Michael Aupetit, & Muhammad Imran. (2017). Interactive Monitoring of Critical Situational Information on Social Media. In eds Aurélie Montarnal Matthieu Lauras Chihab Hanachi F. B. Tina Comes (Ed.), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management (pp. 673–683). Albi, France: Iscram.
Abstract: According to many existing studies, the data available on social media platforms such as Twitter at the onset of a crisis situation could be useful for disaster response and management. However, making sense of this huge data coming at high-rate is still a challenging task for crisis managers. In this work, we present an interactive social media monitoring tool that uses a supervised classification engine and natural language processing techniques to provide a detailed view of an on-going situation. The tool allows users to apply various filtering options using interactive timelines, critical entities, and other logical operators to get quick access to situational information. The evaluation of the tool conducted with crisis managers shows its significance for situational awareness and other crisis management related tasks.
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Mohammed Benali, A. R. G. (2017). Towards a Crowdsourcing-based Approach to enhance Decision Making in Collaborative Crisis Management. In eds Aurélie Montarnal Matthieu Lauras Chihab Hanachi F. B. Tina Comes (Ed.), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management (pp. 554–563). Albi, France: Iscram.
Abstract: Managing crises is considered as one of the most complicated organizational and managerial task. Indeed, dealing with such situations calls for many groups from different institutions and organizations to interact and collaborate their efforts in a timely manner to reduce their effects. However, response organizations are challenged by several problems. The urgent need of a shared and mutual situational awareness, information and knowledge about the situation are distributed across time and space and owned by both organizations and people. Additionally, decisions and actions have to be achieved promptly, under stress and time pressure. The contribution outlined in this paper is suggesting a crowdsourcing-based approach for decision making in collaborative crisis management based on the literature requirements. The objective of the approach is to support situational awareness and enhance the decision making process by involving citizens in providing opinions and evaluations of potential response actions.
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Muhammad Imran, Carlos Castillo, Jesse Lucas, Patrick Meier, & Jakob Rogstadius. (2014). Coordinating human and machine intelligence to classify microblog communications in crises. In and P.C. Shih. L. Plotnick M. S. P. S.R. Hiltz (Ed.), ISCRAM 2014 Conference Proceedings – 11th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 712–721). University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University.
Abstract: An emerging paradigm for the processing of data streams involves human and machine computation working together, allowing human intelligence to process large-scale data. We apply this approach to the classification of crisis-related messages in microblog streams. We begin by describing the platform AIDR (Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response), which collects human annotations over time to create and maintain automatic supervised classifiers for social media messages. Next, we study two significant challenges in its design: (1) identifying which elements must be labeled by humans, and (2) determining when to ask for such annotations to be done. The first challenge is selecting the items to be labeled by crowd sourcing workers to maximize the productivity of their work. The second challenge is to schedule the work in order to reliably maintain high classification accuracy over time. We provide and validate answers to these challenges by extensive experimentation on real world datasets.
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Muhammad Imran, Firoj Alam, Umair Qazi, Steve Peterson, & Ferda Ofli. (2020). Rapid Damage Assessment Using Social Media Images by Combining Human and Machine Intelligence. In Amanda Hughes, Fiona McNeill, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings – 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 761–773). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: Rapid damage assessment is one of the core tasks that response organizations perform at the onset of a disaster to understand the scale of damage to infrastructures such as roads, bridges, and buildings. This work analyzes the usefulness of social media imagery content to perform rapid damage assessment during a real-world disaster. An automatic image processing system, which was activated in collaboration with a volunteer response organization, processed ~280K images to understand the extent of damage caused by the disaster. The system achieved an accuracy of 76% computed based on the feedback received from the domain experts who analyzed ~29K system-processed images during the disaster. An extensive error analysis reveals several insights and challenges faced by the system, which are vital for the research community to advance this line of research.
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Muhammad Imran, Prasenjit Mitra, & Jaideep Srivastava. (2016). Cross-Language Domain Adaptation for Classifying Crisis-Related Short Messages. In A. Tapia, P. Antunes, V.A. Bañuls, K. Moore, & J. Porto (Eds.), ISCRAM 2016 Conference Proceedings ? 13th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil: Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Abstract: Rapid crisis response requires real-time analysis of messages. After a disaster happens, volunteers attempt to classify tweets to determine needs, e.g., supplies, infrastructure damage, etc. Given labeled data, supervised machine learning can help classify these messages. Scarcity of labeled data causes poor performance in machine training. Can we reuse old tweets to train classifiers? How can we choose labeled tweets for training? Specifically, we study the usefulness of labeled data of past events. Do labeled tweets in different language help? We observe the performance of our classifiers trained using different combinations of training sets obtained from past disasters. We perform extensive experimentation on real crisis datasets and show that the past labels are useful when both source and target events are of the same type (e.g. both earthquakes). For similar languages (e.g., Italian and Spanish), cross-language domain adaptation was useful, however, when for different languages (e.g., Italian and English), the performance decreased.
