9,454 research outputs found
eStorys: A visual storyboard system supporting back-channel communication for emergencies
This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Journal of Visual Languages & Computing. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2010 Elsevier B.V.In this paper we present a new web mashup system for helping people and professionals to retrieve information about emergencies and disasters. Today, the use of the web during emergencies, is confirmed by the employment of systems like Flickr, Twitter or Facebook as demonstrated in the cases of Hurricane Katrina, the July 7, 2005 London bombings, and the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Polytechnic University. Many pieces of information are currently available on the web that can be useful for emergency purposes and range from messages on forums and blogs to georeferenced photos. We present here a system that, by mixing information available on the web, is able to help both people and emergency professionals in rapidly obtaining data on emergency situations by using multiple web channels. In this paper we introduce a visual system, providing a combination of tools that demonstrated to be effective in such emergency situations, such as spatio/temporal search features, recommendation and filtering tools, and storyboards. We demonstrated the efficacy of our system by means of an analytic evaluation (comparing it with others available on the web), an usability evaluation made by expert users (students adequately trained) and an experimental evaluation with 34 participants.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and
Banco Santander
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
TriggerCit: Early Flood Alerting using Twitter and Geolocation - A Comparison with Alternative Sources
Rapid impact assessment in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster is
essential to provide adequate information to international organisations, local
authorities, and first responders. Social media can support emergency response
with evidence-based content posted by citizens and organisations during ongoing
events. In the paper, we propose TriggerCit: an early flood alerting tool with
a multilanguage approach focused on timeliness and geolocation. The paper
focuses on assessing the reliability of the approach as a triggering system,
comparing it with alternative sources for alerts, and evaluating the quality
and amount of complementary information gathered. Geolocated visual evidence
extracted from Twitter by TriggerCit was analysed in two case studies on floods
in Thailand and Nepal in 2021.Comment: 12 pages Keywords Social Media, Disaster management, Early Alertin
A Citizen Science Approach for Analyzing Social Media With Crowdsourcing
Social media have the potential to provide timely information about emergency situations and sudden events. However, finding relevant information among the millions of posts being added every day can be difficult, and in current approaches developing an automatic data analysis project requires time and technical skills. This work presents a new approach for the analysis of social media posts, based on configurable automatic classification combined with Citizen Science methodologies. The process is facilitated by a set of flexible, automatic and open-source data processing tools called the Citizen Science Solution Kit. The kit provides a comprehensive set of tools that can be used and personalized in different situations, particularly during natural emergencies, starting from images and text contained in the posts. The tools can be employed by citizen scientists for filtering, classifying, and geolocating the content with a human-in-the-loop approach to support the data analyst, including feedback and suggestions on how to configure the automated tools, and techniques to gather inputs from citizens. Using flooding scenario as a guiding example, this paper illustrates the structure and functioning of the different tools proposed to support citizens scientists in their projects, and a methodological approach to their use. The process is then validated by discussing three case studies based on the Albania earthquake of 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Thailand floods of 2021. The results suggest that a flexible approach to tools composition and configuration can support a timely setup of an analysis project by citizen scientists, especially in case of emergencies in unexpected locations.ISSN:2169-353
IMEXT: a method and system to extract geolocated images from Tweets - Analysis of a case study
open5noopenFrancalanci, Chiara; Guglielmino, Paolo; Montalcini, Matteo; Scalia, Gabriele; Pernici, BarbaraFrancalanci, Chiara; Guglielmino, Paolo; Montalcini, Matteo; Scalia, Gabriele; Pernici, Barbar
Image-based Social Sensing: Combining AI and the Crowd to Mine Policy-Adherence Indicators from Twitter
Social Media provides a trove of information that, if aggregated and analysed
appropriately can provide important statistical indicators to policy makers. In
some situations these indicators are not available through other mechanisms.
For example, given the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, it is essential for
governments to have access to reliable data on policy-adherence with regards to
mask wearing, social distancing, and other hard-to-measure quantities. In this
paper we investigate whether it is possible to obtain such data by aggregating
information from images posted to social media. The paper presents VisualCit, a
pipeline for image-based social sensing combining recent advances in image
recognition technology with geocoding and crowdsourcing techniques. Our aim is
to discover in which countries, and to what extent, people are following
COVID-19 related policy directives. We compared the results with the indicators
produced within the CovidDataHub behavior tracker initiative. Preliminary
results shows that social media images can produce reliable indicators for
policy makers.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, to be published in Proceedings of ICSE Software
Engineering in Society, May 202
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