@HelicoptersofDC is a Twitter account that is dedicated to helping Washingtonians answer the question “what’s that helicopter?” Flight tracking websites are of little use in D.C. because of a widely used government exemption to transponders. After dolling out thousands of points for Twitter users’ helicopter photos, the account uses computer vision to automatically infer operators from any photo/video sent to it. Location tagged “copter spots” are added to an open data set (map.copterspotter.com) that provides residents and lawmakers insights into trends the FAA doesn’t track. We post helicopter ATC radio to Twitter, where users can transcribe interesting transmissions to automatically generate and share maps of helicopter routes and zones.
In addition to showing attendees how to play our helicopter spotting game, I will briefly cover DC-specific trends comparing the last two years of user submitted data and results of the first 8 months of our computer vision program.