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Muhammad Imran, Shady Elbassuoni, Carlos Castillo, Fernando Díaz, & Patrick Meier. (2013). Extracting information nuggets from disaster- Related messages in social media. In J. Geldermann and T. Müller S. Fortier F. F. T. Comes (Ed.), ISCRAM 2013 Conference Proceedings – 10th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 791–801). KIT; Baden-Baden: Karlsruher Institut fur Technologie.
Abstract: Microblogging sites such as Twitter can play a vital role in spreading information during “natural” or man-made disasters. But the volume and velocity of tweets posted during crises today tend to be extremely high, making it hard for disaster-affected communities and professional emergency responders to process the information in a timely manner. Furthermore, posts tend to vary highly in terms of their subjects and usefulness; from messages that are entirely off-topic or personal in nature, to messages containing critical information that augments situational awareness. Finding actionable information can accelerate disaster response and alleviate both property and human losses. In this paper, we describe automatic methods for extracting information from microblog posts. Specifically, we focus on extracting valuable “information nuggets”, brief, self-contained information items relevant to disaster response. Our methods leverage machine learning methods for classifying posts and information extraction. Our results, validated over one large disaster-related dataset, reveal that a careful design can yield an effective system, paving the way for more sophisticated data analysis and visualization systems.
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Murray E. Jennex. (2012). Social media – Truly viable for crisis response? In Z.Franco J. R. L. Rothkrantz (Ed.), ISCRAM 2012 Conference Proceedings – 9th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Vancouver, BC: Simon Fraser University.
Abstract: On September 8, 2011 the Great San Diego/Southwest Blackout occurred. Approximately 5 million people were affected by this blackout. This paper explores the availability of social media following such a crisis event. Contrary to expectations, the cell phone system did not have the expected availability and as a result, users had a difficult time using social media to status/contact family and friends. This paper presents a survey exploring the use and availability of social media during the Great San Diego/Southwest Blackout event. © 2012 ISCRAM.
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Nasik Muhammad Nafi, Avishek Bose, Sarthak Khanal, Doina Caragea, & William H. Hsu. (2020). Abstractive Text Summarization of Disaster-Related Documents. In Amanda Hughes, Fiona McNeill, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings – 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 881–892). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: Abstractive summarization is intended to capture key information from the full text of documents. In the application domain of disaster and crisis event reporting, key information includes disaster effects, cause, and severity. While some researches regarding information extraction in the disaster domain have focused on keyphrase extraction from short disaster-related texts like tweets, there is hardly any work that attempts abstractive summarization of long disaster-related documents. Following the recent success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in other domains, we leverage an RL-based state-of-the-art approach in abstractive summarization to summarize disaster-related documents. RL enables an agent to find an optimal policy by maximizing some reward. We design a novel hybrid reward metric for the disaster domain by combining \underline{Vec}tor Similarity and \underline{Lex}icon Matching (\textit{VecLex}) to maximize the relevance of the abstract to the source document while focusing on disaster-related keywords. We evaluate the model on a disaster-related subset of a CNN/Daily Mail dataset consisting of 104,913 documents. The results show that our approach produces more informative summaries and achieves higher \textit{VecLex} scores compared to the baseline.
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Neda Mohammadi, John E. Taylor, & Ryan Pollyea. (2017). Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Public Response to Human-Induced Seismic Perturbations. In eds Aurélie Montarnal Matthieu Lauras Chihab Hanachi F. B. Tina Comes (Ed.), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management (pp. 666–672). Albi, France: Iscram.
Abstract: There is general consensus that subsurface wastewater injections associated with unconventional oil and gas operations are responsible for the rapid increase of earthquake activity in the mid-U.S. Understanding the public response to these earthquakes is crucial for policy decisions that govern developing situational awareness and addressing perceived risks. However, we lack sufficient information on the reactive and recovery response behavior of the public tending to occur in the spatiotemporal vicinity of these events. Here, we review the spatiotemporal distribution of public response to the September 3, 2016, M5.8 earthquake in Pawnee, Oklahoma, USA, via a social media network (Twitter). Our findings highlight a statistically significant correlation between the spatial and temporal distribution of public response; and suggest the possible presence of a spatial distance decay, as well as a temporal far-field eect. Understanding the underlying structure of these correlations is fundamental to establishing deliberate policy decisions and targeted response actions.
