Description
ofTutorial

Title :
Social Media Analysis for Situation Awareness during Crises

Organizers :

• Gregoire Burel
• Mayank Kejriwal
• Prashant Khare

Abstract :

Recent disasters and crises (such as Hurricanes Irma, Harvey and Maria) have affected many regions of the globe, causing damage in the billions of dollars and hundreds of lives. Communication technologies, such as social media, can play an important role in preventing some of this damage by helping first responders and humanitarian organizations mobilize resources effectively. Social media has emerged as a powerful tool for the crisis informatics community because it serves as a field-level, rich source of real-time information that would otherwise not be available.

Unfortunately, gaining situation awareness from social media content using semi-automatic methods is a difficult task due to the velocity, volume and noise associated with such data. In this tutorial, we will cover the primary steps that can be used for analysing crisis-related social media content in real-world crisis situations.

We will present a situation-awareness data analysis pipeline that focuses on some of the challenges that occur when dealing with social media, including steps ranging from data collection and filtering to event extraction and visualization. The methods, tools and lessons covered will draw on our real-world experience in crisis informatics research, and will include interactions and code demonstrations.