1. Emergency Situation Awareness from Twitter for Crisis Management WWW 2012 Workshop on Social Web for Disaster Management CSIRO ICT CENTRE Mark Cameron, Robert Power, Bella Robinson and Jessie Yin 17 th April 2012

2. Introduction The Australian Government’s Crisis Coordination Centre (CCC) The CCC is a 24/7 all-hazards management facility The CCC monitors domestic and international media for developments relating to national security and emergency management When local authorities are unable to cope with a large scale emergency or disaster, the CCC coordinates assistance The core operational processes of the CCC require verifiable facts Social media provides a new source of data from which crisis coordinators can obtain awareness of developing situations During the 2009 Victorian bushfires, situation information was reported in real- time on social networks, but this was not easily consumable by crisis coordinators ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 2

3. The Problem How can we help crisis coordinators extract useful information from Twitter? We have developed tools to:  detect and alert on events of interest in near real time  condense and summarise content to reduce watch officer load  classify and review high-value messages enabling officers to quickly understand impact of real-world events on people and infrastructure  focus and track issues as they arise, evolve and decay over time (still under development)  perform forensic analysis of incidents ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 3

4. Architecture ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 4

5. Tweet Map showing captures and volume ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 5 Number of tweets in 5 minute window Red circles show capture regions Markers show geo-coded locations of tweets

6. If terms used in an incident of interest are known, near real-time search techniques can be used. Near Real-Time Search ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 6

7. When you don't know what to look for, such as with unexpected incidents, our Alert Monitor can provide clues to what is going on in Twitter Australia (and NZ!) wide. Detecting incidents ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 7  Our burst detector method examines the stemmed words in the tweets  We’ve used historical data to build a statistical model of word occurrences  A burst is defined as a positive variation from this statistical model

8. Condense and Summarise Messages ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 8 If an alert looks interesting we need to provide a way for rapid understanding of topics within bursting words We have integrated a third party clustering engine Carrot 2 to perform clustering of tweets The cluster labels are displayed and the user can select a cluster to view the tweets belonging to it

9. Our infrastructure impact classifier can identify Tweets that indicate damage to roads, bridges, power and telecommunications infrastructure. Classify and review high-value messages ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 9

10. Classify and review high-value messages (2) Cluster labels for all Tweets immediately after the earthquake hit. Cluster labels for Tweets classified as containing infrastructure damage immediately after the earthquake hit. ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 10

11. Forensic Analysis – Historical Alert Viewer Christchurch Earthquake 4 th Sept 2010 @ 02:38 (Aus time) ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 11

12. Forensic Analysis – Historical Alert Viewer (2) Christchurch Earthquake 4 th Sept 2010 @ 02:41 (Aus time) ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 12

13. Forensic Analysis – Historical Alert Viewer (3) Christchurch Earthquake 4 th Sept 2010 @ 02:57 (Aus time) ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 13

14. Deployment Experience ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 14 A subset of our tools have been deployed for trial with the Attorney-General’s Department, in particular the Alert Monitor and Historical Alert Viewer interfaces We deployed this as an externally visible web application on our infrastructure (rather than setup the whole system on theirs) In order to not violate Twitter’s Developer Rules of the Road, we needed to re-implement some of the system to re-retrieve tweet content directly from Twitter in order to display them (rather than simply get them from our database)

15. Deployed Web Interface ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 15

16. Future Work Evaluate other burst detection techniques Develop more classifiers Carry out more trails with other government agencies ESA from Twitter for Crisis Management - Page 16

17. Thank you ICT Centre Bella Robinson Senior Software Engineer ebella.robinson@csiro.au wwww.csiro.au CSIRO ICT CENTRE