Situation fencing: making geo-fencing personal and dynamic

Geo-fencing has recently been applied to multiple applications including media recommendation, advertisements, wildlife monitoring, and recreational activities. However current geo-fencing systems work with static geographical boundaries. Situation Fencing allows for these boundaries to vary automatically based on situations derived by a combination of global and personal data streams. We present a generic approach for situation fencing, and demonstrate how it can be operationalized in practice. The results obtained in a personalized allergy alert application are encouraging and open door for building thousands of similar applications using the same framework in near future

Online indexing and clustering of social media data for emergency management

Social media becomes a vital part in our daily communication practice, creating a huge amount of data and covering different real-world situations. Currently, there is a tendency in making use of social media during emergency management and response. Most of this effort is performed by a huge number of volunteers browsing through social media data and preparing maps that can be used by professional first responders. Automatic analysis approaches are needed to directly support the response teams in monitoring and also understanding the evolution of facts in social media during an emergency situation. In this paper, we investigate the problem of real-time sub-events identification in social media data (i.e., Twitter, Flickr and YouTube) during emergencies. A processing framework is presented serving to generate situational reports/summaries from social media data. This framework relies in particular on online indexing and online clustering of media data streams. Online indexing aims at tracking the relevant vocabulary to capture the evolution of sub-events over time. Online clustering, on the other hand, is used to detect and update the set of sub-events using the indices built during online indexing. To evaluate the framework, social media data related to Hurricane Sandy 2012 was collected and used in a series of experiments. In particular some online indexing methods have been tested against a proposed method to show their suitability. Moreover, the quality of online clustering has been studied using standard clustering indices. Overall the framework provides a great opportunity for supporting emergency responders as demonstrated in real-world emergency exercises

Real-time data exploitation supported by model- and event-driven architecture to enhance situation awareness, application to crisis management

An effective crisis response requires up-to-date information. The crisis cell must reach for new, external, data sources. However, new data lead to new issues: their volume, veracity, variety or velocity cannot be managed by humans only, especially under high stress and time pressure. This paper proposes (i) a framework to enhance situation awareness while managing the 5Vs of Big Data, (ii) general principles to be followed and (iii) a new architecture implementing the proposed framework. The latter merges event-driven and model-driven architectures. It has been tested on a realistic flood scenario set up by official French services

Discovering anomalous events from urban informatics data

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under its International Research Centre @ Singapore Funding Initiativ

FUSING PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL SENSORS FOR SITUATION AWARENESS

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH