Efficient and thorough data collection and its timely analysis are critical for disaster response and recovery in order to save people’s lives during disasters. However, access to comprehensive data in disaster areas and their quick analysis to transform the data to actionable knowledge are challenging. With the popularity and pervasiveness of mobile devices, crowdsourcing data collection and analysis has emerged as an effective and scalable solution.
This talk introduces a new way of data collection (specifically mobile images and videos) with spatiotemporal metadata which can be used for collecting, organizing, sharing, and crowdsourcing data in disasters. On top of an existing mobile media management platform named MediaQ developed by USC IMSC (Integrated Media Systems Center), this study addresses the problem of timely collection and analysis of disaster data, and provides a solution for crowdsourcing mobile videos for disasters by identifying two unique challenges of 1) prioritizing visual data collection and transmission under bandwidth scarcity caused by damaged communication networks and 2) analyzing the acquired data using a space decomposition technique which can evenly distribute human analyst’s load.

Cyrus Shahabi is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and the Director of the Information Laboratory (InfoLAB) at the Computer Science Department and also the Director of the NSF's Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California (USC). He is also the director of Informatics at USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He was the CTO and co-founder of a USC spin-off, Geosemble Technologies, which was acquired in July 2012. Since then, he founded another company, ClearPath (recently rebranded as TallyGo), focusing on predictive path-planning for car navigation systems. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1989 and then his M.S. and Ph.D. Degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in May 1993 and August 1996, respectively. He authored two books and more than two hundred research papers in the areas of databases, GIS and multimedia with more than 12 US Patents.

Dr. Shahabi was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS) from 2004 to 2009, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) from 2010-2013 and VLDB Journal from 2009-2015. He is currently on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (TSAS) and ACM Computers in Entertainment. He is the founding chair of IEEE NetDB workshop and also the general co-chair of SSTD'15, ACM GIS 2007, 2008 and 2009. He chaired the nomination committee of ACM SIGSPATIAL for the 2011-2014 terms. He has been PC co-chair of is a PC co-Chair of BigComp'2016, MDM'2016, DASFAA 2015, IEEE MDM 2013 and IEEE BigData 2013, and regularly serves on the program committee of major conferences such as VLDB, ACM SIGMOD, IEEE ICDE, ACM SIGKDD, IEEE ICDM, and ACM Multimedia.
Dr. Shahabi is a fellow of IEEE, and a recipient of the ACM Distinguished Scientist award in 2009, the 2003 U.S. Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the NSF CAREER award in 2002, and the 2001 Okawa Foundation Research Grant for Information and Telecommunications.