Online algorithmic event detection from realtime mobile photos

This is really incredible - I first heard of this when the Tottenham Court Rd incident happened a few weeks ago in London, and teleportd had images and detected the event before Sky News.

Well done guys! Really cool to see it launched.

This is such a great idea. And imagine if first-hand reporting could be confirmed using a tool like this.

There are so many interesting and potential uses from such a product.

Congrats, in my humble opinion this looks like a game changing idea. I don't see any reason why this can't become a legitimate news source or the visual version of reddit where upvotes come from density ratings.

I'm pretty sure you've thought of this but if not here is some algorithm advice: you should start recording baseline density referenced by time (maybe use Fourier to detect time patterns?) so you can start filtering out the noise. That way you can filter out the few thousand pictures of the Empire State Building everyday unless something happens at the ESB in which case density would dramatically increase relative to time.

Also, this would be great to see visually on a map where when you zoom farther and farther in the clusters get redrawn so I can see micro events happening within the major event.

Great job!

I'm curious how things like "bootylicious" in San Francisco and what appear to be mostly personal photos like "griffith observatory" in Los Angeles, and perhaps artistic things like "lighting shadow" in San Francisco made the cut. Is it that at least two different accounts posted photos with those tags in the same general vicinity within a certain time elapsed?

Maybe it would help filter out less relevant results if events without any photos featuring large groups or crowds of people are removed, since those typically go hand-in-hand with notable events. If there could be a way to separate out sporting and music events, that would be nice as well.

Prime featured content would be large groups of people in the streets, with bonus points if there are things on fire. Another would be natural disasters (floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis), which most likely do not contain pictures of crowds in the streets, but probably do contain damaged or flooded buildings. Another might be a disease outbreak, perhaps with pictures of individuals with lesions or other visible symptoms, maybe in a medical setting. War zone events like the shelling of a neighborhood somewhere would be interesting, and might fall under the damaged building filter for natural disasters. Maybe pictures of tanks or other heavy military equipment rolling into a town, or helicopters flying overhead. UFO sightings. Pictures of crashes and accidents are always popular as well, and might only have a few emergency personnel around. Political events would probably fall under the large crowd filter. What else?

Isn't this what "Color" was supposed to do (amongst many other things that is) ?

I discovered pictures of this car entering the French metro through teleportd. They had way more images than news website. I also love to teleport myself to Rio and San Francisco where part of my family is.

This is pretty awesome and its a great way to spark off additional analysis, such as triggering precise twitter feed filters for a specific topic.

Please don't sell to Facebook. You'll have more value being a de-centralized company.

The power of technology! A laptop, some (a lot of) lines of code and here you are!

Congrats guys! ;)

really cool tech here! have you guys published any papers on this?

Is that Bono on the 4th photo ?

great job