There’s only one certainty in the Internet world: things are going to change. Here’s a glimpse of a possible new multimedia search engine.
Researchers in Glasgow, Scotland are working on an Internet search engine that serves up intelligent / analyzable data and visualizations from Internet-connected sensors (such as cameras, microphones, and other sensors) in the physical world that are cross-referenced with information on physical space (crowd analysis, face detectors, person trackers) and social networking (Twitter, Facebook) to “empower a wide range of added-value applications in the areas of security/surveillance, smart cities, social networking, e-science and more.”, according to the researchers. “SMART aims to combine sensor networks information with social networks information in order to answer sensor based queries in a more social, useful and accurate way. Indeed, information from social networks can be used to enhance the end-users’ context and overall understand the context of the query in a much better way. Social networks information can be used to adapt a query for environment generated context to the end-user’s daily life.”1
“SMART builds upon the existing concept of ‘smart cities’, physical spaces which are covered in an array of intelligent sensors which communicate with each other and can be searched for information. The search results sourced from these smart cities can be reused across multiple applications, making the system more effective.”
Dr Iadh Ounis
University of Glasgow
School of Computing Science
They expect the system to be tested in a real city in 2014. The European-funded SMART project, ‘Search engine for MultimediA Environment geneRated content’, is a joint research initiative of nine partners.
Who knows how such a system might evolve to be useful? Police could query on where fights or riots are occurring, or monitor numerous existing sensors for specific anomalies such as when and where suspicious objects have been abandoned in public spaces. News agencies could monitor crowd behavior and provide better coverage of unexpected events.
I don’t think we can even begin to anticipate how useful – possibly frighteningly so – such a search engine could be.
Article: https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_234495_en.html
SMART Project: https://www.smartfp7.eu/