There was much todo about google’s bigdata bad flu forecasts recently in the news. google had tried to forecast flu rates in the US based on search data. That’s a hard issue to forecast well but doing better will have public benefits by giving public officials and others information to identify pro-active actions.
Lets also think about other places where bigdata, in a non-corporate, non-figure-out-what-customers-will-buy-next way, could also help.
Let’s think about Oso, Washington (Oso landslide area on google maps)
Given my background in geophysics (and a bit of geology), you can look at Oslo, Washington and think…yeah…that was a candidate for a mudslide. Using google earth, its easy to look at the pictures and see the line in the forest where the earth has given way over the years. It looks like the geology of the area is mostly sand and it was mentioned it was glacier related. All this makes sense.
We also know that homeowner’s insurance tries to estimate the risk of a policy before its issued and its safe to assume that the policies either did not cover mudslides or catastrophes of this nature for exactly this reason.
All of this is good hind-sight. How do we do better?
Its pretty clear from the aerial photography that the land across the river was ripe for a slide. The think sandy line, the sparse vegetation and other visual aspects from google earth/maps shows that detail. Its a classic geological situation. I’ll also bet the lithography of the area is sand, alot of sand, and more sand possible on top of hard rock at the base.
So lets propose that bigdata should help give homeowners a risk assessment of their house which they can monitor over time and use to evaluate the potential devastation that could come from a future house purchase. Insurance costs alone should not prevent homeowners from assessing their risks. Even “alerts” from local government officials sometimes fall on deaf ears.
Here’s the setup:
- Use google earth maps to interpret the images along rivers, lakes and ocean fronts
- Use geological studies. Its little known that universities and the government have conducted extensive studies in most areas of the US and we could, in theory, make that information more accessible and usable
- Use aerial photography analysis to evaluate vegetation density and surface features
- Use land data to understand the terrain e.g. gradients and funnels
- Align the data with fault lines, historical analysis of events and other factors.
- Calculate risk scores for each home or identify homes in an area of heightened risk.
Do this and repeat monthly for every home in the US at risk and create a report for homeowners to read.
Now that would be bigdata in action!
This is a really hard problem to solve but if the bigdata “industry” wants to prove that its good at data fusion on a really hard problem that mixes an extremely complex and large amount of disparate data and has public benefit, this would be it.