Beyond the EU: DORA and NIS 2 Directive's Global Impact
SMART Data Workshop: Social media and Emergency Management
1. ICT CENTRE
Dr Cécile Paris and Stephen Wan
CSIRO Computational Informatics
Social Media and Emergency Management –
The Vizie tool
Kathryn Barwick and Mylee Joseph
State Library NSW
3. Different channels for different purposes
mwpartners
Ias.surrey.ack.uk
technonologyinprevention
webseoanalytics
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5. Prevention
Preparedness
Response
Recovery
First-event detection
Alerts
Disseminate information
Assess readiness of
Community; engage
Monitor situation
Identify where what is needed
Inform
Respond
Plan for recovery
Analyse past events
Disseminate information
Assess readiness of community
Engage with community
Monitor for early warnings
Understand how community
reacts to event and
response
Understand community attitude
Inform for better prevention/etc.
Learn
Understand
issues
Work towards
a resilient
community
Document
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Emergency Management
7. Use of Social Media throughout the
whole cycle
em.gov.au dis.anl.gov
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Prevention and Preparedness
– Understanding community awareness: are people talking/sharing about
prevention/preparedness; where do they talk about it?
– Understanding the language used by community
– Disseminating appropriate information
– Engaging with the community
Discover the crisis
Deal with events as they unfold
– Data exploration
(what are the issues?
Facebook vs Twitter?)
Learn about what happened
Document for the future (SLNSW)
10. First event detection: burst in mentions of
crisis events (Twitter)
From ESA (Cameron et al, 2012)
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11. Monitoring a crisis and recovery – discussions
across all SM channels
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12. Vizie: Collecting and Analysing Social Media
Vizie Overview12 |
Query = “csiro hendra”
Etc.
13. Exploring the data with Vizie: understanding, learning
and reflecting
Presentation title | Presenter name | Page 13
14. Explore data to enable in-depth analysis
– e.g.,
• Most shared content
• Time sequence
• Where does what gets discussed
• Shared discourse and shared language
• Compare different topics
Learning
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70,000 posts collected during
the first day alone of the
Ashes cricket series in
November last year, roughly
double the number collected
in October during the
bushfires in the Blue
Mountains
https://twitter.com/alexpal95_alex/statuses/419814926241513472
https://twitter.com/nayyarasheed/status/419803506959069184
15. Documenting (SL NSW) -- Capturing the conversation =
different voices & perspectives, as it happens and unfolds
– the modern day diaries and letters
https://twitter.com/NSWRFS/status/393984735787364352https://twitter.com/onsight_simon/status/393378878934093825
https://twitter.com/NickGrimm/status/393225099899191296
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18. Making use of SM
not as easy as it
might appear...
1. Amount of data
2. Needle-in-a-haystack problem – where to look for what
when and how?
... However, I’m also left with a profound sense of the challenges still remaining. The designated places of
safety for many people in the wide flat valley was as much as 10 km away, leaving them highly
vulnerable, especially if they lack transport, as travel time for a lahar from the peak is perhaps only half an
hour. Maybe better understanding of precursors would enable precautionary evacuation before an eruption,
but would the political and social appetite be there after the challenging experiences when this was done for
Baños and Tungurahua? I was also frustrated to find one evacuation route could not even be followed safely,
where a left-turn was prevented by the later addition of a central fence in the highway. Although I’m sure this
was miscommunication between agencies, I guess this also comes back to competing risks and priorities –
was the daily hazard for cars crossing the highway perhaps just more important than a once-a-century
mudflow?
http://blogs.egu.eu/gfgd/2013/10/01/guest-blog-a-summer-of-volcanic-observation-in-ecuador-5/
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19. More challenges... Processing text
• Embedded symbols (e.g., “hash tags”, @ signs, “.au”, links)
• Terminology variation:
• Lexical Variation: misspellings, incorrect use of terminology,,
informal language, abbreviations, slang
• Synonyms, different terms than official language
• Syntax: Ungrammatical sentences, lack of correct punctuation
• Semantic, pragmatic, discourse:
• Lack of discourse markers, or informal language to mark them
• Grouping discussions together
barryisfunny.com
Whoah, Ooooh, Weeee cuppa, shakey shake
News.com.au
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20. She’s a natural disaster: a tusnami in her eyes an earthquake
in her chest a hurricane flooding her mind she’s a traveling
catastrophe
Recently, my office has been flooded with gifts from some super friends.
@M1Jarvis I don’t like u! My stomach is on fire! Can’t move!
Hate you! Regards, Niall
Sifting the wheat from the chaff
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21. Mentions a disaster -- but is it relevant?