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Nilani Algiriyage, Rangana Sampath, Raj Prasanna, Kristin Stock, Emma Hudson-Doyle, & David Johnston. (2021). Identifying Disaster-related Tweets: A Large-Scale Detection Model Comparison. In Anouck Adrot, Rob Grace, Kathleen Moore, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2021 Conference Proceedings – 18th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 731–743). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: Social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook are fast becoming a key instrument in gaining situational awareness (understanding the bigger picture of the situation) during disasters. This has provided multiple opportunities to gather relevant information in a timely manner to improve disaster response. In recent years, identifying crisis-related social media posts is analysed as an automatic task using machine learning (ML) or deep learning (DL) techniques. However, such supervised learning algorithms require labelled training data in the early hours of a crisis. Recently, multiple manually labelled disaster-related open-source twitter datasets have been released. In this work, we create a large dataset with 186,718 tweets by combining a number of such datasets and evaluate the performance of multiple ML and DL algorithms in classifying disaster-related tweets in three settings, namely ``in-disaster'', ``out-disaster'' and ``cross-disaster''. Our results show that the Bidirectional LSTM model with Word2Vec embeddings performs well for the tweet classification task in all three settings. We also make available the preprocessing steps and trained weights for future research.
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Nils Bourgon, Benamara Farah, Alda Mari, Véronique Moriceau, Gaetan Chevalier, Laurent Leygue, et al. (2022). Are Sudden Crises Making me Collapse? Measuring Transfer Learning Performances on Urgency Detection. In Rob Grace, & Hossein Baharmand (Eds.), ISCRAM 2022 Conference Proceedings – 19th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 701–709). Tarbes, France.
Abstract: This paper aims at measuring transfer learning performances across different types of crises related to sudden or unexpected events (like earthquakes, terror attacks, explosions, technological incidents) that cannot be foreseen by emergency services and on the occurrence of which they have virtually no control. Although sudden crises are present in most existing crisis datasets, as far as we are aware, no one studied their impact on classifiers performances when evaluated in an out-of-type scenario in which models are tested on a particular type of crisis unseen during training. Our contribution is threefold: (1) A new dataset of about 3,800 French tweets related to four sudden events that occurred in France annotated for both relatedness (i.e., useful vs. not useful for emergency responders) and urgency (i.e., not useful vs. urgent vs. not urgent), (2) A set of monotask and multitask zero-shot learning experiments to transfer knowledge across events and types, and finally, (3) Experiments involving few-shot learning to measure the amount of sudden events instances needed during training to guarantee good performances. When compared to a cross-event setting, our preliminary results are encouraging and show that transfer from predictable ecological crisis to sudden events is feasible and constitutes a first step towards real-time crisis management systems from social media content.
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Ntalla Athanasia, & Ponis T. Stavros. (2015). Twitter as an instrument for crisis response: The Typhoon Haiyan case study. In L. Palen, M. Buscher, T. Comes, & A. Hughes (Eds.), ISCRAM 2015 Conference Proceedings ? 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Kristiansand, Norway: University of Agder (UiA).
Abstract: The research presented in this paper attempts an initial evaluation of Twitter as an instrument for emergency response in the context of a recent crisis event. The case of the 2013 disaster, when typhoon Haiyan hit Philippines is examined by analyzing nine consecutive days of Twitter messages and comparing them to the actual events. The results indicate that during disasters, Twitter users tend to post messages to enhance situation awareness and to motivate people to act. Furthermore, tweets were found reliable and provided valuable information content, supporting the argument that Twitter presents a very good potential to become a useful tool in situations where rapid emergency response is essential.
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Nurollahian, S., Talegaonkar, I., Bell, A. Z., & Kogan, M. (2023). Factors Affecting Public’s Engagement with Tweets by Authoritative Sources During Crisis. In Jaziar Radianti, Ioannis Dokas, Nicolas Lalone, & Deepak Khazanchi (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International ISCRAM Conference (pp. 459–477). Omaha, USA: University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Abstract: People increasingly use social media at the time of crisis, which produces a social media data deluge, where the public may find it difficult to locate trustworthy and credible information. Therefore, they often turn to authoritative sources: official individuals and organizations who are trusted to provide reliable information. It is then imperative that their credible messages reach and engage the widest possible audience, especially among those affected. In this study, we explore the role of metadata and linguistic factors in facilitating three types of engagement — retweets, replies, and favorites— with posts by authoritative sources. We find that many factors are similarly important across models (popularity, sociability, activity). However, some features are salient for only a specific type of engagement. We conclude by providing guidance to authoritative sources on how they may optimize specific types of engagement: retweets for information propagation, replies for in-depth sense-making, and favorites for cross-purpose visibility.
