Using social media for sub-event detection during disasters

AbstractSocial media platforms have become fundamental tools for sharing information during natural disasters or catastrophic events. This paper presents SEDOM-DD (Sub-Events Detection on sOcial Media During Disasters), a new method that analyzes user posts to discover sub-events that occurred after a disaster (e.g., collapsed buildings, broken gas pipes, floods). SEDOM-DD has been evaluated with datasets of different sizes that contain real posts from social media related to different natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes, floods and hurricanes). Starting from such data, we generated synthetic datasets with different features, such as different percentages of relevant posts and/or geotagged posts. Experiments performed on both real and synthetic datasets showed that SEDOM-DD is able to identify sub-events with high accuracy. For example, with a percentage of relevant posts of 80% and geotagged posts of 15%, our method detects the sub-events and their areas with an accuracy of 85%, revealing the high accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed approach

IMPLANTACIÓN DE UNA APLICACIÓN MÓVIL PARA PPGIS DESTINADA A DESLIZAMIENTOS E INTEGRADA A UNA IDE

Se ha generado una aplicación móvil para participación ciudadana aplicada a Sistemas de Información Geográfica –SIG- para que la población pueda proporcionar datos específicos sobre zonas que hayan sufrido deslizamientos o propensas a este fenómeno, de manera que los investigadores o tomadores de decisiones puedan contar con datos actualizados y geo localizados de estas zonas. En base a información proporcionada por la Secretaría de Gestión de Riesgos –SGR–  y la experiencia del personal del proyecto, se definieron los perfiles y contenidos de la encuesta implementada a través de la aplicación móvil. Posteriormente se utilizó esta aplicación para levantamiento de información en determinadas áreas de la ciudad de Cuenca en las que se realizaron estudios sobre deslizamiento. Los resultados de la información levantada pueden ser visualizados en la plataforma de Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales de la Universidad de Cuenca –IDE UCuenca–, en diferentes formatos. Adicionalmente, el contenido de la aplicación móvil fue validado por el personal de la SGR.

An enhanced binary bat and Markov clustering algorithms to improve event detection for heterogeneous news text documents

Event Detection (ED) works on identifying events from various types of data. Building an ED model for news text documents greatly helps decision-makers in various disciplines in improving their strategies. However, identifying and summarizing events from such data is a non-trivial task due to the large volume of published heterogeneous news text documents. Such documents create a high-dimensional feature space that influences the overall performance of the baseline methods in ED model. To address such a problem, this research presents an enhanced ED model that includes improved methods for the crucial phases of the ED model such as Feature Selection (FS), ED, and summarization. This work focuses on the FS problem by automatically detecting events through a novel wrapper FS method based on Adapted Binary Bat Algorithm (ABBA) and Adapted Markov Clustering Algorithm (AMCL), termed ABBA-AMCL. These adaptive techniques were developed to overcome the premature convergence in BBA and fast convergence rate in MCL. Furthermore, this study proposes four summarizing methods to generate informative summaries. The enhanced ED model was tested on 10 benchmark datasets and 2 Facebook news datasets. The effectiveness of ABBA-AMCL was compared to 8 FS methods based on meta-heuristic algorithms and 6 graph-based ED methods. The empirical and statistical results proved that ABBAAMCL surpassed other methods on most datasets. The key representative features demonstrated that ABBA-AMCL method successfully detects real-world events from Facebook news datasets with 0.96 Precision and 1 Recall for dataset 11, while for dataset 12, the Precision is 1 and Recall is 0.76. To conclude, the novel ABBA-AMCL presented in this research has successfully bridged the research gap and resolved the curse of high dimensionality feature space for heterogeneous news text documents. Hence, the enhanced ED model can organize news documents into distinct events and provide policymakers with valuable information for decision making

A framework for smart traffic management using heterogeneous data sources

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.Traffic congestion constitutes a social, economic and environmental issue to modern cities as it can negatively impact travel times, fuel consumption and carbon emissions. Traffic forecasting and incident detection systems are fundamental areas of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that have been widely researched in the last decade. These systems provide real time information about traffic congestion and other unexpected incidents that can support traffic management agencies to activate strategies and notify users accordingly. However, existing techniques suffer from high false alarm rate and incorrect traffic measurements. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in integrating different types of data sources to achieve higher precision in traffic forecasting and incident detection techniques. In fact, a considerable amount of literature has grown around the influence of integrating data from heterogeneous data sources into existing traffic management systems. This thesis presents a Smart Traffic Management framework for future cities. The proposed framework fusions different data sources and technologies to improve traffic prediction and incident detection systems. It is composed of two components: social media and simulator component. The social media component consists of a text classification algorithm to identify traffic related tweets. These traffic messages are then geolocated using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Finally, with the purpose of further analysing user emotions within the tweet, stress and relaxation strength detection is performed. The proposed text classification algorithm outperformed similar studies in the literature and demonstrated to be more accurate than other machine learning algorithms in the same dataset. Results from the stress and relaxation analysis detected a significant amount of stress in 40% of the tweets, while the other portion did not show any emotions associated with them. This information can potentially be used for policy making in transportation, to understand the users��� perception of the transportation network. The simulator component proposes an optimisation procedure for determining missing roundabouts and urban roads flow distribution using constrained optimisation. Existing imputation methodologies have been developed on straight section of highways and their applicability for more complex networks have not been validated. This task presented a solution for the unavailability of roadway sensors in specific parts of the network and was able to successfully predict the missing values with very low percentage error. The proposed imputation methodology can serve as an aid for existing traffic forecasting and incident detection methodologies, as well as for the development of more realistic simulation networks

