Track 6


Crowdsourcing and Social Media for Disaster Management


Track Chairs



Scope


Natural disasters like flooding and earthquakes, as well as terrorism attacks and industrial disasters, should be dealt with in a fast and effective manner. In such scenarios, first responders, news agencies and the victims are used to exploit social media as a first "communication channel" to disseminate situational information in a reliable way, reaching a huge pool of users. Similarly, crowdsourcing applications engage user communities in emergency response and disaster management for natural hazards. However, some drawbacks may occur in such social tools, thus limiting authorities and disaster management stakeholders to use social media data to take decision. As an instance, social media crowdsourcing data should be georeferenced to improve situational awareness, and the positioning error should be very low. In addition, social media data should be merged with other external data sources and authoritative data to establish geographic relationships between the disaster event and social media messages. Also, the dissemination of a message should occur between trusted and reliable nodes, in order to be sure the disseminated information is secure. As a solution, the main goal is to handle a set of learning materials such as methods, tools and guidelines on the use of social media and crowdsourcing in disasters in an effective manner, especially for what concern security and trustworthiness of data information.

So, this track wants to stimulate the scientific community to propose new technical studies that may address different topics such as :