衛星圖像+社交媒體 = 新途徑去識別呈現的核威脅

衛星圖像+社交媒體 = 新途徑去識別呈現的核威脅
Satellite Imagery + Social Media = A New Way to Spot Emerging Nuclear Threats

一支研究小組正在訓練電腦尋找和融合來自不同河流的數碼數據的線索。

A research team is training computers to find and fuse clues from wildly different rivers of digital data.

JULY 31, 2018

Hiding illicit nuclear programs might be getting harder, thanks to new ways of gleaning and combining clues from various rivers of digital data. That’s the conclusion of new research funded in part by the U.S. Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

Satellites offer one kind of information; social media another — particularly inside countries that may be trying to flout inspections. But large volumes of satellite imagery and social media data aren’t similar. You can have one analyst examine satellite pictures and another look at social media posts to see if they align, but the process is time-consuming and generally far from comprehensive. The study’s authors developed a method for fusing different types of data in a machine-readable way to offer a much clearer picture.

“In light of their ubiquitous emergence, social media increasingly promise to be of great value even though associated applications have thus far remained simple, and their fusion with other data has been largely ad hoc,” the team from North Carolina State University writes in “Fusing Heterogeneous Data: A Case for Remote Sensing and Social Media.” Only by creating a new statistical method for fusing the outputs of satellite data and social media data do you get something you can use to predict what might happen next within a given area of interest, such as a specific nation’s nuclear enrichment or weapons development.

The researchers looked at satellite and social media data from August 2013, when deadly floods killed eight people and caused widespread damage in Colorado. They sought to show that if you could algorithmically identify which imagery showed the flooding from space, and which geotagged tweets described it on the ground, you could could much more quickly verify one data set against another — that is, you could determine whether  incoming social media data supports the conclusions you might be reaching from your satellite data, and vice versa. https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2018/07/satellite-imagery-social-media-new-way-spot-emerging-nuclear-threats/150153/