Civique: Using Social Media to Detect Urban Emergencies
This addresses the need for real-time emergency response in urban areas, though it is incremental as it applies existing methods to social media data.
The researchers tackled the problem of detecting urban emergencies by monitoring social media posts, achieving F-scores over 70% for emergency detection and over 90% for categorization.
We present the Civique system for emergency detection in urban areas by monitoring micro blogs like Tweets. The system detects emergency related events, and classifies them into appropriate categories like "fire", "accident", "earthquake", etc. We demonstrate our ideas by classifying Twitter posts in real time, visualizing the ongoing event on a map interface and alerting users with options to contact relevant authorities, both online and offline. We evaluate our classifiers for both the steps, i.e., emergency detection and categorization, and obtain F-scores exceeding 70% and 90%, respectively. We demonstrate Civique using a web interface and on an Android application, in realtime, and show its use for both tweet detection and visualization.