Project ACT: Social Media Analytics in Disaster Response

TL;DR

This paper introduces Australian Crisis Tracker (ACT), a social media analytics tool designed to help emergency response agencies extract critical information from Twitter during large-scale disasters, demonstrated through a pilot during Australian bushfires.

Contribution

The paper presents ACT, a novel social media analytics tool tailored for disaster response, and reports its successful pilot deployment during Australian bushfires.

Findings

ACT improves information extraction from Twitter during emergencies.

The pilot demonstrated ACT's effectiveness in real disaster scenarios.

Social media analytics can enhance disaster response efforts.

Abstract

In large-scale emergencies social media has become a key source of information for public awareness, government authorities and relief agencies. However, the sheer volume of data and the low signal-to- noise ratio limit the effectiveness and the efficiency of using social media as an intelligence resource. We describe Australian Crisis Tracker (ACT), a tool designed for agencies responding to large- scale emergency events, to facilitate the understanding of critical information in Twitter. ACT was piloted by the Australian Red Cross (ARC) during the 2013-2014 Australian bushfires season. Video is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-1rtNFqQbE