4 ms·

This has been heating up. Here's the seminal paper that kicked off the Cambrian Explosion: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~vmnih/docs/Mnih_Volodymyr_PhD_Thesis.pdf

• manarth 10y ago
  > "There is starting to be a debate in the OSM community about allowing robot edits into the map" What do you think about a hybrid: bot detects and recommends changes, which are then queued or tagged for human verification? I've been looking at scuba data in the OSM dataset, and there are a number of bot-added entries, with a tag "verified": "no, please check and del this tag" (e.g. Maaya Thila dive site [1]). [1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/663869880 http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/663869880
  • andrewljohnson 10y ago
    That's the status quo. I'm in favor of a regime where there is a benchmark for the recall and precision rates for the automated analysis, and anything that hits the benchmarks is acceptable. I don't regard this as a philosophical matter - let's accept any bot analysis that hits a certain threshold. 1) We can certainly set the threshold above the TIGER import in the US, which most people agree is positive, but very crufty. 2) It's the developing parts of the world that need automated road creation the most. The opposition seems to emanate from rich, European nations.
    • lucb1e 10y ago
      Robot edits are great when they add data. When modifying or removing work that humans did, I'm much more hesitant. This is probably why there's opposition from "rich, European nations": the developing world has little data that anything could go wrong with. I'm not necessarily pro autonomous robots unless they either hit very high benchmarks, or it's purely for initial groundwork (or improving on previous bots' work). I totally see how it could be great for unmapped places where it could add grass/forest areas, houses, roads, rivers, etc. but tampering with existing data with no review queue (if not an approval queue, at least post-editing review)... I'm hesitant.
      • andrewljohnson 10y ago
        Again, I wouldn't be philosophical about "When modifying or removing work that humans did, I'm much more hesitant." If a robotic system can demonstrate some high bar of precision in modifying human updates, then let the edits happen. If a human mapped a road, then that road changed places or perhaps changed from being two-way to one-way and a robot can detect that reliably, let the robot edit. That said, I don't think "robots changing human edits" is where the robots shine. Most human edits will be good, unless the data later changes. I agree that the low hanging fruit is 1) mapping new features, 2) cleaning up imports like TIGER, 3) providing "lint" type tools to give human editors feedback if their new edit might be wrong.
        • maxerickson 10y ago
          I'm curious how the lint aspect of DeepOSM will work in areas that have less room for improvement than the areas I looked at in Delaware and Maine. In those areas, the imported TIGER data is poor enough that a road by road analysis is overkill. The DeepOSM output flagged most of the roads. Given the capacity to run it, an interesting analysis would be an evaluation of the entire United States, maybe grouped by county or so. Then people in well mapped cities looking for a project could improve the worst county in their state, or the worst county in the US, etc.
        • manarth 10y ago
• reportingsjr 10y ago
  I'm really glad to see all of this going on! I did a little bit of building outlining in OSM and stopped when I realized that it would probably be automated within the next few years.
• Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
  > Facebook mapped a bunch of roads in Egypt, and has an ongoing effort Worth noting that the Facebook robomapping was of extremely poor quality (it actually managed to completely break the OSRM router, which is quite some achievement) and has now been reverted for that reason.