Social Media for Emergency Response

In the SUPER project, funded by the European Commission’s 7th framework programme, the University of Glasgow have been tracking and analysing social media data for emergency response, including real-time:

  • targeted sentiment analysis – identifying what are users saying on social media about entities important to the event, e.g. political leaders

  • topic tracking – identifying what aspects of the crisis/emergency people are discussing over time

  • Summarisation – generating a timeline summarising how a given event is evolving

  • rumour detection – identifying discussion threads of misinformation surrounding events.

  • community detection – grouping active users into the categories, allowing a common operational picture (COP) to be tracked

The SUPER platform was recently trialled at the Civil Protection Service of the Campania Region (Italy) in a simulated flooding scenario. Another deployment of the system is due to be shortly held in Bucharest (Romania) in a simulated security crisis scenario.

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