Sarah Vieweg

Processing Social Media Messages in Mass Emergency: A Survey

Social media platforms provide active communication channels during mass convergence and emergency events such as disasters caused by natural hazards. As a result, first responders, decision makers, and the public can use this information to gain insight into the situation as it unfolds. In particular, many social media messages communicated during emergencies convey timely, actionable information. Processing social media messages to obtain such information, however, involves solving multiple challenges including: parsing brief and informal messages, handling information overload, and prioritizing different types of information found in messages. These challenges can be mapped to classical information processing operations such as filtering, classifying, ranking, aggregating, extracting, and summarizing. We survey the state of the art regarding computational methods to process social media messages and highlight both their contributions and shortcomings. In addition, we examine their particularities, and methodically examine a series of key subproblems ranging from the detection of events to the creation of actionable and useful summaries. Research thus far has, to a large extent, produced methods to extract situational awareness information from social media. In this survey, we cover these various approaches, and highlight their benefits and shortcomings. We conclude with research challenges that go beyond situational awareness, and begin to look at supporting decision making and coordinating emergency-response actions.

What to Expect When the Unexpected Happens: Social Media Communications Across Crises

The use of social media to communicate timely information during crisis situations has become a common practice in recent years. In particular, the one-to-many nature of Twitter has created an opportunity for stakeholders to disseminate crisis-relevant messages, and to access vast amounts of information they may not otherwise have. Our goal is to understand what affected populations, response agencies and other stakeholders can expect-and not expect-from these data in various types of disaster situations. Anecdotal evidence suggests that different types of crises elicit different reactions from Twitter users, but we have yet to see whether this is in fact the case. In this paper, we investigate several crises-including natural hazards and human-induced disasters-in a systematic manner and with a consistent methodology. This leads to insights about the prevalence of different information types and sources across a variety of crisis situations.

Integrating Social Media Communications into the Rapid Assessment of Sudden Onset Disasters

Recent research on automatic analysis of social media data during disasters has given insight into how to provide valuable and timely information to formal response agencies—and members of the public—in these safety-critical situations. For the most part, this work has followed a bottom-up approach in which data are analyzed first, and the target audience’s needs are addressed later.

Privacy & Social Media in the Context of the Arab Gulf

Theories of privacy and how it relates to the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) have been a topic of research for decades. However, little attention has been paid to the perception of privacy from the perspective of technology users in the Middle East. In this paper, we delve into interpretations of privacy from the approach of Arab Gulf citizens. We consider how privacy is practiced and understood in technology-mediated environments among this population, paying particular attention to the role of Islam and cultural traditions in constructing norms around privacy. We then offer culturally sensitive design principles and suggestions for future research that incorporates previously unexplored characteristics of privacy, which play a role in how users navigate social media.

Surveillance & Modesty on Social Media: How Qataris Navigate Modernity and Maintain Tradition

Recent research on social media use in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has focused on their role in the Arab Spring uprisings, but less work has examined the more mundane uses of these technologies. Yet exploring the way populations in the MENA region use social media in everyday life provides insight into how they are adapted to cultural contexts beyond those from which they originated. To better understand this process, we interviewed eleven Qatari nationals currently living in Doha, Qatar. Our analysis identifies ways users, particularly females, practice modesty, manage their own (and by extension) their familys reputation, and use social media to monitor and protect others. These findings are placed within a framework of social, or participatory surveillance, which challenges conventional notions of surveillance as a form of control and instead shows how surveillance has the potential to be empowering.

Rethinking Context: Leveraging Human and Machine Computation in Disaster Response

Human-computer systems that treat context simply as enumerated facts, rules, or axioms about the surrounding physical and social environment will always have trouble handling information requiring human pragmatic interpretation. One way to overcome such limitations is to draw upon human pragmatic awareness to create hybrid systems capable of both extracting large quantities of data and processing that data in a way that is meaningful to users. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/pqI2qcigiCw is a video demonstrating Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response (AIDR), a free, open source, and easy-to-use platform to filter and classify relevant microblog messages during humanitarian crises.

Processing Social Media Messages in Mass Emergency: Survey Summary

Millions of people use social media to share information during disasters and mass emergencies. Information available on social media, particularly in the early hours of an event when few other sources are available, can be extremely valuable for emergency responders and decision makers, helping them gain situational awareness and plan relief efforts. Processing social media content to obtain such information involves solving multiple challenges, including parsing brief and informal messages, handling information overload, and prioritizing different types of information. These challenges can be mapped to information processing operations such as filtering, classifying, ranking, aggregating, extracting, and summarizing. This work highlights these challenges and presents state of the art computational techniques to deal with social media messages, focusing on their application to crisis scenarios.

Culturally-Grounded Analysis of Everyday Creativity in Social Media: A Case Study in Qatari Context

In deploying social media and other information technologies often not designed with MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) cultures in mind, users generate creative approaches to self-representation using virtual identities while preserving their cultural values. To understand and further empower such approaches, we present a mixed-method of computational and qualitative study, focusing on Qatar as a case of such communities in the MENA region. We analyzed a dataset of over 42,000 publicly available social media profiles using computational approaches (archetypal analysis) and qualitatively analyzed a separate set of 255 profiles. We augmented our descriptions with semi-structured interviews. As a result, we delineate a set of five needs/values exhibited by Qatari users supporting their creativity in effectively using virtual identities: Khaleeji features, self-expression, social connections, social monitoring, and physical and virtual identity contrasts. Finally, we propose an initial set of guidelines to support developers of virtual identity systems in better serving these users while preserving their cultural values and creative agency.