Researchers Are Proposing a New Way To Generate Street Addresses by Extracting Roads From Satellite Images (technologyreview.com) 48
An estimated 4 billion people in the world lack a physical address. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab and Facebook are now proposing a new way to address the unaddressed: with machine learning. From a report: The team first trained a deep-learning algorithm to extract the road pixels from satellite images. Another algorithm connected the pixels together into a road network. The system analyzed the density and shape of the roads to segment the network into different communities, and the densest cluster was labeled as the city center. The regions around the city center were divided into north, south, east, and west quadrants, and streets were numbered and lettered according to their orientation and distance from the center.
When they compared their final results with a random sample of unmapped regions whose streets had been labeled manually, their approach successfully addressed more than 80% of the populated areas, improving coverage compared with Google Maps or OpenStreetMaps. This isn't the only way to automate the creation of addresses. The organization what3words generates a unique three-word combination for every 3-by-3-meter square on a global grid. The scheme has already been adopted in regions of South Africa, Turkey, and Mongolia by national package delivery services, local hospitals, and regional security teams. But Ilke Demir, a researcher at Facebook and one of the creators of the new system, says its main advantage is that it follows existing road topology and helps residents understand how two addresses relate to one another.
When they compared their final results with a random sample of unmapped regions whose streets had been labeled manually, their approach successfully addressed more than 80% of the populated areas, improving coverage compared with Google Maps or OpenStreetMaps. This isn't the only way to automate the creation of addresses. The organization what3words generates a unique three-word combination for every 3-by-3-meter square on a global grid. The scheme has already been adopted in regions of South Africa, Turkey, and Mongolia by national package delivery services, local hospitals, and regional security teams. But Ilke Demir, a researcher at Facebook and one of the creators of the new system, says its main advantage is that it follows existing road topology and helps residents understand how two addresses relate to one another.
Do you know your ICBM address? (Score:2)
Everyone with a fixed "residence" - even if it's not on any road - has an ICBM address [wikipedia.org], even if they don't know it.
They also have other "your location is your address" addresses [wikipedia.org].
MOD THIS DOWN - WITH REASON (Score:1, Insightful)
That site has zero functionality. It won't explain how this "3 words" system works in any meaningful detail. It won't let you look up, saerch, or learn about much of anything. It's just a download link for an app.
This is just another spamvertisement for yet another stupid app (with who-knows what permissions required when a simple web site would do). MOD DOWN please. Unless you want more of the same?
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While that's probably the default behavior of the mobile phone version of the site, the desktop version is fully functional. That's no less annoying (and I won't use anything that forces mobile visitors onto an app or blocks desktop users), just more accurate.
This is dangerous - it can be gamed (Score:3)
Consider what a generative adversarial network [wikipedia.org] (GAN) can do to such an algorithm. Perhaps all an attacker needs to do is paint some rooftops in a manner that creates an off-by-one error on counting streets and then they can misdirect (or even intercept) somebody's mail.
Read this article on Camouflaged Graffiti on Road Signs Can Fool Machine Learning Models [thenewstack.io] (from 1y ago) for some examples of how simple stickers or graffiti can fool these systems. It also hit Slashdot, though all I can find is an article on 'Psychadelic' Stickers That Confuse AI Image Recognition [slashdot.org].
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In many neighborhoods, all someone has to do to intercept mail is go over and take the mail out of the unlocked mailbox. I hardly think worrying about mail thieves painting rooftops is a productive use of time, it would be much more conspicuous and easy to prosecute.
Something for the North Dakota tribes (Score:1)
Re:What The Fuck Is Wrong With The Existing Method (Score:4)
Personally, I'd think it might be just as well to incorporate high resolution Lat-Lon coordinates into a QR splotch and let local software on a smartphone find the route. Addresses with words are designed for people to learn them, but people don't learn them. We use address books.
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There's probably arguments that you don't need addresses at all, but I think the arguments for non-street addresses are nerd masturbation. What they totally fail to grasp is that in most cases a local reference is sufficient, for an analogy with date and time "Tuesday at two" is usually meaningful in context, you don't have to go ISO 8601 and say 2018-12-04T14:00:00 because it's obvious you mean this year and the coming Tuesday and two in the afternoon not two in the middle of the night and on the strike of
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I like Plus Codes (Score:4, Informative)
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Plus, for most plots of land you have a number of opportunities to find a 3x3m square named something memorable/apropos. For example, on the Apple campus there's burn.count.mint [what3words.com], stable.elite,hype [what3words.com], owners.lift.bronze [what3words.com], and so on.
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What3Words has a big drawback: the words are assigned randomly, which makes it impossible to figure out where an address is without accessing the What3Words database. It's not human-usable without computer assistance.
This makes What2Words likely to fail: countries that aren't organized enough to have street addresses worked out, are usually too poor for the citizens to be able to afford satnav systems.
Conventional street addresses are grouped: city, street, number. Large area, smaller area, 1 house.
When you
Exactly, +1 for Plus Codes (Score:2)
https://plus.codes/ [plus.codes] is the URL.
They work in Google Maps, BTW.
There are rural places all over the world that need a good addressing system that works regardless of internet connections.
They are open. Anyone can use the algorithm. That's why W3W fails with their proprietary crap. If w3w opened it up, it is a great tool.
Plus.codes let you determine the resolution - need a few acres or a tiny food stall - you decide.
They don't use look-alike letters/numbers.
I lived at 66XQXRXV+XC for a few months, then moved to
Just one problem (Score:3)
Obvious question (Score:2)
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Because most people understand their location relative to a road, trail or intersection. The problem isn't to assign an identifier to each location in a town. It's to get people to remember and use something that they are already familiar with.
OK ... (Score:1)
Open Location Code (Score:1)
Google developed this exactly for these purposes. They show up in maps already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code [wikipedia.org].