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Online Media as a Means to Affect Public Trust in Emergency Responders. (2015). Amanda Lee Hughes; Apoorva Chauhan. In L. Palen, M. Buscher, T. Comes, & A. Hughes (Eds.), ISCRAM 2015 Conference Proceedings ? 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Kristiansand, Norway: University of Agder (UiA).
Abstract: This exploratory study examines how fire and police departments used online media during the 2012 Hurricane Sandy and how these media can be used to affect trust with members of the public during such an event. Using trust theory, we describe how online communications provide a means for emergency responders to appear trustworthy through online acts of ability, integrity, and benevolence. We conclude with implications and recommendations for emergency response practice and a trajectory of future work.
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Paige Maas, Shankar Iyer, Andreas Gros, Wonhee Park, Laura McGorman, Chaya Nayak, et al. (2019). Facebook Disaster Maps: Aggregate Insights for Crisis Response & Recovery. In Z. Franco, J. J. González, & J. H. Canós (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management. Valencia, Spain: Iscram.
Abstract: After a natural disaster or other crisis, humanitarian organizations need to know where affected people are located
and what resources they need. While this information is difficult to capture quickly through conventional methods,
aggregate usage patterns of social media apps like Facebook can help fill these information gaps.
In this paper, we describe the data and methodology that power Facebook Disaster Maps. These maps utilize
information about Facebook usage in areas impacted by natural hazards, producing aggregate pictures of how the
population is affected by and responding to the hazard. The maps include insights into evacuations, cell network
connectivity, access to electricity, and long-term displacement.
In addition to descriptions and examples of each map type, we describe the source data used to generate the maps,
and efforts taken to ensure the security and privacy of Facebook users. We also describe limitations of the current
methodologies and opportunities for improvement.
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Patrick C. Shih, Kyungsik Han, & John M. Carroll. (2014). Community incident chatter: Informing local incidents by aggregating local news and social media content. In and P.C. Shih. L. Plotnick M. S. P. S.R. Hiltz (Ed.), ISCRAM 2014 Conference Proceedings – 11th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 772–776). University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University.
Abstract: The emergence of social media provides an additional channel for broadcasting information to the public and support two-way communication between governmental stakeholders and the public during crisis. Research has focused on large-scale events, and few have investigated how social media can contribute to civic awareness and participation of small-scale incidents in a community-oriented context. Moreover, social media have been criticized because it is overabundant with noisy, inaccurate, and unprofessional information that are often misleading. This presents a serious challenge for community members to identify information that are relevant to a local incident. We introduce Community Incident Chatter (CIC), a smartphone application that is designed to aggregate information reported by formal news agencies and social media surrounding local incidents. Participants in a preliminary user study indicate that the community-oriented information presented in CIC is informative, relevant to the community, and has the potential of empowering community residents for responding to and managing local incidents.
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Pereira, J., Fidalgo, R., Lotufo, R., & Nogueira, R. (2023). Crisis Event Social Media Summarization with GPT-3 and Neural Reranking. In Jaziar Radianti, Ioannis Dokas, Nicolas Lalone, & Deepak Khazanchi (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International ISCRAM Conference (pp. 371–384). Omaha, USA: University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Abstract: Managing emergency events, such as natural disasters, requires management teams to have an up-to-date view of what is happening throughout the event. In this paper, we demonstrate how a method using a state-of-the-art open-sourced search engine and a large language model can generate accurate and comprehensive summaries by retrieving information from social media and online news sources. We evaluated our method on the TREC CrisisFACTS challenge dataset using automatic summarization metrics (e.g., Rouge-2 and BERTScore) and the manual evaluation performed by the challenge organizers. Our approach is the best in comprehensiveness despite presenting a high redundancy ratio in the generated summaries. In addition, since all pipeline components are few-shot, there is no need to collect training data, allowing us to deploy the system rapidly. Code is available at https://github.com/neuralmind-ai/visconde-crisis-summarization.
