Talk:Distributed UFO Mobile Detection, Analysis, Identification and Reporting Platform

Triaging Reports

I was just reading this post and it occurred to me that one thing the Beeblebrox should do is use people REMOTELY participating in the project as tools to evaluate and weight sightings.

Imagine this process:

1. A person sees something.
2. They pull out their mobile device, activate Beeblebrox, and start recording on their camera. Doing this causes the application to start polling the GPS.
3. The program occasionally flashes a message on the screen encouraging the person to walk in the direction of the object. Doing this allows it to determine heading.
4. Once the sighting is over the program breaks down all the frames, does a quick internal analysis, and after querying the user for information about possible explanations then starts looking for the best frames.
5. As this is occurring the film would have already been streamed to the DB and other users would have seen it. These users can immediately flag important frames.
6. These flagged frames would then notify the person who took the video to walk back to the GPS location where it was recorded. Using the heading it would tell the person where to orient. Then it would ask the person confirm the tilt-angle of the iPhone.
7. Once that's done the program would ask the person to try to find foreground objects and try to walk the person through the steps of computing the size of the foreground object to attempt to compute angular size and distance (possibly based on other peoples reports that have already flowed in).
8. At this point people on the website or elsewhere would start to work breaking the data down. Are there any questionable aspects of the video? Does it look like it may have been hoaxed? How many other reports came in for this same sighting? This is the part of the process that is USER driven.
9. Based on this real-time analysis UFO reports would be instantly graded, recorded, posterified, and deployed to people who can then further analyze physical evidence, etc.

Think of it like Amazon's distributed mechanical-turk project (and here are some other distributed human-analysis projects).

Passive Radar Detection At Home

This is a fanciful idea that I had. It's less ambitious than an UFO reporting scheme, but might attract support from people interested in things other than UFOs. I've posted versions of it at several places on the internet and gotten modest feedback. I revised it to try to avoid misconceptions about the idea that arose. See what you think.

Passive Radar Detection At Home

The objective of “Passive Radar Detection At Home” is to collect radar data and make archives of it available on the web. Web pages of the project would display the current data in a visual format. These maps would not be a “real time” maps. They would have a time lag similar to the lag in weather radar maps on the web. People who want to do detailed research could download the archives as numerical data and analyze or display it in other ways.

This project is unrelated to the maps of airline traffic that are currently available on the web. Those maps are based on the FAA's "Aircraft Situation Display To Industry" (ASDI) data. As I understand that data, it is not based on radar detection, but rather on the transponders carried by the aircraft.

The maps of "Passive Radar Detction At Home" would not necessarily identify airline flights by their number. They might not even be able to identify individual targets by a symbol. They might look like weather radar maps. The numerical data underlying the maps would be available to the public for further processing. People might figure out various ways to recognize targets in the data or coordinate the data with ASDI data.

What is the use of doing this? I just think it would be a neat thing to have. Perhaps archives of the map could be used to investigate aircraft disappearances or accidents. On the other hand, I suppose some government agencies would argue that public access to such data would be a bad thing and try to censor it.

The method for getting the data is suggested by the “SETI At Home” project and also by a paper on “Passive Radar Detection” on the website of the National UFO Reporting Center. People that believe we are visited by extraterrestrials would probably be interested in using the data to investigate UFO incidents. I would welcome their participation, but investigating UFOs is not the exclusive goal of the project.

“Passive Radar Detection” is a well known idea. In such a system, you don’t build any equipment to emit radar signals. Instead you use “public” sources of signals like commercial radio stations or radar transmitters belonging to other people. You put some antennas near the sources to get a reference signals. Ideally, you put other antennas in places where they only get theses signals if they are reflected from aircraft. Or you may have receivers that filter out the direct signals. By doing computations that compare the reference and reflected signals, you can find aircraft locations.

“SETI At Home” is socio-technical project. Signal data (received from space) is collected at a central location. The data is sent out over the web to people who volunteer the use of their computers. It is processed and the results are sent back to a centralized location.

The idea that I call “Passive Radar Detection At Home” is a reverse-analogy to “SETI At Home”. Recruit volunteers all over the world to attach radar receivers to their PCs. They will collect the signal data and send it back to a central location. At the central location, the data is organized and stored. Some processing of the data is done to produce the current radar maps.

Hopefully, a volunteer's radar receiver could be a simple device, not a big scanning dish. The PC would run software to transmit data about received signals over the web to the central location. It might also do other simple functions. For example, if the job of the volunteer site is to receive reflected signals, the software could decided when it was worthwhile to send information over the web vs when the site is only seeing empty sky.

Data would include a time stamp since the central site can’t rely on getting the information instantaneously. This means that each volunteer site would need to have an accurate clock. Let me emphasize that the central site is not trying to analyze the data within milliseconds of receiving it. Nor does data about a received signal have to be processed within milliseconds of the time the signal is emitted from a radar. A computer analyzing the data can look at the time stamps and see that a signal was emitted at a certain time and that another signal was received milliseconds afterward. The computer might be analyzing the data minutes or hours after the data was recorded. Furthermore the data doesn't have to collected every second of the day. It would be enough to take "snapshots" of the sky. Perhaps a second or two of data could be recorded every few minutes.

Since this is a socio-technological idea, some the “socio” aspects are interesting to discuss. However, at the moment, I’m mainly interested in whether the “techno” side is feasible.

I suspect that radar specialists will take a dim view of it. The business of having dispersed recievers that may turn off or on, each one possibly having different specs - it just sounds like bad design. However it might interest mathematicians and computer scientists who like the challenges of noisy data.

I request that people who provide technical objections to the feasibility of this project make clear whether their objections are to "Passive Radar Detection" in general, or to the particular case of "Passive Radar Detection At Home".

Tashirosgt 03:11, 14 July 2009 (UTC)