Citizen Science as a Service (CSaaS)

Citizen Science as a Service consists of a flood reporting mobile app that allows citizens to contribute to flood monitoring by reporting flood related events and issues.

A mobile app is being developed, led by the University of Bradford, for Citizen Science as a Service (CSaaS) solution to provide motivational tools to help and engage citizens to collect flooding data to provide support on decision making to the local authority. 

The app allows citizens to report an event with the location where the issue is and offers flexibility on choosing type of issues: monitoring of rainfall, river flow and water levels, drain blockages. The app enables citizens to collect information and report incidents using image and text description as well as view other reports of the interested area.

Intelligent techniques are being applied to develop an effective flood monitoring app including natural language processing and text mining to analyse the context of the report, deep learning for image processing and classification, and creating video camera based sensors for images to be classified into multiple labels and mobile technology for offering an app, geo-fencing and personalisation/context

Community members have been invited to provide feedback on the mobile app prototype and discuss any features they would like as part of the mobile app. Citizens contribute to the objectives set forward by the scientists through the analysis and gathering of a large dataset without any prior training or technical background.

For more information about Citizen Science as a Service, please contact:

Dr Dhaval Thakker: D.Thakker@bradford.ac.uk 

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