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Peter A. Jongejan, & Tim J. Grant. (2012). Social media in command & control: An extended framework. In Z.Franco J. R. L. Rothkrantz (Ed.), ISCRAM 2012 Conference Proceedings – 9th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Vancouver, BC: Simon Fraser University.
Abstract: Our research is aimed at investigating whether social media has a role to play in military Command & Control. Since social media is peer-to-peer, it could facilitate Network-Enabled Capabilities. A useful theoretical development is Reuter, Marx, and Pipek's (2011) proposal of a two-by-two matrix for social software infrastructure. Their framework assumes one-way communication and monolithic organizations. However, to operate in a real-time, dynamic environment, crisis management organizations must close the decision-making loop. Moreover, they must be structured into an action part that handles the crisis on-site, and a control part that monitors and directs operations in real time. The purpose of this work-in-progress paper is to present our extension of Reuter et al's framework. The paper outlines Reuter et al's framework, summarises the basic theory of Command & Control, describes how we extended Reuter et al's framework, and outlines further research. © 2012 ISCRAM.
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Pooneh Mousavi, & Cody Buntain. (2022). “Please Donate for the Affected”: Supporting Emergency Managers in Finding Volunteers and Donations in Twitter Across Disasters. In Rob Grace, & Hossein Baharmand (Eds.), ISCRAM 2022 Conference Proceedings – 19th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 605–622). Tarbes, France.
Abstract: Despite the outpouring of social support posted to social media channels in the aftermath of disaster, finding and managing content that can translate into community relief, donations, volunteering, or other recovery support is difficult due to the lack of sufficient annotated data around volunteerism. This paper outlines three experiments to alleviate these difficulties. First, we estimate to what degree volunteerism content from one crisis is transferable to another by evaluating the consistency of language in volunteer-and donation-related social media content across 78 disasters. Second it introduces methods for providing computational support in this emergency support function and developing semi-automated models for classifying volunteer-and donation-related social media content in new disaster events. Results show volunteer-and donation-related social media content is sufficiently similar across disasters and disaster types to warrant transferring models across disasters, and we evaluate simple resampling techniques for tuning these models. We then introduce and evaluate a weak-supervision approach to integrate domain knowledge from emergency response officers with machine learningmodelstoimproveclassification accuracy andacceleratethisemergencysupportinnewevents. This method helps to overcome the scarcity in data that we observe related to volunteer-and donation-related social media content.
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Pragna Debnath, Saniul Haque, Somprakash Bandyopadhyay, & Siuli Roy. (2016). Post-disaster Situational Analysis from WhatsApp Group Chats of Emergency Response Providers. In A. Tapia, P. Antunes, V.A. Bañuls, K. Moore, & J. Porto (Eds.), ISCRAM 2016 Conference Proceedings ? 13th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil: Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Abstract: Use of social media has established itself as one of the important information carriers in the field of disaster management. However, use of Twitter and Facebook by victims, first responders and others generates information that is varied, unstructured and unreliable. On the other hand, NGOs, operating in the disaster area, are often involved in intra-organizational communication using messaging apps like WhatsApp, and their group interactions can help in gathering meaningful data for situational analysis and need assessment. Our focus is to automate the process of filtering relevant information, query-based clustering of pertinent information from a WhatsApp group conversation of a specific volunteer group, so that situation analysis and need assessment can be done more rapidly. We have evaluated our scheme using WhatsApp chat log of a medical volunteer group in two post-disaster scenarios and concluded that it can provide valuable insights about region-specific resource requirements and allocation for effective decision making.
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Rachel Samuels, John Eric Taylor, & Neda Mohammadi. (2018). The Sound of Silence: Exploring How Decreases in Tweets Contribute to Local Crisis Identification. In Kees Boersma, & Brian Tomaszeski (Eds.), ISCRAM 2018 Conference Proceedings – 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 696–704). Rochester, NY (USA): Rochester Institute of Technology.
Abstract: Recent research has identified a correlation between increasing Twitter activity and incurred damage in disasters. This research, however, fails to account for localized emergencies occurring in areas in which people have lost power, otherwise lack internet connectivity, or are uncompelled to Tweet during a disaster. In this paper, we analyze the correlation between daily Tweet counts and FEMA Building Level Damage Assessments during Hurricane Harvey. We find that the absolute deviation of Tweet counts from steady state is a potentially useful tool for the evolving information needs of emergency responders. Our results show this to be a more consistent and persistent metric for flood damage across the full temporal extent of the disaster. This shows that, when considering the varied information needs of emergency responders, social media tools that seek to identify emergencies need to consider both where Tweet counts are increasing and where they are dropping off.
