HSAP: A Human-in-the-Loop Social Media-Based Situation Awareness Platform

Abstract

Situation-awareness (SA) has been important for natural disaster management and smart decision making. Traditionally, security officers recognize disaster situations through emergency reporting with phone calls. However, due to the busy phone lines or power outages caused by disasters, traditional SA has been limited in terms of time and mitigation response, which may cause high loss in life and properties in disaster areas. Social media-based SA has been studied recently. However, existing systems are designed for events without nonconsecutive migrations over location and time. In this demo, we design HSAP, the first human-in-the-loop social media-based SA platform for effective and efficient management of disasters with complex event migrations. HSAP is designed with a number of novel techniques, including complex social event detection, summarization, and human-in-the-loop result filtering. We demonstrate the usage of HSAP via Nepal earthquake 2015.