As the canopy of unmanned drones over the Middle East and elsewhere grows larger and more complex, the military faces an interesting problem. Before, if they sent a plane over enemy airspace to take pictures, there was a pilot in it. He was connected to that data, and knew what he saw. But when we’ve got hundreds of cameras in the sky without a corresponding human, we run into the problem. We have the data, but we can’t process it fast enough. Check this out, from The Economist:
During 2009, American drone aircraft flying over Iraq and Afghanistan sent back around 24 years’ worth of video footage. New models being deployed this year will produce ten times as many data streams as their predecessors, and those in 2011 will produce 30 times as many.
The military can’t keep up, so they’re looking elsewhere for solutions. Their most recent stop: NASCAR. That’s right, AOL Defense says the guys who record thousands of people in multiple countries with flying unmanned vehicles are asking the guys who record people driving in circles for help.
Sports television has pioneered many of the techniques for marking and finding data in a video. For each NASCAR race they deploy a team of six or more data taggers, whose job is to watch the event and –with the help of directors — spot what’s interesting and immediately assign it a data tag. That lets directors quickly search through the video, pull the exciting crash, for example, pull it and do an instant replay or build a highlights video.
Real-time data tagging is a key way to get it done, but the Air Force doesn’t have six people for every one drone in the sky, and that’s what it would take. The technique could be integrated with others to provide a solution to getting through all this data. Other tips might come from Gordon Bell, the Microsoft researcher who is conducting an experiment on himself. Using the best technology available, Bell is recording every aspect of his life in real time.
Think about every moment of your day. Every text message, every tweet, email, phone conversation, real conversation, meeting, credit card transaction, everything. All of those are tangible data points that make up your life, and Bell is collecting his. Wired did a short profile on the project in 2009.
This trove includes Web sites he’s visited (221,173), photos taken (56,282), emails sent and received (156,041), docs written and read (18,883), phone conversations had (2,000), photos snapped by the SenseCam hanging around his neck (66,000), songs listened to (7,139), and videos taken by him (2,164). To collect all this information, he uses a staggering assortment of hardware: desktop scanner, digicam, heart rate monitor, voice recorder, GPS logger, pedometer, smartphone, e-reader.
Well according to The Guardian, Bell has the same data problem the Air Force does.
Dr Bell has now stored so much of his life on computer that he is in danger of forgetting how to remember. “I look at it as a surrogate memory,” he says. If he wants to recall something, he switches on and picks his way through days and months of information until he finds what he is after. It was all dreamt up at Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Centre in San Francisco, where Dr Bell works.
With video data, which isn’t easily searchable and is time-consuming to manually review, the problem is even worse.
The SitRep 