Crisis Mapping during Natural Disasters via Text Analysis of Social Media Messages

Recent disasters demonstrated the central role of social media during emergencies thus motivating the exploitation of such data for crisis mapping. We propose a crisis mapping system that addresses limitations of current state-of-the-art approaches by analyzing the textual content of disaster reports from a twofold perspective. A damage detection component employs a SVM classifier to detect mentions of damage among emergency reports. A novel geoparsing technique is proposed and used to perform message geolocation. We report on a case study to show how the information extracted through damage detection and message geolocation can be combined to produce accurate crisis maps. Our crisis maps clearly detect both highly and lightly damaged areas, thus opening up the possibility to prioritize rescue efforts where they are most needed

On the need of opening up crowdsourced emergency management systems

Nowadays,socialmediaanalysissystemsarefeedingonusercontributed data, either for beneficial purposes, such as emergency management, or for user profiling and mass surveillance. Here, we carry out a discussion about the power and pitfalls of public accessibility to social media-based systems, with specific regards to the emergency management application EARS (Earthquake Alert and Report System). We investigate whether opening such systems to the population at large would further strengthen the link between communities of volunteer citizens, intelligent systems, and decision makers, thus going in the direction of developing more sustainable and resilient societies. Our analysis highlights fundamental chal- lenges and provides interesting insights into a number of research directions with the aim of developing human-centered social media-based systems

Impromptu crisis mapping to prioritize emergency response

To visualize post-emergency damage, a crisis-mapping system uses readily available semantic annotators, a machine-learning classifier to analyze relevant tweets, and interactive maps to rank extracted situational information. The system was validated against data from two recent disasters in Italy

Pulling Information from Social Media in the Aftermath of Unpredictable Disasters

Social media have become a primary communication channel among people and are continuously overwhelmed by huge volumes of User Generated Content. This is especially true in the aftermath of unpredictable disasters, when users report facts, descriptions and photos of the unfolding event. This material contains actionable information that can greatly help rescuers to achieve a better response to crises, but its volume and variety render manual processing unfeasible. This paper reports the experience we gained from developing and using a web-enabled system for the online detection and monitoring of unpredictable events such as earthquakes and floods. The system captures selected message streams from Twitter and offers decision support functionalities for acquiring situational awareness from textual content and for quantifying the impact of disasters. The software architecture of the system is described and the approaches adopted for messages filtering, emergency detection and emergency monitoring are discussed. For each module, the results of real-world experiments are reported. The modular design makes the system easy configurable and allowed us to conduct experiments on different crises, including Emilia earthquake in 2012 and Genoa flood in 2014. Finally, some possible functionalities relying on the analysis of multimedia information are introduced

Towards better social crisis data with HERMES: Hybrid sensing for EmeRgency ManagEment System

People involved in mass emergencies increasingly publish information-rich contents in online social networks (OSNs), thus acting as a distributed and resilient network of human sensors. In this work, we present HERMES, a system designed to enrich the information spontaneously disclosed by OSN users in the aftermath of disasters. HERMES leverages a mixed data collection strategy, called hybrid crowdsensing, and state-of-the-art AI techniques. Evaluated in real-world emergencies, HERMES proved to increase: (i) the amount of the available damage information; (ii) the density (up to 7x) and the variety (up to 18x) of the retrieved geographic information; (iii) the geographic coverage (up to 30%) and granularity

Natural Disaster Application on Big Data and Machine Learning: A Review

Natural disasters are events that are difficult to avoid. There are several ways of reducing the risks of natural disasters. One of them is implementing disaster reduction programs. There are already several developed countries that apply the concept of disaster reduction. In addition to disaster reduction programs, there are several ways to predict or reducing the risks using artificial intelligence technology. One of them is big data, machine learning, and deep learning. By utilizing this method at the moment, it facilitates tasks in visualizing, analyzing, and predicting natural disaster. This research will focus on conducting a review process and understanding the purpose of machine learning and big data in the area of disaster management and natural disaster. The result of this paper is providing insight and the use of big data, machine learning, and deep learning in 6 disaster management area. This 6-disaster management area includes early warning damage, damage assessment, monitoring and detection, forecasting and predicting, and post-disaster coordination, and response, and long-term risk assessment and reduction

AN APPLICATION-ORIENTED IMPLEMENTATION OF HEXAGONAL ON-THE-FLY BINNING METRICS FOR CITY-SCALE GEOREFERENCED SOCIAL MEDIA DATA

The use of georeferenced social media data (GSMD) for informing municipal policy-making has significant potential, particularly in addressing pressing socio-environmental challenges. Geospatial dashboards have emerged as a powerful tool for knowledge communication and supporting urban sustainability. However, there has been little emphasis on how to display and make GSMD more accessible, partly due to their complex nature. Existing visualization tools lack sophisticated methods, especially for complex urban contexts, and the methodological choice can significantly impact the interpretation of results. In this study, we propose the use of hexagonal binning as an interactive visualization method and assess three different on-the-fly binning metrics for mapping GSMD. We expand the use of the signed chi metric for spatial purposes and apply it in a case study in Bonn, Germany. We evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed metrics as well as visualizations and highlight the challenges of visualizing GSMD particularly in the context of Instagram. Our findings highlight the importance of using appropriate context-dependent visualization methods when analyzing data at the municipal level