Project Details
Description
The 7.0 Earthquake in Haiti has mobilized the entire world to support
the relief effort, especially through novel uses of the cyberspace.
Even though the earthquake damaged much of the communication
infrastructure in Haiti, Haiti's Internet connectivity is robust
because most Haitian Internet Service Providers use satellite, rather
than the damaged undersea fiber optic cable link, to connect to the
Internet. Consequently, relief workers, regular citizens, and
non-governmental organizations (NGO's) have used Tweets extensively
to spread and share information about the needs, events, and relief
operations. However, these tweets are not easily aggregated into
meaningful topics for ease of delivery to people who critically need
the information.
The goal of this research project is to develop and
deploy, in collaboration with an NGO coordination body (NetHope),
a reusable text message-based infrastructure that classifies and
aggregates multi-lingual tweets and text messages about Haiti
relief operations by topics and regions so that they can be easily
subscribed by NGO's, survivors in Haiti, and their friends and
families. The research project leverages existing software
developed for entity extraction and topic classification so that the
system can be developed and deployed quickly to respond to the time
critical needs at Haiti.
The evaluation of the system includes
feedbacks from NetHope as well as quantitative metrics about the
usage and performance of the system. The intellectual merit of the
research is developing integrated engineering solution to automatic
identification of topics and geo-location from short-messages
utilizing contextual information, which lays important foundation
for designing the next-generation information infrastructure for
emergency response and disaster management. For further information
see the project web page: URL: http://www.emerse.ist.psu.edu
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 3/15/10 → 2/29/12 |
Funding
- National Science Foundation: $75,000.00