Help Ukraine - armor tracking app
Just saw on CNN a short video of a defiant villager trying to stop a tank, being pulled by his friends out of harm's way. Maybe it can be useful for Ukrainian defense to monitor in real-time the armor movement.
An idea of a simple mobile app that takes pictures, runs them through image recognition, and pins the exact location and time. Does it make sense? I am not skilled enough to build it however someone here maybe.
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It looks like this exists: https://liveuamap.com/
The site is down right now, probably because of Russian denial of service attacks. Hopefully they can defend against it, and get it back up and running.
Yes, it is down, I was able to take a look for like 10 seconds before it went down.
I very much like this idea! An app for tagging points could probably be built pretty quickly.
The primary issue I see is malicious actors creating fake data. I'd like to brainstorm on how to help prevent that.
What if you ask users to upload an image of their Ukrainian ID for verification? (I don't know if people would like this. If I were on the ground I might worry that it's a Russian intelligence campaign to identify Ukrainian fighters)
You could also use some social proof. If one person tags a location the trust level could be 1. If they add a photo it's 2. If multiple registered users confirm the pin the trust level of that pin increases. Then users with multiple trusted pins elevate their own trust level?
A simple system like this could be thrown together in a couple days I think. No need for a complicated image recognition training model. There might be some people with the skill to do that in a short time, but it's much harder
Great brainstorming! This is exactly what I was hoping for :). Unintended and malicious use protection is challenging for any app, here in the case of a 'military' app is so much harder. Maybe disconnecting a data-gathering part (open to the general population) from the data synthesizing part, can help. The latter being only available and protected by the military or intelligence.
So like Waze for tanks. Same way you could mark where a police car is on a road and add a photo.
Thanks for the Waze reference. Never used it but it looks like it can be appropriated for self-defense. I hope their military or civil defenses know how to tap into the power of mobile sensors and apps. You can spot a large column of war machines from a satellite but following small disperse units getting into a battle formation and anticipating their moves is not that easy, you need ground-level intelligence.
No. It doesn't make sense to me. Image recognition potentially might be wrong. It would be better if people mark it.
Well, nothing is perfect. I provided a context, a column of tanks driving through a small village exposed to dozens of smartphone cameras. Tanks and other armor are easily recognizable, so the model can be pretty dumb, optimized for speed. Obviously, you can add manual recognition as you suggested.
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Again, in the context of defending your own country, you can assume people will take it seriously. As for the malicious actors, yes it is a serious point. It may not be that easy to fake geo and timing data of a tank column moving through the villages, and "sensed" along the way independently by certified users living in the given locations.
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To brainstorm. Arguing back, not really, fleshing out the idea more likely.