Micro-Reports

Most people nowadays use their smartphones for reporting and getting information from contents shared by other people in societies during variety of situations. Camera is becoming the main reporting instrument, like pen used to be, for reporting. The reports through smartphones are increasingly more spontaneous, objective, compelling, and universal. Unlike micro-blogs (i.e., tweets), micro-reports serve like eyewitnesses and field reporters of the events which are more reliable.

Along with human participatory sensing concepts, these micro-reports can be used to recognize situations and form knowledge to provide appropriate recommendations. Among diverse citizen contributed data, photo and video are the biggest data source. Given enormous progress in concept recognition using machine learning in the last few years, photos and videos are more than visual documents. They become the best resources of information because of their objective and factual nature. For example, during emergency response users can report the current flood level situations, their needs for food or shelter, and their available resources to help.