A quiet moment for #eqnz reflection to mark the second
anniversary of Christchurch’s Feb 20122 earthquake.
Yuss! I win at #eqnz quick draw! #competitiveaboutstupidhit
Businessblogshub.com
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22. Credibility of sources and veracity of
information
Tht.org.au
paul-barford.blog
Blog.resourcepro.com
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23. Technologies available
Classifiers
Burst detection algorithms
Clustering algorithms
Topic identification
Visualisation
Summarisation
Heuristics for location
Tracking discussions
Network analysis
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24. Where?
What?
How?
Challenges in disseminating information and
engaging with the public through social
media
Nepal et al, 2012
Blog.socialmaximizer.com
Prblog.typepad.com
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25. How to establish credibility and trustworthiness?
Disseminating information and engaging
with the public
empowernetwork.com
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26. How to evaluate impact?
How to increase impact?
Disseminating information and engaging
with the public
Name ScreenName Followers
Against Suicide @AgainstSuicide 165,000
Suicide Prevention @afspnational 20,000
Beyond Blue @beyondblue 13,000
Black Dog Institute @blackdoginst 5,000
postgradproblems.com
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29. • Can be used throughout
Emergency Management cycle
• In times of crisis: very good
at providing the trigger or an
indicator (look in this direction)
• Large amounts of unfiltered
and analysed information –
need tools to help obtain
useful information
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30. SMART Workshop May 2014| C. Paris | Page 30
• Social Media is one source of
information
• Social Media must be verified
by another Source
• Provides valuable
information to the historical
record
• Must be captured and
documented appropriately to
enable future learning
31. • Social Media must be verified
by another Source
• Provides valuable
information to the historical
record
• Must be captured and
documented appropriately to
enable future learning
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32. Some references
• Barwick, Joseph, Paris and Wan, S. (2014, February 3-6). Hunters and
collectors: seeking social media content for cultural heritage
collections. Paper presented at the VALA2014 17th Biennial Conference,
Melbourne. http://www.vala.org.au/vala2014-proceedings/vala2014-session-
7-barwick
• Cameron, Power, Robinson, and Yin (2012). Emergency situation awareness
from twitter for crisis management. In Proc. of the 21st international
conference companion on World Wide Web, p 695-698, ACM.
• J. Colton and M. Cameron. ESA: Emergency Situation Awareness -- From
Tweets to Situation Awareness; Social Media Analysis for All-Hazards.
• Griffen, Jones and Paris (2012): Strategic Implications of Social Media for
Emergency Management. In Next Generation Disaster and Security
Management. Clarke & Griffen (ed). The Australian Security Research Council.
• Moss, Information / Intelligence Specialist , State Disaster Coordination Centre
Queensland Government. Using Social Media as a Trigger or Indicator. EIDOS
Presentation.
• Wan and Paris Vizie: Social Media Monitoring.
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Documenting context around this type of collecting is very important
some hashtags would be inexplicable to people even a few years after the event, yet to people using them at the time it was a shared language. The organic nature of hashtags and the completely anarchic way they can emerge can also force Emergency services agencies to switch to using a popular hashtag to participate in the current conversations.
the data set that a researcher would be faced with in the years to come is many tiny pieces of information, our documentation supplements the metadata captured in Vizie to provide the social, environmental and geopolitical context within which to interpret and decode the tweets etc.
We have seen many examples of social media use during natural disasters in Australia, and it is not surprising considering most people in that type of situation have access to their mobile phone (and social media apps) as well as a pressing need to keep their family and friends informed of the danger and that they are ok.
The Black Friday fires in Victoria in February 2009 was some of the earliest mass use of social media to share information in a disaster … the Brisbane floods in 2011 social media really proved itself.
SPEED is one of the challenges of capturing a sample of the social media conversation in a disaster situation. The characteristic ‘burst’ and high level of activity all happens very rapidly, requiring a quick response in putting search terms into the system. Some retrospective collecting is possible but the Twitter search api indicates 6-9 days is the optimal timeframe before the retrieval capability degrades.
As you can see from this graph – measuring the posts trapped in the Environment monitoring activity in October 2013 (which includes bushfires) – shows peaks on 18 and 23 October 2013. Fires across NSW, particularly severe in the Blue Mountains
18 October – fatality at Lake Munmorah, fires increasing in severity
23 October – extreme weather warnings for hot weather, warnings from previous day that 23 October was likely to be a day of extreme risk and residents encouraged to leave the Blue Mountains area if they were not prepared. The weather was better than expected and backburning efforts on the 22nd meant that the extreme risk was averted.