Una arquitectura para el uso de las redes sociales por agencias gubernamentales en la gestión de emergencias

Una emergencia es una situación imprevisible que requiere de acciones de respuesta para minimizar posibles daños humanos y materiales. La gestión de emergencias consiste en un conjunto de actividades para la mitigación, preparación, respuesta y recuperación de una situación de emergencia que involucra a agencias gubernamentales, organizaciones no gubernamentales, comunidades de voluntarios, comunidades de práctica, el sector privado y los ciudadanos. Durante las 4 fases de la gestión de emergencias se requiere una comunicación constante entre las personas y organizaciones afectadas e involucradas con el objetivo de coordinar acciones de respuesta, informar de actividades llevadas a cabo, conocer el estado de la situación y dar asistencia a solicitudes de ayuda, entre otras. Las Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones (TIC) proporcionan los mecanismos para dar soporte al intercambio, almacenamiento, procesamiento y distribución de la información generada en este contexto. Los medios sociales establecen un canal de comunicación complementario para habilitar una participación activa de los ciudadanos en la gestión de situaciones de emergencia. Uno de los medios sociales más utilizados son las redes sociales, que permiten a los usuarios compartir información de manera textual o multimedia con una red de contactos, así como valorar, responder o compartir un contenido publicado de manera sencilla a través de páginas Web, aplicaciones de escritorio y aplicaciones móviles. En los últimos años, las redes sociales han generado un interés en constante aumento con respecto a su utilización por agencias gubernamentales durante la gestión de situaciones de emergencia, con el objetivo de hacer más eficiente la comunicación e interacción entre los ciudadanos, las comunidades y el personal de las agencias gubernamentales involucradas. Se considera que las redes sociales pueden ser utilizadas como un canal de comunicación bidireccional que permita la publicación y monitorización de información. Sin embargo, se han identificado dificultades y carencias para la utilización eficiente de las redes sociales por agencias gubernamentales en este contexto. Los problemas principales son: (1) escasez de recursos humanos y tecnológicos para llevar a cabo una actividad constante durante todas las fases de la gestión de situaciones de emergencia; (2) una sobrecarga de la información generada, en especial durante las fases de respuesta y recuperación de una situación de emergencia específica; y (3) la desconfianza en la veracidad de la información, debido a contenido falso y rumores que se suelen generar alrededor de una situación de emergencia. Para ayudar a resolver estos problemas principales identificados, se define un conjunto de 16 requerimientos específicos de las agencias gubernamentales para la utilización de las redes sociales en la gestión de situaciones de emergencia. Estos requerimientos están basados en la literatura, en particular en 3 estudios de investigación llevados a cabo con personal de las agencias gubernamentales, y un estudio de la actividad y el comportamiento de las agencias gubernamentales en la red social Twitter durante una situación de emergencia real. En esta tesis doctoral se describe el diseño y desarrollo de una arquitectura tecnológica que tiene como objetivo facilitar la utilización de las redes sociales por agencias gubernamentales como un canal de comunicación bidireccional durante situaciones de emergencia a partir del cumplimiento de los requerimientos identificados. Esta arquitectura está compuesta por un modelo de datos y un lenguaje de procesos para el almacenamiento y procesamiento de la información generada en las redes sociales durante la gestión de situaciones de emergencia. La base de la arquitectura desarrollada es un modelo de datos común e interoperable entre las distintas plataformas de redes sociales. El modelo de datos se define utilizando un diagrama de clases UML que toma en cuenta la estructura general de las redes sociales más comunes utilizadas actualmente y la estructura necesaria para almacenar los datos relacionados con el cumplimiento de los requerimientos de las agencias gubernamentales. Con el objetivo de proporcionar interoperabilidad, se incluye un esquema de datos utilizando el lenguaje estándar XSD que describe las clases, atributos, operaciones y relaciones de los elementos del modelo de datos. El segundo componente principal de la arquitectura es un lenguaje de procesos que permite la incorporación de módulos de procesos que cubren las necesidades de las agencias gubernamentales en este contexto. Los procesos se definen utilizando la notación BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) que describe las tareas, eventos, datos, mensajes y contextos involucrados en el cumplimiento de los requerimientos de las agencias gubernamentales. Los procesos incluidos pueden definirse como componentes reutilizables que llevan a cabo una tarea o actividad específica relacionada con el uso de las redes sociales en la gestión de situaciones de emergencia. Para medir el desempeño de la arquitectura desarrollada, se lleva a cabo una evaluación analítica compuesta por 2 estudios complementarios: (1) evaluación del cumplimiento por parte de la arquitectura desarrollada de los requerimientos identificados; y (2) comparativa del cumplimiento de los requerimientos con respecto a un conjunto de herramientas existentes de sindicación y agregación de contenido y la arquitectura. La evaluación demuestra que la arquitectura proporciona los mecanismos tecnológicos para el cumplimiento de los requerimientos identificados que ayudan a resolver los problemas principales de la utilización de las redes sociales por agencias gubernamentales en la gestión de situaciones de emergencia, en comparación con las herramientas generales existentes de sindicación y agregación de contenido. A partir del diseño y desarrollo de la arquitectura tecnológica en esta tesis doctoral, se proporciona una solución que facilita la utilización de las redes sociales por las agencias gubernamentales en la gestión de situaciones de emergencia, a través del cumplimiento de los requerimientos específicos de las agencias gubernamentales que ayudan a resolver los problemas principales de escasez de recursos humanos y tecnológicos, la sobrecarga de la información