Project Name: Carmen Sandiego Team Members: Andrew Chiang, Daniel Keeney, Kathy Pham, Conroy Whitney Motivation and Objectives Online photo albums have become a method for people to share memories and experiences with people all over the world. Online albums such as Flickr, Picasa, Webshots and many others exist to make the creation and sharing of electronic pictures easy. Though much effort and work has been put in by countless software engineers and UI designers to develop the best online experiences for users, much work still needs to be done to make online albums more useful, informative, and easy to navigate. At a recent Tech Talk at Georgia Tech, Alan Warren from Google asked the audience members to raise their hands if they tagged the people in all their pictures and wrote captions by all pictures. Not many raised their hands. Adding meta-data to digital photos is a tedious task and because of this many users do not experience the associated benefits of tagging. When considering the value of photographs, the idea of location and time is almost as important as content. Photos capture not only "what", but also "where" and "when". The latter two can be used to provide a more general classification of photos and therefore can be a more useful retrieval mechanism: a photo from your trip to San Francisco (location) or from Christmas (time) is found more easily by location or time than by content. Additionally, the "when" and "where" classifications allow for a more generalized association between photos: viewing all photos from San Francisco (location) or from Christmas (time). The goal of Carmen Sandiego is to develop an easy way for user to tag their photos by time and location and display them on an easy to navigate template. With just a GPS device and digital camera, users can run our script and see their pictures displayed on a geographic map. One day, with the momentum of current research for digital imaging, cameras may have embedded GPS chips [1]. Until then two separate devices are used. Carmen Sandiego allows users to navigate pictures by when and where they were taken in addition to just a name of an album or a name of a photo. Also, this tool allows for automatic archiving and organization of pictures by location and time. Related Work Much research has been accomplished to investigate the idea of location based tagging of photos. Tools such as Flickr[2] and Picasa[3] have manual location tagging options. Flickr also has a method of placing text over location on a map to better define a map. However, manual tagging has proven to be tedious and therefore is not widely prevalent. Therefore, computer scientists have been researching ways to automate location-based tagging. The GT-800BT Bluetooth GPS EverPhoto[4] developed by Evermore is a device that combines Bluetooth GPS with geo-tagging software. It uses software to import the image onto Google Earth for viewing. This device is still limited by cost and is relatively new so it has not yet been tested in the consumer market. Researchers from Microsoft have explored different method of attaching geo-spatial data to digital photographs. Their focus is on the World Wide Media eXchange and indexing images by location, user, time and other meta data to provide a database similar to the World Wide Web [5]. We will be using the method mentioned in Section 5.3 of [5], "From Location-Aware Device", to tag our photographs. In [6] the authors discuss various meta-data (e.g., Events, Light Status, Weather) "cues" that can be automatically determined about a photograph given its spatio-temporal information. They tested the usefulness of these different cues in user-recall. We will use a subset of their research to determine ways to present a collection of digital photographs to a user. In [7] the authors discuss a method of clustering photographs to provide hierarchical navigation of photographs based on location and event. We will implement this idea of hierarchical clustering and zooming in order to present a user's collection of photographs in a meaningful way. In [8], the authors focus on the organization of images taken from a mobile phone. The authors declare that people now use devices like their phone to record events that happen in their life. Therefore, thesephones contain a large amount of personal digital data that is not organized. They propose a method to organize the personal image collection acquired strictly from a cell phone. These images can be organized by date and location, since cell phones have a concept of GPS and time. The authors of [9] focus on novel methods to browse photo collections based on location and heading of metadata associated with the photos. This method requires manual addition of geo-location information to pictures and adding those images to the web for sharing. The authors present the different sites that offer manual geo-tagging. As previously mentioned, manual tagging is tedious and is something that has not taken off on the user end. Authors of [10] propose a community focused method to allow people from all over the world to link pictures taken from the same location. This method is for the photos that are publicly available. It clusters images from different users taken from the same cities to allow users to compare pictures and experiences with one another. As seen from the many papers already presented, different groups have researched different methods of improving geo-tagging of images- private and public. Our method will provide users with a simple way to combine their camera with any GPS device and view the images on the familiar template of Google Maps. Proposed Work Our goal is to automate the tagging of photos with location and time in order to provide the benefits arising from these additional classifications without necessitating the effort related to manually tagging. There has been much prior work in this area; however, no adequate tools have been released to the public in a cross-platform, open-source version. Using Java, we will implement the timestamp-based geo-tagging algorithm seen in Section 5.3 of [5]. This will provide us with geo-tagged photos with which we can experiment. Additionally, we will implement and extend research on associations between digital photos. This association includes clustering photos by location and time on a geographic map. This feature allows the users to visually see the photos by when and where