JC Herz

DARPA and NRC

Flickr for Satellites
12 minutes, 5.9mb, recorded 2005-06-29
JC Herz
The military often uses overlays on top of satellite images for strategic purposes. However, the same images can also be used for civilian purposes, in cases such as monitoring reconstruction activity in regions hit by disaster. JC Herz discusses how these "Flickr for satellite" images are used in combination with geographic data-mining to extract enormously detailed area-specific information to save lives in war zones and rebuild towns in devastated areas.

It's possible to focus a satellite on specific locations and chart the range of its "vision" on the ground. In this short talk, JC Herz looks at how generals and other war-room personnel can select from a number of different landmarks and points of interest within a location and subscribe to receive notifications of change at intervals or as result of a range of events. The selected images can also then be tagged and annotated for future reference.


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J.C. Herz sits on the National Research Council's Committee on Creativity and Information Technology, as well as the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's study group on patterns of emergent behavior in massively multiplayer persistent worlds.

After graduating from Harvard in 1993 with a B.A. in Biology and Environmental Studies, Ms. Herz wrote Surfing on the Internet (Little Brown, 1994) and then Joystick Nation: How Video-games Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds (Little, Brown 1997). She was the first computer games critic on the New York Times and is now producing a documentary on the history of video games for PBS. At present Ms. Herz is the principal of Joystick Nation Inc., a research and design practice that applies the principles of game design to products, services, and learning systems.

Resources:

This presentation is one of a series from the Where 2.0 Event held in Westin St. Francis, San Francisco, June 29-30, 2005.

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This free podcast is from our Where Conference series.