Data for the Boston Marathon Investigation Will Be Crowdsourced | Hacker News Reader

Data for the Boston Marathon Investigation Will Be Crowdsourced

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Doesn't the FBI always ask for people to submit relevant info? The only difference I see here is that a lot more people were filming because of the race and the use of a buzzword.

Imagine the evidence collected in 5 years if Google Glass is successful. You could probably recreate the entire crime scene in 3D using tech like Photosynth.

As I was watching videos and looking at all the pictures yesterday I felt like I was starting to do that in my head.

«Davis requested that any spectator providing media showing the attacks indicate the time they collected the data so police “don’t need to go through the electronic signature.”»

Wouldn't this be more costly and less accurate than scanning EXIF and other metadata, dumping it all into a database, and sorting and scanning through it temporally?

I'd hope that the majority of the images and videos they'll receive directly from citizens will still have this information intact.

Edit: I see that austenallred already pointed to a thread that describes such a methodology. I just find it concerning that those who are tasked with investigation seem to be ignorant (perhaps not willfully) of the other side of how technology can assist with investigations of this sort.

They'd need both, the human saying "I took this here at this time," and the EXIF data. Just because the camera says the photo was taken at 3:15pm doesn't meant the photo was taken at 3:15pm.

Although they could probably substitute some human-in-the-loop with analysis (or verify a human time/place statement), comparing non-time-and-place-established photos with more reliably known-data photos.

And future events might just get preemptive eye-in-the-sky venue monitoring, via a system like...

http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/1/3940898/darpa-gigapixel-dro...

...that makes post hoc tracing of proximate suspects more amenable to computer-vision-automation.

Well, there is the answer to this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5560247

What website will be used to do this crowdsourcing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com