guntha ◽  
Maneesha Vinodini Ramesh
Keyword(s):  
High Performance ◽  
Monsoon Season ◽  
Performance Testing ◽  
Mobile App ◽  
Mobile Databases ◽  
Synchronization Mechanism ◽  
Server Side ◽  
Repeated Calls ◽  
The World ◽  
Client Side

<p>Substantially complete landslide inventories aid the accurate landslide modelling of a region’s susceptibility and landslide forecasting. Recording of landslides soon after they have occurred is important as their presence can be quickly erased (e.g., the landslide removed by people or through erosion/vegetation). In this paper, we present the technical software considerations that went into building a Landslide Tracker app to aid in the collection of landslide information by non-technical local citizens, trained volunteers, and experts to create more complete inventories on a real-time basis through the model of crowdsourcing. The tracked landslide information is available for anyone across the world to view. This app is available on Google Play Store for free, and at http://landslides.amrita.edu, with software conceived and developed by Amrita University in the context of the UK NERC/FCDO funded LANDSLIP research project (http://www.landslip.org/).</p><p>The three technical themes we discuss in this paper are the following: (i) security, (ii) performance, and (iii) network resilience. (i) Security considerations include authentication, authorization, and client/server-side enforcement. Authentication allows only the registered users to record and view the landslides, whereas authorization protects the data from illegal access. For example, landslides created by one user are not editable by others, and no user should be able to delete landslides. This validation is enforced at the client-side (mobile and web apps) and also at the server-side software to prevent unintentional and intentional illegal access. (ii) Performance considerations include designing high-performance data structures, mobile databases, client-side caching, server-side caching, cache synchronization, and push-notifications. The database is designed to ensure the best performance without sacrificing data integrity. Then the read-heavy data is cached in memory to get this data with very low latency. Similarly, the data, once fetched, is cached in memory on the app so that it can be re-used without making repeated calls to the server every time when the user visits a screen.  The data persists in the mobile database so the app can load faster while reopening. A cache-synchronization mechanism is implemented to prevent the caches' data from becoming stale as new data comes into the database. The synchronization mechanism consists of push-notifications and incremental data pulls. (iii) Network resiliency considerations are achieved with the help of local storage on the app. This allows recording the landslides even when there is no internet connection. The app automatically pushes the updates to the server as soon as the connectivity resumes. We have observed over 300% reduction in time taken to load 2000 landslides, between the no-cache mode to cache mode during the performance testing. </p><p>The Landslide tracker app was released during the 2020 monsoon season and more than 250 landslides were recorded through the app across India and the world.</p>

scholarly journals Tracking Light Aircraft with Smartphones at Low Altitudes

Information ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lilly ◽  
Deniz Cetinkaya ◽  
Umut Durak
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Application ◽  
Emergency Services ◽  
Flight Tests ◽  
Radar Systems ◽  
Desktop Application ◽  
The World ◽  
Main Components ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Aircraft Pilots ◽  
Aircraft Data

Most aircraft in the world are tracked by various surveillance radar systems. Currently there is no legal requirement for light aircraft to be fitted with a transponder; however, this does not mean light aircraft should not be tracked. By adding a cheap, live tracking solution for light aircraft, the safety of low-flying aircraft pilots can be greatly increased. The radio operators who coordinate the aircraft can have an improved understanding of the air traffic and in the event of an emergency, the position of the aircraft can be relayed to emergency services. This paper proposes an approach to use a smartphone as an aircraft transponder to improve the radar tracking capabilities of low-flying aircraft. This study presents a practical and effective approach as well as a prototype implementation. The study includes the development of the three main components: (1) A mobile application that transforms a smartphone into an aircraft transponder; exploiting the GPS functionalities, (2) a desktop application that visualizes the aircraft data in real time on a map, and (3) a backend that bridges the mobile and the desktop application. To evaluate the study, flight tests were performed in a real aircraft over the Isle of Wight in the UK.

scholarly journals Classification of Google Play Store Application Reviews Using Machine Learning

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdul Karim ◽  
Azhari Azhari ◽  
Meshrif Alruily ◽  
Hamza Aldabbas ◽  
Samir Brahim Belhaouri ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Text Classification ◽  
Mobile Application ◽  
Mobile App ◽  
User Preferences ◽  
User Reviews ◽  
Star Rating ◽  
Single Feature ◽  
Google Play

Google play store allow the user to download a mobile application (app) and user get inspired by the rating and reviews of the mobile app. A recent study analyzes that user preferences, user opinion for improvement, user sentiment about particular feature and detail with descriptions of experiences are very useful for an application developer. However, many application reviews are very large and difficult to process manually. Star rating is given of the whole application and the developer cannot analyze the single feature. In this research, we have scrapped 282,231 user reviews through different data scraping techniques. We have applied the text classification on these user reviews. We have applied different algorithms and find the precision, accuracy, F1 score and recall. In evaluated results, we have to also find the best algorithm.

scholarly journals A systematic review of the smartphone applications available for corona virus disease 2019 (COVID19) and their assessment using the mobile app rating scale (MARS)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samira Davalbhakta ◽  
Shailesh Advani ◽  
Shobhit Kumar ◽  
Vishwesh Agarwal ◽  
Samruddhi Bhoyar ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Mobile Applications ◽  
Rating Scale ◽  
Virus Disease ◽  
Mobile App ◽  
Assessment Tools ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Mobile Platforms ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Google Play

