Emergency Situation Awareness from
Twitter for Crisis Management
WWW 2012 Workshop on Social Web for Disaster Management
Mark Cameron, Robert Power, Bella Robinson and Jessie Yin
17th April 2012
CSIRO ICT CENTRE
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 realtime on social networks, but this was not easily consumable by crisis coordinators
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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
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Architecture
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Tweet Map showing captures and volume
Red circles
show capture
regions
Markers show
geo-coded
locations of
tweets
Number of
tweets in 5
minute window
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Near Real-Time Search
• If terms used in an incident of interest are known, near real-time
search techniques can be used.
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Detecting incidents
• 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.
 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
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Condense and Summarise Messages
• 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 Carrot2 to
perform clustering of tweets
• The cluster labels are displayed and the user can select a cluster
to view the tweets belonging to it
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Classify and review high-value messages
• Our infrastructure impact classifier can identify Tweets that
indicate damage to roads, bridges, power and
telecommunications infrastructure.
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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.
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Forensic Analysis – Historical Alert Viewer
• Christchurch Earthquake 4th Sept 2010 @ 02:38 (Aus time)
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Forensic Analysis – Historical Alert Viewer (2)
• Christchurch Earthquake 4th Sept 2010 @ 02:41 (Aus time)
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Forensic Analysis – Historical Alert Viewer (3)
• Christchurch Earthquake 4th Sept 2010 @ 02:57 (Aus time)
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Deployment Experience
• 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)
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Deployed Web Interface
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Future Work
• Evaluate other burst detection techniques
• Develop more classifiers
• Carry out more trails with other government agencies
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Thank you
ICT Centre
Bella Robinson
Senior Software Engineer
e bella.robinson@csiro.au
w www.csiro.au
CSIRO ICT CENTRE