Donating Your Selfies to Science

It’s not only your friends and family who follow your online selfies and group photos. Scientists are starting to look at them, too, though they’re more interested in what’s around you. In bulk, photos can reveal weather patterns across multiple locations, air quality of a place over time, the dynamics of a neighborhood—all sorts of information that helps researchers study cities.

At the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, a research group is using crowdsourced photos to create a low-cost alternative to air-pollution sensors. Called AirTick, the smartphone app they’ve designed will collect photos from users and analyze how hazy the environment looks. It’ll then check each image against official air quality data, and through machine-learning the app will eventually be able to predict pollution levels based on an image alone.