Grantham Supervisor Dr. Diana Maynard publishes on how social media can help crisis response.
Dr Maynard, from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, has been working as part of a team developing tools to automatically help citizens and aid workers communicate during emergency crises. The tool can be used in response to events such as floods and earthquakes.
Crisis responders are increasingly using social media, data and other digital sources of information to build a situational understanding of a crisis situation in order to design an effective response. However with the increased availability of such data, the challenge of identifying relevant information from it also increases. This paper presents a successful automatic approach to handling this problem.
This is part of a wider tool-set and project aimed at developing community resilience and social innovation during crises. It aims to empower communities with intelligent socio-technical solutions to help them reconnect, respond to, and recover from crisis situations.
Read: Helping Crisis Responders Find the Informative Needle in the Tweet Haystack.
Or you can visit the project website here.
Ye Jiang’s project at the Grantham Centre investigated correlations between natural disasters, climate change, and the reporting and understanding of such events.
The main image is from Diana Maynard. It shows the team working in Nepal.