This paper addresses the problem of floods classification and floods aftermath detection based onboth social media and satellite imagery. Automatic detection of disasters such as floods is still a very challenging task. The focus lies on identifying passable routes or roads during floods. Two novel solutions are presented, which were developed for two corresponding tasks at the MediaEval 2018 benchmarking challenge. The tasks are (i) identification of images providing evidence for road passability and (ii) differentiation and detection of passable and non-passable roads in images from two complementary sources of information. For the first challenge, we mainly rely on object and scene-level features extracted through multiple deep models pre-trained on the ImageNet and Places datasets. The object and scene-level features are then combined using early, late and double fusion techniques. To identify whether or not it is possible for a vehicle to pass a road in satellite images, we rely on Convolutional Neural Networks and a transfer learning-based classification approach. The evaluation of the proposed methods is carried out on the large-scale datasets provided for the benchmark competition. The results demonstrate significant improvement in the performance over the recent state-of-art approaches.

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way of application usage and deployment: applications run cost-effectively in remote data centers. With the increasing need for mobility and micro-services, particularly with the upcoming 5G mobile broadband networks, there is also a strong demand for mobile edge computing (MEC): applications run in small cloud systems in close proximity to the user, in order to minimize latencies. Both cloud and MEC have their advantages and disadvantages. Combining the two approaches in a unified multi-cloud, consisting of both traditional cloud services provisioned over heterogeneous cloud platforms and MEC systems, has the potential of obtaining the best out of both worlds. However, a comprehensive study is needed to evaluate the performance gains and the overheads involved for real-world cloud applications. In this paper, we introduce a baseline performance evaluation in order to identify the fallacies and pitfalls of combining multiple cloud systems and MEC into a unified MEC-multi-cloud platform. For this purpose, we analyze the basic, application-independent performance metrics of average round-trip time (RTT) and average application payload throughput in a setup consisting of two private and one public cloud systems. This baseline performance analysis confirms the feasibility of MEC-multi-cloud, and provides guidelines for designing an autonomic resource provisioning solutions, in terms of an extension proposed to our existing Melodic middleware platform for multi-cloud applications.