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Raquel Gimenez, Leire Labaka, Jose Mari Sarriegi, & Josune Hernantes. (2015). Development of a Virtual Community of Practice on Natural Disasters. In L. Palen, M. Buscher, T. Comes, & A. Hughes (Eds.), ISCRAM 2015 Conference Proceedings ? 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Kristiansand, Norway: University of Agder (UiA).
Abstract: This research identifies from literature principles of successful Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoPs) and explains how they have been fulfilled in the development of a VCoP that aims at contributing to knowledge sharing on natural disasters. The developed VCoP involves 70 experts in dealing with natural disasters from different hierarchical levels, organizations and nationalities of Europe. The VCoP has been developed within a European project from the 7th framework program. During the project three workshops were arranged for the members of the VCoP to know each other and to develop a living document. The living document is a web based tool used by the VCoP to share documents and insights, and it helps VCoP members networking. This paper provides direction for developing a VCoP to exchange lessons learned reports among crisis managers and first responders, and it identifies barriers that hinder the use of the living document.
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Rémy Bossu, Robert Steed, Gilles Mazet-Roux, Caroline Etivant, & Fréderic Roussel. (2015). THE EMSC TOOLS USED TO DETECT AND DIAGNOSE THE IMPACT OF GLOBAL EARTHQUAKES FROM DIRECT AND INDIRECT EYEWITNESSES? CONTRIBUTIONS. In L. Palen, M. Buscher, T. Comes, & A. Hughes (Eds.), ISCRAM 2015 Conference Proceedings ? 12th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Kristiansand, Norway: University of Agder (UiA).
Abstract: This paper presents the strategy and operational tools developed and implemented at the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) to detect and diagnose the impact of global earthquakes within minutes by combining « flashsourcing » (real time monitoring of website traffic) with social media monitoring and crowdsourcing.
This approach serves both the seismological community and the public and can contribute to improved earthquake response. It collects seismological observations, improves situation awareness from a few tens of seconds to a couple of hours after earthquake occurrence and is the basis of innovative targeted real time public information services.
We also show that graphical input methods can improve crowdsourcing tools both for the increasing use of mobile devices and to erase language barriers. Finally we show how social network harvesting could provide information on indirect earthquake effects such as triggered landslides and fires, which are difficult to predict and monitor through existing geophysical networks.
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Reza Mazloom, HongMin Li, Doina Caragea, Muhammad Imran, & Cornelia Caragea. (2018). Classification of Twitter Disaster Data Using a Hybrid Feature-Instance Adaptation Approach. In Kees Boersma, & Brian Tomaszeski (Eds.), ISCRAM 2018 Conference Proceedings – 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 727–735). Rochester, NY (USA): Rochester Institute of Technology.
Abstract: Huge amounts of data that are generated on social media during emergency situations are regarded as troves of critical information. The use of supervised machine learning techniques in the early stages of a disaster is challenged by the lack of labeled data for that particular disaster. Furthermore, supervised models trained on labeled data from a prior disaster may not produce accurate results, given the inherent variation between the current and the prior disasters. To address the challenges posed by the lack of labeled data for a target disaster, we propose to use a hybrid feature-instance adaptation approach based on matrix factorization and the k nearest neighbors algorithm, respectively. The proposed hybrid adaptation approach is used to select a subset of the source disaster data that is representative for the target disaster. The selected subset is subsequently used to learn accurate Naive Bayes classifiers for the target disaster.
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Richard McCreadie, Cody Buntain, & Ian Soboroff. (2020). Incident Streams 2019: Actionable Insights and How to Find Them. In Amanda Hughes, Fiona McNeill, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings – 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 744–760). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: The ubiquity of mobile internet-enabled devices combined with wide-spread social media use during emergencies is posing new challenges for response personnel. In particular, service operators are now expected to monitor these online channels to extract actionable insights and answer questions from the public. A lack of adequate tools makes this monitoring impractical at the scale of many emergencies. The TREC Incident Streams (TREC-IS) track drives research into solving this technology gap by bringing together academia and industry to develop techniques for extracting actionable insights from social media streams during emergencies. This paper covers the second year of TREC-IS, hosted in 2019 with two editions, 2019-A and 2019-B, contributing 12 new events and approximately 20,000 new tweets across 25 information categories, with 15 research groups participating across the world. This paper provides an overview of these new editions, actionable insights from data labelling, and the automated techniques employed by participant systems that appear most effective.
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