ECE Seminar: Qingkai Kong

Qingkai Kong Ph.D. Candidate   University of California, Berkeley  October 19th PHO 339 10 am Host: Janusz Konrad Light refreshments will be available outside of PHO 339 at 9: 45 am Title: MyShake - Crowdsourcing smartphone seismic network Abstract: In this talk, I will show one of the projects I am working on - MyShake, building a global smartphone seismic network. This is a crowdsourcing project that harnesses the sensors inside the smartphones to detect earthquakes. For the first part of the talk, I will discuss the motivations behind the project and the steps we took to address the key challenges to build the network. With a global release of the application on Feb 2016, we got more than 270,000 downloads and built a global network across 6 continents within less than a year. Until Aug 12th 2017, MyShake network has recorded more than 700 earthquakes globally ranging from M2.5 to M7.8. Furthermore, the real-time data and waveform data collected from the network have great potential applications both in Earth science and data science. We are currently in the process of exploring this new dataset with various applications. Building on top of MyShake, I will share some of my ideas of combining data science with earth science in this talk as well.  For more information about MyShake, please check our website: http://myshake.berkeley.edu/ Qingkai Kong will receive his Ph.D. degree in geophysics in 2018 from University of California at Berkeley. Before that, he studied Civil Engineering back in China and got his master degree in structural engineering in 2010. His research focuses on earthquake detection using machine learning and large-scale sensor network. Currently he is working on MyShake, a crowdsourcing smartphone seismic network and applying data science to various problems in Earth science.  For more information about Qingkai, please visit http://seismo.berkeley.edu/qingkaikong/