The year is 2026. The time is 8:37 AM. A wall-mounted speaker comes on and a male’s voice announces that you’ve just crossed the border into Oregon. Beyond the window myriad shades of green whizz past at 760 mph blurring into a sort of flickering, moss green paint stroke. You sip on your piping hot coffee and burn your tongue. You curse silently to yourself, wondering if you’ll be able to taste anything by lunch. Thinking it best to wait on the coffee, you lean towards your bag on the floor and pull out your tablet device. You’ve got an article you’ve been meaning to read, but haven’t had the time. Suddenly your device vibrates in your hands and a notification displays on the screen. “Alert: Earthquake expected to arrive in area in ~13s” You watch the numbers countdown. 12. 11. 10. The Hyperloop’s emergency braking system activates and you hear the slight whine of screeching metal from outside the sound-proofed capsule. 9. 8. 7. 6. 5. Your capsule lurches and comes to a complete stop on the tracks. 4. 3. 2. 1. You anxiously brace yourself, slightly nauseated from the sudden G-forces. The capsule begins to shake moderately and sends your coffee flying off the table tray on to the floor. Damn. In a few moments the notification reads that you’ve just experienced a 5.6 on the richter scale, not altogether unpleasant inside of a stopped capsule, but you stop and consider what could’ve happened had the capsule been zooming along at 700 mph. The male’s voice comes over the intercom as the capsule begins to accelerate again: “Well folks, sorry for that delay. We’ll be keeping alert for the possibility of aftershocks, but with that momentary setback, we’re predicting a 9:47 AM arrival in San Francisco and a 10:24 AM arrival in Los Angeles.”
Advanced earthquake warning systems (EWS) can save lives and prevent destruction of property and valuable materials. When a 5.9 magnitude earthquake hit Mineral, Virginia on August 23, 2011, Twitter users in New York City had up to 30 seconds warning of the imminent quake. When tweets and seismic waves compete in a race, there might as well be no contest. Comparing the speed of sound to the speed of light is like comparing a paper airplane and a Boeing 747.
In essence, an EWS is a network of accelerometers feeding data into computers and communicating seismic events with one another. The “mesh-size” of this network is pretty large. In some of the most critical places, you might find an EWS station every 10 km.
But wait? Accelerometers? Don’t you mean the thing in my smart phone? Well, yeah — exactly that!
MyShake is an app developed at Berkeley that aims to utilise the existing network of smart phones around the globe as an advanced earthquake warning system. The app looks at the signal coming from your smart phone’s accelerometer and sits waiting for the tell-tale signal of an earthquake. If you experience an earthquake, your smartphone instantly communicates that data which can then be used to give an early warning to others. That brings the mesh size of the network down from 10 km to ~10 m. That sort of resolution could give us a huge advantage in detecting earthquake events and alerting people in nearby areas. Thirty seconds is enough time to get outside of a building, or at least to get to a door frame.
This is just one example of what can be done with a network of billions of internet-connected, smart devices. The ever increasing number of such devices makes possible a entirely new paradigm of scientific experiments. Waze already uses the GPS positions of mobile app users to predict traffic in real-time. A distributed network of microphones could be used to track the migratory patterns of birds based on their calls.
Welcome to the world of distributed science. A huge network of valuable, and relatively untapped data is out there just waiting for creative ideas like MyShake to utilize it. The “Internet of Things” (IOT) isn’t just a buzz phrase. Big data and IoT are already proving to have life saving applications, and it’s only just begun.
A lot of the excitement surrounding these ideas is warranted, but we have to make sure to be extra careful as we develop them. Security practices are lacking or weak in a lot of existing products. As we add more devices to the internet, we want to make sure they’re working for us, not against us. On the one hand, we’ll have access to data the likes of generations prior couldn’t even have conceptualized. Coupled with new insights in data science, and especially artificial neural networks, this data will do incredible things for us. On the other hand, concerns over privacy will be raised and we need to find suitable answers to these questions. Additionally, we want to keep devices from falling into the hands of hackers and being used in botnets.
There are so many exciting developments coming out of this field that it’s hard to not have a sense of vertigo. If we manage to apply these ideas well, they will have an incredible effect on our lives and well-being.