First responders“Social media triangulation” to help emergency responders

Published 21 July 2017

During emergency situations like severe weather or terrorist attacks, local officials and first responders have an urgent need for accessible, reliable and real-time data. Researchers are working to address this need by introducing a new method for identifying local social media users and collecting the information they post during emergencies.

During emergency situations like severe weather or terrorist attacks, local officials and first responders have an urgent need for accessible, reliable and real-time data. Rob Grace, a doctoral student in Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), and his colleagues at the Center for Crisis, Community, and Civic (3C) Informatics are working to address this need by introducing a new method for identifying local social media users and collecting the information they post during emergencies.

Researchers in the 3C Informatics lab, led by Andrea Tapia, associate professor of IST, and Jess Kropczynski, lecturer of IST, are exploring how social media can be leveraged in these emergency situations. In addition to Grace, the research team includes IST doctoral students Scott Pezanowski, Shane Halse and Prasanna Umar.

PSU says that the group hopes to make it easier for emergency management and response personnel to monitor and disseminate content across social media. This approach can help to support situational awareness among officials as well as more effectively share important information with local citizens, such as evacuation routes and status updates regarding critical infrastructure like water and power.

Grace recently presented his research findings at the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) conference in Albi, France.

The big-picture object would be to design a tool that would allow an official to monitor publicly available information on social media in order to inform their decision making,” said Grace. “To coordinate crisis response, you have to have a presence in a digital space.”

Officials now informally use social media to access information about their communities, yet they often lack technological capacities to access the information they are seeking. Grace believes they can more effectively monitor social media before and during emergencies; however, the first difficulty involves obtaining the right information.

If we want to design a tool for monitoring, how can we best collect data in order to have the best picture of what is occurring in a community?” posed Grace.

The team defined three main approaches to using social media, specifically Twitter, as a monitoring tool: geographical information—called “geotags”—that marks the location from where content originated; keyword and content searches; and a method they introduced as “social triangulation.”

While attached geotags can be included in tweets to help officials identify a user’s location, less than 3 percent of all tweets use them, leaving locations for the remaining 97 percent unidentifiable.