generada y la desconfianza en la veracidad de la información recibida.An emergency is an unexpected situation that requires response actions to minimize possible human and material damage. Emergency management is a set of activities for mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery of an emergency situation that involves governmental agencies, non-governmental agencies, communities of practice and volunteers, the private sector and citizens. During the four phases of emergency management, a constant communication is required between people and organizations affected and involved to coordinate response actions, inform about activities being performed, know the status of the situation and respond to help requests, among others. Information and Communications Technology (ICT) provide mechanisms to support the exchange, storage, processing and distribution of the information generated in this context. Social media provides an additional communication channel to enable active participation from citizens in emergency management. One of the most used social media platforms are social networks that allow users to share information in a textual or multimedia way with a user network, and to assess, respond or share a published content through the use of Web pages, desktop and mobile applications. In recent years, social networks have generated an increasing interest for their use by government agencies for emergency management in order to make more efficient the communication and interaction between citizens, communities and staff of government agencies involved. In general, social networks are considered as bidirectional communication channels that allow the publication and monitorization of information. However, some difficulties and shortcomings have been identified for the efficient use of social media by government agencies in this context. The main problems are: (1) limited human and technological resources to enable a continuous activity in social networks during all phases of emergency management; (2) an overload of information generated, especially during the response and recovery phases of an emergency event; and (3) distrust in the accuracy of the information, due to false content and rumors that usually appear during an emergency situation. In order to help solving these identified problems, a set of 16 specific requirements is defined for the use of social media by government agencies in emergency management. These requirements are based on the literature, particularly in 3 research studies conducted with personnel of government agencies, and a study of the activity and behavior of governmental agencies in Twitter during a real emergency event. In this thesis is presented the design and development of a technological architecture that aims to facilitate the use of social media by government agencies as a bidirectional communication channel during emergencies based on the fulfillment of the requirements identified. This architecture consists of a data model and a process language for the storage and process of information generated in social networks during emergency management. usually appear during an emergency situation. In order to help solving these identified problems, a set of 16 specific requirements is defined for the use of social media by government agencies in emergency management. These requirements are based on the literature, particularly in 3 research studies conducted with personnel of government agencies, and a study of the activity and behavior of governmental agencies in Twitter during a real emergency event. In this thesis is presented the design and development of a technological architecture that aims to facilitate the use of social media by government agencies as a bidirectional communication channel during emergencies based on the fulfillment of the requirements identified. This architecture consists of a data model and a process language for the storage and process of information generated in social networks during emergency management. viii The basis of the architecture developed is a data model interoperable between the various social networking platforms. The data model is defined using a UML class diagram that considers the overall structure of the most common social networks currently used and the structure needed to store information related to the fulfillment of the requirements of government agencies. In order to provide interoperability, a database schema is created using the XSD standard language for describing the classes, attributes, operations and relationships of all the elements in the data model. The second component of the architecture is a process language that allows the incorporation of process modules that meet the needs of government agencies in this context. The process language is defined using the BPMN notation (Business Process Modeling Notation) and describe the tasks, events, data, messages and contexts involved in meeting the requirements of government agencies. The processes included are defined as reusable components that perform a specific task or activity related to the use of social media in emergency management. To assess the performance of the architecture, an analytical evaluation is carried out that consists of two complementary studies: (1) an assessment of the fulfillment by the architecture of the requirements identified; and (2) a comparative between a set of existing syndication and aggregation tools and the architecture with respect to the fulfillment of the requirements identified. The evaluation demonstrates that the architecture provides the technological mechanisms to fulfill the identified requirements in order to help solving the main problems of the use of social media by government agencies in emergency management, in comparison to existing syndication and aggregation tools. The technological architecture designed and developed in this doctoral thesis provides a solution that facilitates the use of social media by government agencies during emergency management through the fulfillment of specific requirements identified in this context that help solving the main problems of limited human and technological resources, information overload and distrust in the information received.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ciencia y Tecnología InformáticaPresidente: Jesús Hilario Canós Cerdá.- Secretario: Telmo Agustín Zarraonandía Ayo.- Vocal: Víctor Amadeo Bañuls Silver