AbstractThe global impact of COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need to rapidly develop and improve utilization of mobile applications across the healthcare continuum to address rising barriers of access to care due to social distancing challenges and allow continuity in sharing of health information, assist with COVID-19 activities including contact tracing, and providing useful information as needed. Here we provide an overview of mobile applications being currently utilized for COVID-19 related activities. We performed a systematic review of the literature and mobile platforms to assess mobile applications been currently utilized for COVID-19, and quality assessment of these applications using the Mobile Application Rating Scale (MARS) for overall quality, Engagement, Functionality, Aesthetics, and Information. Finally, we provide an overview of the key salient features that should be included in mobile applications being developed for future use. Our search identified 63 apps that are currently being used for COVID-19. Of these, 25 were selected from the Google play store and Apple App store in India, and 19 each from the UK and US. 18 apps were developed for sharing up to date information on COVID-19, and 8 were used for contact tracing while 9 apps showed features of both. On MARS Scale, overall scores ranged from 2.4 to 4.8 with apps scoring high in areas of functionality and lower in Engagement. Future steps should involve developing and testing of mobile applications using assessment tools like the MARS scale and the study of their impact on health behaviors and outcomes.

scholarly journals Orthodontic apps: an assessment of quality (using the Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS)) and behaviour change techniques (BCTs)

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
N. R. Siddiqui ◽  
S. J. Hodges ◽  
M. O. Sharif
Keyword(s):  
Behaviour Change ◽  
Rating Scale ◽  
Mobile App ◽  
Behaviour Change Techniques ◽  
List Type ◽  
Behaviour Change Wheel ◽  
Current Availability ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Google Play

Abstract Background Apps have been shown to be an effective tool in changing patients’ behaviours in orthodontics and can be used to improve their compliance with treatment. The Behaviour Change Techniques (BCTs) and quality (using MARS) within these apps have previously not been published. Objectives To evaluate the quality of these apps aiming to change behaviour. To assess BCTs used in patient focused orthodontic apps. Methods The UK Google Play and Apple App Stores were searched to identify all orthodontic apps and 305 apps were identified. All 305 apps were assessed for the presence of BCTs using an accepted taxonomy of BCTs (Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW)), widely utilised in healthcare. Of those containing BCTs, the quality was assessed using the Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS), a validated and multi-dimensional tool which rates apps according to 19 objective criteria. Data collection was carried out by two calibrated, independent assessors and repeated after 6 weeks for 25% of the apps by both assessors. Results BCTs were found in 31 apps, although only 18 of them were analysed for quality and 13 apps were excluded. Six different BCTs were identified: these were most commonly ‘prompts/cues’, and ‘information about health consequences’. All apps were shown to be of moderate quality (range 3.1–3.7/5). Inter-rater and intra-rater reliability for BCT and quality assessment were excellent. Conclusions The current availability of orthodontic apps of sufficient quality to recommend to patients is very limited. There is therefore a need for high-quality orthodontic apps with appropriate BCTs to be created, which may be utilised to improve patients’ compliance with treatment.

Classification of Google Play Store Application Reviews Using Machine Learning

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdul Karim ◽  
SAMIR BRAHIM BELHAOUARI ◽  
Azhari SN ◽  
Ali Adil Qureshi
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Text Classification ◽  
Mobile Application ◽  
Mobile App ◽  
User Preferences ◽  
User Reviews ◽  
Star Rating ◽  
Single Feature ◽  
Google Play

Google play store allow the user to download a mobile application (app) and user get inspired by the rating and reviews of the mobile app. A recent study analyzes that user preferences, user opinion for improvement, user sentiment about particular feature and detail with descriptions of experiences are very useful for an application developer. However, many application reviews are very large and difficult to process manually. Star rating is given of the whole application and the developer cannot analyze the single feature. In this research, we have scrapped 282,231 user reviews through different data scraping techniques. We have applied the text classification on these user reviews. We have applied different algorithms and find the precision, accuracy, F1 score and recall. In evaluated results, we have to find the best algorithm.

scholarly journals Pictures of X-Rays Displayed in Monitors for Deep Learning-Based COVID-19 Screening: Implications for Mobile Application Development

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Silva ◽  
Eduardo Luz ◽  
Gladston Moreira ◽  
Caio Gomes ◽  
Larissa Viana ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Mobile Application ◽  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Mobile App ◽  
X Rays ◽  
Application Development ◽  
Research Papers ◽  
The World ◽  
Computer Monitors ◽  
To Receive

Abstract As the world faces the COVID-19 pandemic, Artificial Intelligence, in particular, Deep Learning (DL) have been called up for help. Several recent research papers have shown the usefulness of these techniques for COVID-19 screening in Chest X-Rays (CXRs). To make this technology accessible and easy to use for the healthcare workers a natural path is to embed it into a mobile app. In these cases, however, the DL models must be prepared to receive as inputs pictures taken with the smartphones.Trying to raise awareness about the limitations of these models in a real-world setup, in this work, a dataset of CXR pictures taken of computer monitors with smartphones is built and DL models are evaluated on it. The results show that the current models are not able to correctly classify this kind of input. In the tested setup, augmenting the dataset with such pictures has shown to mitigate the problem, but it was not enough to raise accuracy to acceptable levels. As an alternative, this work shows that it is possible to build a model that discards pictures of monitors such that the COVID-19 screening module does not have to cope with them.

International Listening Post report summary: the world at the dawn of 2019

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-124
Author(s):  
Sandy Henderson ◽  
Ulrike Beland ◽  
Dimitrios Vonofakos
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Faroe Islands ◽  
The South ◽  
The World ◽  
The Uk

On or around 9 January 2019, twenty-two Listening Posts were conducted in nineteen countries: Canada, Chile, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, Germany (Frankfurt and Berlin), Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy (two in Milan and one in the South), Peru, Serbia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, and the UK. This report synthesises the reports of those Listening Posts and organises the data yielded by them into common themes and patterns.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document