Social media has been established in many larger emergencies and crises. This process has not started just a few years ago, but already 15 years ago in 2001 after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In the following years, especially in the last 10, sometimes summarized under the term crisis informatics, a variety of studies focusing on the use of ICT and social media before, during or after nearly every crisis and emergency has arisen. This article aims to recapitulate 15 years of social media in emergencies and its research with a special emphasis on use patterns, role patterns and perception patterns that can be found across different cases in order to point out what has been achieved so far, and what future potentials exist.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1468-5973.12196

Fifteen years of social media in emergencies: A retrospective review and future directions for crisis Informatics

When I was your age

Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the use of social media in emergency and crisis events has greatly increased and many studies have concentrated on the use of ICT and social media before, durin...

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Social Media in Crisis Management: An Evaluation and Analysis of Crisis Informatics Research

The research field of crisis informatics examines, amongst others, the potentials and barriers of social media use during disasters and emergencies. Social media allow emergency services to receive valuable information (e.g., eyewitness reports, pictures, or videos) from social media. However, the vast amount of data generated during large-scale incidents can lead to issue of information overload. Research indicates that supervised machine learning techniques are suitable for identifying relevant messages and filter out irrelevant messages, thus mitigating information overload. Still, they require a considerable amount of labeled data, clear criteria for relevance classification, a usable interface to facilitate the labeling process and a mechanism to rapidly deploy retrained classifiers. To overcome these issues, we present (1) a system for social media monitoring, analysis and relevance classification, (2) abstract and precise criteria for relevance classification in social media during disasters and emergencies, (3) the evaluation of a well-performing Random Forest algorithm for relevance classification incorporating metadata from social media into a batch learning approach (e.g., 91.28%/89.19% accuracy, 98.3%/89.6% precision and 80.4%/87.5% recall with a fast training time with feature subset selection on the European floods/BASF SE incident datasets), as well as (4) an approach and preliminary evaluation for relevance classification including active, incremental and online learning to reduce the amount of required labeled data and to correct misclassifications of the algorithm by feedback classification. Using the latter approach, we achieved a well-performing classifier based on the European floods dataset by only requiring a quarter of labeled data compared to the traditional batch learning approach. Despite a lesser effect on the BASF SE incident dataset, still a substantial improvement could be determined.

Rapid relevance classification of social media posts in disasters and emergencies: A system and evaluation featuring active, incremental and online learning

The research field of crisis informatics examines, amongst others, the potentials and barriers of social media use during conflicts and crises. Social media allow emergency services to reach the pu...

Mitigating information overload in social media during conflicts and crises: design and evaluation of a cross-platform alerting system

Emergencies threaten human lives and overall societal continuity, whether or not the crises and disasters are induced by nature, such as earthquakes, floods and hurricanes, or by human beings, such as accidents, terror attacks and uprisings. In such situations, not only do citizens demand information about the damage and safe behaviour, but emergency services also require high quality information to improve situational awareness. For this purpose, there are currently two kinds of apps available: General-purpose apps, such as Facebook Safety Check or Twitter Alerts, already integrate safety features. Specific crisis apps, such as KATWARN in Germany or FEMA in the US, provide information on how to behave before, during and after emergencies, and capabilities for reporting incidents or receiving disaster warnings. In this paper, we analyse authorities’ and citizens’ information demands and features of crisis apps. Moreover, we present the concept, implementation and evaluation of a crisis app for incident reporting and bidirectional communication between authorities and citizens. Using the app, citizens may (1) report incidents by providing a category, description, location and multimedia files and (2) receive broadcasts and responses from authorities. Finally, we outline features, requirements and contextual factors for incident reporting and bidirectional communication via mobile app.

112.SOCIAL: Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Crisis App for Bidirectional Communication between Emergency Services and Citizen

The convergence of social networking and mobile media technology is shifting the way how people communicate and gain or share information. People are using social media to a greater extent, also in emergency situations. During disasters throughout the world, such as the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the 2013 European floods, or the terror attacks 2015 in Paris and 2016 in Brussels, this has been illustrated again. Often information about disasters even finds its way faster to social media than it reaches regular news companies and emergency services. However, approaches for processing and analyzing the vast quantities of data produced have even more potential. Yet many emergency services still have not found a way to put this potential to an effective use. Within our project EmerGent we are developing a system to process and analyse information from social media particularly tailored for the specific needs of emergency services. The aim is to transform the high volume of noisy data into a low volume of rich content that is useful to emergency personnel. In the first part of this paper we present our approach from a user interface perspective. The second part deals with the evaluation of the approach and the derivation of future potentials of the approach.

Semi-Automatic Alerts and Notifications for Emergency Services based on Cross-Platform Social Media Data - Evaluation of a Prototype

Security-critical processes of emergency response are part of a complex system of people, organisation and technology. They are often characterised by their own dynamics, interconnectedness and information deficits. In addition, a wide variety of stakeholders, some from different organisations, work together, each specialising in a specific area. In order to capture this (process-) knowledge in risk management, information from the experts is necessary. However, experts are difficult to access, often separated locally, cost-intensive and usually have little time (discussion-) capacity. A pictogram-based process visualisation was developed within the risk management concept. The method could be validated within a European project in an expert workshop. This was done using the example of a CBRN mass casualty incident. By using the methods presented, very good qualitative and quantitative results can be achieved from the perspectives of various organisations and their experts. The limited resource ”expert” is used optimally.

Christoph Amelunxen

Papers

112.SOCIAL: Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Crisis App for Bidirectional Communication between Emergency Services and Citizen

Semi-Automatic Alerts and Notifications for Emergency Services based on Cross-Platform Social Media Data - Evaluation of a Prototype

Information collection using process visualisation in the risk management concept for emergency response.

Methode zur Risikoidentifizierung in Prozessen der Gefahrenabwehr