Citizen-Sourced Event Reporting with Veracity Assessment

The overwhelming number of events of potential interest to local or national authorities is often in stark contrast to the severely limited resources that authorities can avail for identifying such events. The active engagement of citizens in the identification task is, arguably, a potential solution to this problem, but brings with it a number of other issues that need to be addressed: How are citizens incentivized to participate? How is the veracity of reported events assessed? To what extent can relevant processes be automated? This position paper puts forward an architecture for an integrated platform that couples citizen-sourced reporting with the semi-autonomous use of drones for assessing the veracity of sourced reports, and discusses the multiple facets of such an architecture in relation to typical research questions for autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.