MyShake V2.0 released

MyShake is the project I am currently working on, which aims to build a smartphone seismic network to detect and record earthquakes. It is a citizen science project, to take the power of crowdsourcing. It utilizes the accelerometers inside the smartphones to monitor the motion of the phones, and an Artificial Neural Network classifier will decide whether the motion is due to an earthquake or just human activities. For more details about how it works, you can check this previous blog I wrote.

Yesterday, we released MyShake V2.0, which has three new features:

• Earthquake notification from the existing traditional seismic network
• Option to choose whether run MyShake in battery saving mode
• Users can receive our pushed news

For the first feature, this is not Earthquake Early Warning, but notification from the current traditional seismic network. Usually in a few minutes after the earthquake, you will get a notification to show you where the earthquakes are, information about this earthquake. You can also set a distance and magnitude threshold to only receive notifications within a certain distance and above a certain magnitude. This will be our main test of the push notification out to the users, and prepare to push earthquake early warning alert in the future. The 2nd feature will allow the user to choose the battery saving mode, which will only run MyShake when the phone plugged into the power. The 3rd new feature is that our users can receive a pushed news from MyShake team. This will be our way to communicate with the users when we have latest results.

All these new features are exciting, and make MyShake a better application. Thanks to our current MyShake users, we've already got a lot of useful and amazing results. You can check out our latest paper about the initial observations from MyShake seismic network - link to the paper.

Since we released MyShake in Feb 12th, 2016, we've got more than 200,000 people downloads and expand the network to different continents. The following figure shows you where our MyShake users are. We can see clearly that MyShake users light up most part of the world.

Since it is a global seismic network now, it recorded 395 earthquakes from Feb 12th - Dec 1st, you can see the following figure showing where the earthquakes MyShake users recorded. The size of the circle represents the magnitude of the earthquake, and the colors showing here are the depth.

We hope will continue to improve MyShake, and get more users using our app, and of course, in the future, issue Earthquake Early Warnings ^)^ Hope you can become part of MySahke as well!

Acknowledgements
Our collaborator - Deutsche Telekom Silicon Valley Innovation Center.
Our funder - Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Resources from Berkeley Seismological Lab.
And of course, all the MyShake users!